By Dan O’Shea

The MLB trade deadline is still a few days away, but we have already seen some significant deals. As of this writing, locals Ryan Dempster and Matt Garza still hadn’t made highly anticipated moves to new teams, but there have been at least three trades with fantasy significance:
Kevin Youkilis, 1B/3B, to the White Sox: This deal has turned out to have much more fantasy impact than I first expected. Youkilis has been hitting like his old self, and though he’s cooled a bit in recent games, he’s already rewarded fantasy owners who had the wisdom either to acquire him or keep him when Boston shipped him to Chicago.

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Posted on July 25, 2012

By Roger Wallenstein

I need to accept a chunk of the responsibility for the Sox’s five-game slide last week.
Being out of town in California for a few days, I figured my absence would be a good thing. I’d be away from the TV, separated from the drama of the (former) division leaders.
I tend to fear the worst when it comes to close games. I’m not necessarily a negative person, but having watched this team for a long time, there have been more heartbreaks than elixirs. My thinking was that the Sox would have a better chance in Boston and Detroit without me screwing things up.
Years ago this would have been easy. Leave town and you’re out of range of the play-by-play of the games on radio and television. (You understand where this is going.)

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Posted on July 23, 2012

By Jim Coffman

How bad was that weekend of baseball?
Perhaps the haters (mostly White Sox fans but certainly some Cub backers as well) can console themselves with the idea that “at least the Cubs/White Sox were getting their asses kicked at the same time . . .” but for most Windy City baseball fans, that was just a brutal three days.
We can try meditation, repeating to ourselves “It is a looong season. It is a looong season” as a mantra for awhile, and it is certainly the case that baseball teams are going to have bad stretches no matter what (heck, the Yankees lost their fourth straight to the A’s on Sunday, which was cold comfort to no small number of haters). The key is to make them as short as possible.
The White Sox are on the verge of letting this one get out of hand.
The Cubs’ season essentially ended earlier this year when they just couldn’t get a terrible losing streak stopped. They eventually dropped 12 consecutive games and that ensured that even when they played well later in the season, like winning 14 of 19 leading into the weekend in St. Louis, they were still looking up (several stories/games) at fourth place in the NL Central.

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Posted on July 23, 2012

By Marty Gangler

At times this column turns personal. And really, isn’t that why we follow sports, and especially the Cubs? It’s the personal connection. And I’m not even talking about Ron Santo. This week another lifelong fan of the Cubs, my father-in-law Jim Casey, will be passing on without seeing them win a World Series.
What makes Jim different than your garden-variety Cub fan was that he was a minor league guy to the core. The Tennessee Smokies, the Iowa Cubs, the Peoria Chiefs, he went everywhere. Even saw them on the road. As a retired Greyhound bus driver, he had no problem logging the long miles needed to literally follow his Cubs wherever they played.
And he loved the kids; always said how this guy and that guy was a good player and was going to be good. He wasn’t often right, but, well, we all know that the Cubs haven’t yielded much from the farm system in the last, well, forever. But he still went and still believed in the kids.

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Posted on July 23, 2012

By John Montgomery/Chicago Force

The undefeated Chicago Force eked out a spine-tingling 35-34 win over the Boston Militia on Saturday night at Lazier Field in Evanston, advancing to the Women’s Football Alliance championship for the second time in team history.
The Force will face the equally undefeated San Diego Surge on Saturday, August 4, at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh in the title tilt. The game will be televised on ESPN3.
“It’s huge for us,” said quarterback Sami Grisafe after completing 14-of-16 passes for 128 yards and one touchdown against the Militia. “We haven’t been to the championship since 2008. There’s a stigma that we don’t have what it takes to finish. We showed that we do today.”

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Posted on July 22, 2012

By Dan O’Shea

One of the laws of fantasy baseball is that stars who are slumping eventually will bounce back to their robust historical averages – you just have to wait, and make sure you have a player on a streak to plug into your lineup in the meantime.
Having said that, patience has its limits, and if your fantasy team is in postseason contention, the second half of the baseball season is no time to waste a roster spot on a slumping star.
I’m not talking about guys like Matt Kemp, OF, LAD; Jacoby Ellsbury, OF, BOS; or Evan Longoria, 3B, TAM; who have spent much of the first half injured and actually could rebound with a vengeance in the second half. I mean guys like Justin Upton, OF, ARI, who failed to get a hit in Wrigley Field last weekend.
Here’s my list of stars skating on thin ice (You’ll probably recognize a few of these names from my “Stars and Gripes” column a couple weeks ago):

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Posted on July 18, 2012

By Jim Coffman

Let’s be clear on something: the Cubs brass has a year (this year) to make major progress on the big fix (and I propose “The Big Fix” as the official name for the great Cubs rebuilding project of 2012 – we’re certainly going with it around here until further notice).
I was listening to sports radio silliness yesterday during which time it was posited that it doesn’t matter who the starting pitchers are for the Cubs next year because The Big Fix can’t just take one year, it must take several.
Puh-lease, although the Ricketts family would love for Cubs fans to buy into that notion. That way they can continue to slash the payroll and pile up the cheap prospects while raking in huge revenues during the next year plus.

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Posted on July 16, 2012

By Steve Rhodes

In true Cubs fashion, the team is about to sell off just about anybody they can short of Starlin Castro and Anthony Rizzo now that they’ve won 12 of their last 16 games. Does any franchise work in reverse as well as the Cubs?
It’s about to get a lot worse for this team, just as they are performing their best.
Cubs!

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Posted on July 16, 2012

By Roger Wallenstein

He may not have realized it at the time, but my brother John created the model for the Excel spreadsheet almost 30 years before Microsoft unveiled it. All because of the White Sox.
The season was 1959, and because “it just needed to be done,” Brother John began keeping day-to-day statistics – both hitting and pitching – for the eventual American League champions. For all 154 games, he began in the upper left hand corner of a clean sheet of notebook paper with Aparicio and Arias, ending with Torgeson and Wynn. IBM engineers may have begun experimenting with a copying machine, but it took them another ten years to market one. So John spent a part of each day re-creating his spreadsheet. Ask him today to recite the entire ’59 roster, especially after a couple glasses of wine, and he’ll give it to you in alphabetical order.

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Posted on July 16, 2012

By Thomas Chambers

Do you ever get the feeling they’re trying to take your sports away from you?
The very fabric of baseball is deeply woven with a monied laziness embodied by the pull-up, good-enough double or the touch-the-plate-very-slowly-with-your-tippy-toe (Oh, for a hidden ball here!) plays.
No less an authority than Phil Jackson calls the NBA hard to watch. NHL hockey has embraced such an absurdity of senseless violence that it’s top stars are almost literally getting their heads knocked off. After years of reactionary, situational NFL legislation enforced inconsistently, a guy in a funny shirt checks under the hood and then tells us we did not see what we just saw. Never mind wagering on it.

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Posted on July 13, 2012