By Jim Coffman
In the middle of my son’s baseball game at Welles Park on Sunday, the coaches and spectators’ attention was drawn by a burst of noise emanating from a nearby bar. We initially surmised that something big had to be going on at the Cell. But then one of the dads voiced his belief that it was actually a reaction to the U.S. soccer team’s Confederations Cup championship game against Brazil. He wondered aloud if “the U.S. scored again?!” A minute later he confirmed that it had. The U.S. led Brazil 2-0 midway through the first half (on its way to a thrilling but ultimately disappointing 3-2 loss).

Beachwood Baseball: The Cub Factor The White Sox Report

Could we have imagined that scenario even 10 years ago? I think not. First of all, this was the first time the U.S. team had ever advanced to a FIFA final (and it completed an unbelievable journey to do so – more on that later). Second was the fact that in the middle of the day on a big summer baseball weekend (featuring Cubs versus Sox at the same time for goodness sake), the crowd at an average sports bar was captivated by a soccer game.

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Posted on June 29, 2009

Editor’s Note: On the occasion of this summer’s final Crosstown Classic series, The Cub Factor’s Marty Gangler and The White Sox Report’s Andrew Reilly switched places.
By Andrew Reilly
Once upon a time, the Chicago Cubs were supposed to run away with the National League Central and across Chicagoland we all just kind of assumed that would happen. Ten game leads and twelve-ounce heroics! Superstar trades and ticker tape parades!
Remember those days, Cubs fans? Weren’t they neat? Weren’t they magical?
So you can imagine the outsider’s view when the Small Bears, this time even armed with a bonus bat, stroll into historic Cellphone Stadium only to head back to Lakeview with nothing to show for their efforts beyond a lone token win against a crummy Sox team that pretty much everybody notches a win against. This mega-bankrolled non-juggernaut shows up, gets in a fight with itself, and its self-appointed Cy Young winner of an ace extracts his revenge on the world by taking a shot at quite possibly the worst outfielder in the history of baseball.
This is what a contender looks like?

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Posted on June 29, 2009

Editor’s Note: On the occasion of this summer’s final Crosstown Classic series, The Cub Factor’s Marty Gangler and The White Sox Report’s Andrew Reilly switched places.
By Marty Gangler
I would put myself on the side of “whatever” when it comes to the Crosstown “Classic,” as most times it never proves anything. And people who put stock in it need to re-evaluate their priorities. And it proves out in the overall record, which is like 36-35 or something like that. So no team has truly been better than the other. So this week as I watched really fun bad baseball being played I thought to myself, Why did I ever get wrapped up in the crosstown series? When did it ever matter? And then it dawned on me. My level of “caring” was directly proportional with the number of Sox fans I worked with.
And it’s not all about the number, per se. All it takes is one guy. The last time I cared about a Sox/Cubs tilt was at a job I had three years ago. There was that one frothy rabid Sox fan who made my skin crawl. I mean, he used to tuck in his Sox jerseys and had numerous made with his own name on the back. Yeah, this guy was the table saw in a room full of tools.

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Posted on June 29, 2009

By Thomas Chambers

Why do they call it Arlington Heights?
A quick check of elevations of Mount Prospect, Rolling Meadows and Palatine put AH at the bottom of the list, so maybe it’s like a subdivision name. But the bedroom community does have one thing that soars above surrounding suburbia and that is the majestic grandstand of Arlington Park, the jewel of Chicago Thoroughbred racing and one of the finest facilities in the racing world.
You’d think it’s merely a trip to the races, out in the country, well beyond O’Hare, for a pastoral diversion. But there’s so much going on out there that TrackNotes will require two installments to give you a feel for the place. That this is necessary has sparked megabytes of debate over what Arlington is, or has become. The insides of a horseplayer are torn apart in the conflict between racing and wagering and Arlington’s Churchill Downs Inc. parent’s seeming passion to rival Wrigley Field as the world’s largest outdoor, Generation-Alphabet beer bash.

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Posted on June 26, 2009

By Dan O’Shea

It’s about 92 degrees in the shade right now, so I figured what better time to start talking about fantasy football. Actually, I don’t plan of formulating my draft night game plan for the football season for hopefully another month, but I noticed a lot of fantasy football publications hitting the newsstands and mock drafts popping up across the Internet, so I figured I would at least update the first round recommendations I put together at the end of last season.
Here’s what I’m thinking now:

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Posted on June 24, 2009

By Jim Coffman
Contrition isn’t going to work for Sammy Sosa. And he knows it. The time for admitting mistakes and saying sorry passed him by a long time ago, probably around the same time he was caught using a corked bat and offering up the ridiculous explanation that he had done so without realizing it. And he didn’t stop there. He and the Cubs had the rest of his bats x-rayed (there were more than 70 of them if I recall correctly) and then claimed that because they were still in pristine condition, he had clearly made nothing but an innocent mistake after corking a bat to use “just during batting practice.” No guys, we wanted to scream at the time, the fact that all the other bats were clean made it impossible to believe that Sammy had just happened to grab the one bat with cork. There was no way in hell he had just so happened to grab the one that weighed significantly less than his other bats, the one that had obviously been tampered with, before he went up to the plate.
The fact that contrition – or anything else for that matter – will fail to help is why this is Day 6 or so of no official comment from Sosa in the aftermath of the New York Times story asserting he was one of the players who tested positive for performance enhancing drugs during a preliminary test in 2003. At this point I feel as though a person commenting on this situation has to “declare.” At some point radio man Mike Murphy established a policy on his show on The Score that a person commenting on the Cubs or Sox had to declare their allegiance because of course that colors everything she’ll have to say. So just be aware that I am indeed a cursed Cubs fan. Have been all my life. And I reveled in Sammy’s accomplishments up until the final few years of his career.

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Posted on June 23, 2009

By Andrew Reilly
Paul Konerko passed the 1,000 career RBI mark this weekend, forever etching his name alongside the likes of Jeff Conine, Cecil Fielder, Travis Fryman, Todd Zeile and Stuffy McInnis. Two-hundred sixty-two men have driven in such a number, yet raise the bar to 1,250 and the headcount drops to 115. Keep climbing to 1,500 and suddenly we’re talking about 50 players.
At 1,750, the crowd shrinks to 18. At 2,000, we’re down to three. A thousand batted in is a huge number, yes, but at the same time the exclusivity of even those nominally larger sums suggests a thousand isn’t quite as big as it seems. None of which should imply that Konerko’s milestone stands as anything less than awesome, but for all intents and purposes 1,000 runs batted in might be the most Konerkonian achievement of them all.

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Posted on June 22, 2009

By Marty Gangler
Now that Mark DeRosa’s homecoming weekend is over, we here at The Cub Factor would like to note some of the things The Greatest Ex-Cub In History failed to accomplish in his return to Chicago.
Mark DeRosa did not:
* Buy that guy behind you a round of Old Styles last inning.
* Get you out of that lame Fourth of July barbecue you’ve been roped into.
* Help your brother in-law’s friend move.
* Develop a swine flu vaccine.
* Stand up to Iran.
* Select the perfect wine to go with your pork chops.
* Resolve our state’s budget crisis.
* Reach 51 RBIs for the season.

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Posted on June 22, 2009

By Dan O’Shea

Interleague play can send the fantasy baseball manager mixed signals. Everyone talks about how the lack of play for designated hitters screws with their offensive game plan, but there are also a number of other performances during the interleague period that are kind of anomalies and can’t be trusted.
Will Johan Santana continue to get shelled the way he did in Yankee Stadium last weekend? Not likely. Will Pablo Sandoval keep pace with the .460 batting average, three home runs and six RBIs he generated against Oakland and the L.A. Angels in two recent games? Nope, though maybe he’s starting to reveal a bit more of the power than his owners expected. Mark DeRosa, of Cleveland, is an American League player who has been eating up National League pitching, but from a former Cub, that’s probably no surprise.

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Posted on June 17, 2009

By Jim Coffman
That’s it, I thought about halfway through Sunday’s crisp interleague contest at Wrigley; these guys are not invited back next year. Any fan of baseball can find stuff to appreciate during a typical Twins game. Manager Ron Gardenhire’s boys almost always do the little things better than their Chicago foes and Sunday was no exception – the first run scored when Carlos Gomez, who had bashed a two-out double, took advantage of Ted Lilly and his defense’s indifference (or should we say incompetence) and stole third without a throw. Lilly and his mates could plead that a runner advancing to third doesn’t matter so much with two outs but then sure enough it did. Gomez (who would later complete the fastest home-run trot in Wrigley history after launching a solo shot to left-center – he thought the wind was going to blow it back) came in to score on Nick Punto’s perfect bunt between first base and the pitcher. Punto might have been safe anyway but Lilly’s tardiness covering the bag certainly didn’t help. Thankfully the Cubs finally (finally!) had a decisive little-ball answer in the ninth but we’ll save that for later. My problem Sunday was that I found myself seated right in front of a loud, repetitious (but not profane – I will at least give her that) Twinkie fan. And therefore I took some pleasure in the realization that the Twins won’t return to Wrigley any time soon.

Beachwood Baseball: The Cub Factor The White Sox Report

I know that visiting Cub fans can be annoying elsewhere in the country, especially up at Miller Park. But then they leave and you have the place to yourselves again, don’t you Brewers fans? At Wrigley at this time of year in particular, it seems like every time we North Siders turn around we’re running into packs of opposing fans. Interleague play in particular brings out the visiting hordes, giving them the still relatively rare opportunity to see their squads at the finest ballpark in the land. And of course we always have the delightful White Sox and their gracious manager in for a series in the middle of it all.

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Posted on June 15, 2009