By Jim Coffman
I understood it was miserably cold Tuesday evening at Wrigley. In fact, it was worse than that – it was angrily cold. And fans reacted in kind, i.e., cursing out the weather incessantly as they waited for concessions at the central, double-counter purchase point in the upper deck (I heard three different people say “I can’t believe it’s so effing cold!” when I went to get fries in about the fifth inning). So it was obviously a tough night. But still, the folks booing Jim Edmonds were driving me nuts.
The Cubs scored three runs in the seventh inning to seize command of an eventual 3-1 win over the Dodgers that would ensure they remained a couple games in front of the Cardinals (in the loss column) atop the Central Division. Sure it’s still early, but we all prefer the view from up here don’t we? We’re all fired up at this point, right? But after the runs came home, Edmonds made the last out. And the boos cascaded down.
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The weather did make it a bit tougher to look on the bright side of Cubs baseball even given the fact the team started the evening in first. And therefore I was willing to cut my fellow fans some slack after they let Edmonds have it after his first couple at-bats. But the booing after the bottom of the seventh was some of the stupidest stuff I’ve ever heard at a ballgame.
And at this point, let’s make sure we get one thing straight: No one was booing Jim Edmonds because he used to play, and oftentimes star, for the Cardinals. No one.
When the stellar center fielder turned it around at the end of the week (I also took in Sunday’s game, when Edmonds tripled, doubled in a run and walked in a run) there wasn’t a negative word to be heard. The only thing the people who were paying attention cared about on Tuesday was that Edmonds had struggled at the plate against the Dodgers that evening, just as he had since joining the Cubs a week prior to that. The folks who weren’t paying attention booed because, well, it’s kind of fun to boo, isn’t it? Might as well pile on whichever poor sap the people who are paying attention have decided to target on this given evening.
By the way, I went to two games in one week in the second month of the 2008 season and Cubs pitcher Sean Gallagher started and won both of them. At the start of the season, what were the odds of that happening?
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No one booed Corey Patterson or Jacque Jones or even Todd Hundley more than I did. Well, there was this one friend of mine who booed Patterson more than me. He decided booing the potential five-tool (hits, hits for power, runs, throws and plays D) center fielder in Chicago wasn’t enough – he bought outfield seats when the Cubs traveled to Philadelphia about what, four years ago? just to boo Patterson a little more. In fact, he spent much of that night urging Patterson to “get traded!” It was odd, sure, but therapeutic for him I guess.
Patterson drove us insane by wasting so much natural talent. And he’s just about Continuously Swinging For The Fences Despite Having Great Speed-ed himself out of the league for good after his last patron, manager Dusty Baker, agreed to his re-assignment to the Reds AAA affiliate last week after a terrible six weeks of baseball).
As for Jones, he was the least-disciplined hitter in an incredibly undisciplined lineup. And before Patterson, it was Hundley (a very talented local guy and the son of a popular ex-Cub) who could have had it all but among other things apparently partied too much There were obvious reasons to boo those guys, and oh yeah, when we were booing them, the team sucked as well. Jones and the Cubs got better during the last half of the 2007 season and the booing eased up. Still, Jones wasn’t good enough and I was certainly quite happy when Jim Hendry dumped him. Did we mention also that Jones and Hundley played for big contracts with the Cubs? That was definitely a factor as well.
So those guys deserved to be verbally pummeled. Why did Edmonds deserve to be booed? The only reason the Cubs were able to get him was because he had struggled so much with the Padres that they released him. If you were thinking about it at all, you knew it was going to take Edmonds a little while to find his stroke in Chicago.
Another argument against the boos was his still-stellar defense. He had made a big defensive play earlier Tuesday evening to save at least a run in support of Gallagher. He still has that amazing ability to hear the crack of the bat, realize a fly ball is headed straight over his head, turn and track it down, even if it requires running up a hill to make a catch, as it did and he did in Houston’s ridiculous ballpark the week before.
And did we mention that the Cubs are paying Edmonds the minimum veteran’s major league salary?
Now he’s started hitting and the booing has ended. But the fact that it happened at all was weak. In the future, people, let’s boo smart.
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There is so much drivel written about how some pretend critical mass of Cubs fans act, i.e., that Cubs fans didn’t really boo players until after 2003 and how Cubs fans really care now after so many years of wallowing in loveable loserville.
What a bunch of crap. There were plenty of Cubs fans booing lousy performances when I began going to games in the 70’s and there was plenty of negative reaction to underachieving Cubs teams the next decade, especially in aftermath of the playoff runs in ’84 and ’89, when subsequent teams went into seasons with high expectations and didn’t come close to meeting them.
Of course, there were also some Cubs fans who didn’t boo on general principle. There are some White Sox fans who feel the same way. Local columnists write column after column in which they pretend to have the ability to define the mood of Cubs fans en masse and to psycho-analyze their resulting actions. And they do so from the sealed in environs of the press box. Maybe you ought to reconsider the use of your ridiculous Cub fan fairy tales as fodder for columns, eh guys?
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Doug Collins? Doug Freaking Collins? Surely this would be the weirdest coaching hire in the history of Chicago sports, bringing a guy back to the job he was fired from almost 20 years prior. But he doesn’t have the gig yet and at this point his getting it probably depends on one thing: where did the leak come from? Was it someone close to Collins who leaked it all over Chicago that he was probably on his way back to the hot seat on the Bulls bench? If it was, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see negotiations break down and the Bulls go in a different direction (unless of course Collins is willing to work cheaper than cheap).
If John Paxson and Jerry Reinsdorf believe there’s a chance the leak came from the Bulls organization, then Collins will probably be hired. The Trib’s K.C. Johnson reported over the weekend that the Bulls leadership was ticked the info about Collins leaked and I’ll bet that isn’t the half of it. I’ll bet if they feel there is pressure to hire Collins due to the expectations created by last week’s reports, they’ll intentionally hire someone else.
I loved Collins as a coach. At least I think I did – did I mention his first go-round was a while back now? The Bulls won what I would argue was either the biggest or the second-biggest playoff series in team history (none of the NBA Finals Series were ever really in doubt – no seventh games – so maybe the first Finals against the Lakers was the biggest just because it was the breakthrough, with Collins’ highlight second) shortly before the coach was pushed out. That was when the Bulls prevailed in the deciding Game 5 of the first round of the 1989 playoff on Michael Jordan’s amazing, last-second, hanging jumper over the Cleveland Cavaliers’ Craig Ehlo. That series established the Bulls as the heir apparent to the Pistons in the Eastern Conference. The Cavaliers never recovered and the Bulls went on to dominate the 90s.
Those were the days. Even if we had to boo Will Perdue or Luc Longley every once in a while just to try to stay sharp, we still loved them.
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Jim Coffman appears in this space every Monday with the city’s best sports wrap-up.
Posted on June 2, 2008