It has to be about Chicago baseball this morning doesn’t it? Given the presence of both teams at the top of their respective divisions more than a month-and-a-half into the season? My son asked me Sunday morning, “When was the last time the Cubs and the White Sox were both in the playoffs in the same year?” And there it was, a streak that has lasted even longer than that championship drought we hear about every once and a while on the North Side.
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I mean, sure, it’s been 100 years since the Cubs won, but it’s been a really long time – 102 years – since both teams made the post-season simultaneously. Of course, for the first 69 years of baseball in this century, making the post-season meant making the World Series. And there was only one Chicago versus Chicago World Series. In 1906, the “Hitless Wonder” White Sox, who won the American League pennant despite a league-low .230 team batting average, won the best-of-seven series in six games. During the regular season, the Cubs won 116 out of 154 games for a staggering .753 winning percentage. But that didn’t mean a hill of beans once the World Series rolled around.
The teams haven’t found a way to succeed at the same time ever since, even in the last almost-40-years, when the post-season field doubled, and then doubled again.
Actually, as the Trib’s Phil Rogers pointed out earlier this spring, the streak that is the most troubling for the Cubs isn’t the 100 years without a championship; it is 100 years without making the post-season two years in a row. Especially in this day and age, teams need multiple-season runs of better-than-average play in order to give themselves a real chance of at least once making it all the way through the crapshoot that is three rounds of playoffs. That or they have to achieve a certain level of luckiness (see the Marlins, Florida, in both 2004 and 1997). The Cardinals were lucky to squeak into the playoffs despite only 83 wins in 2006 but they were better able to compete in the pos-tseason and were more worthy champs because they had been a contending team for a while.
The Cubs certainly don’t look like they’ll be venturing too far from the top of the standings as this season progresses. Somehow the Sox’s lofty perch seems more precarious.
* There was a note in the Sunday Sun-Times sports section about former Cub Luis Gonzalez – now a scrub in Florida getting playing time only because the starting Marlin outfielder is hurt – dreaming of 3,000 hits. That’s “one of my goals,” he said. Heading into this weekend’s action, he had 2,529. If I were Luis, who will return to the bench when starter Josh Willingham returns soon from a sore back, I’d be worried about making it to 2,530. He’ll get 3,000 all right, as long as you count results from the the Schaumburg Flyers, where he’ll likely end up after the Marlins cut him later this year.
* Some final words on The D’Antoni Fiasco (mostly I just wanted to write that phrase again): Do you think the new Knicks coach actually heard the theme from Jaws after his meeting with Bulls Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf right before he spurned the Bulls? You know the “duh-duh duh-duh . . . duh-duh duh-duh . . . dun dun dun dun dun dun-dun-dun.” During interviews early last week, Reinsdorf noted that his three-hour meeting with D’Antoni had been only the start of what he envisioned would be an extended (involving multiple get-togethers) contract negotiation. In other words, the master negotiator was circling his prey. Reinsdorf also made it clear he would not negotiate with any coaching candidate’s agent (clearly a stance that won’t fly with anyone with leverage). The first meeting and the promise of more were apparently enough to scare D’Antoni into hurrying back to Knicks general manager Donnie Walsh and accepting the relatively simple contract Walsh had offered to try to turn around a New York team that seems absolutely hopeless. D’Antoni did that despite having acknowledged that the Bulls were potentially a much better choice for a host of reasons.
The only way to salvage this coaching search now is to somehow convince Avery Johnson, who has proven he can win and win playoff series’ (even if his Mavericks teams didn’t win in the playoffs the past two years after making the finals the season before) to return to coaching after Dallas gave him the ax earlier this spring. That means giving Johnson a reason to get back to work despite the fact he still has a reported $12 million left on his contract with the Mavericks. The Bulls probably won’t be able to do that by refusing to talk to his agent.
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Jim Coffman appears in this space every Monday. He does so out of love.
Posted on May 19, 2008