Tonight I hit my first Cubs game of the season–I have tickets for Sunday, too–and things are looking pretty good. I got nice tickets well under face value on eBay, probably because this time of year you really roll the dice on weather. I’ve gotten good and sick (literally, I mean) at Wrigley over the years when attending games even through May, because the park is right off the lake and when it’s cold there it’s downright frigid. However, at worst both tonight and Sunday look to be heavy jacket weather, and that’s fine. I’m no fool, though, and I’ll still be packing a scarf and knit cap. Better to have them and not need them etc.
Despite a stumble against the Phillies this last weekend, the Cubs are looking significantly better than they did last year at this time, when they had an awful first two months under then new skipper Lou Pinella. We ended up after April and May something like five games under .500. We still could, of course, but the Cubs are currently eight and five. Some of these were ugly wins, and we still have some major question marks, mostly in terms of how we’ve been overworking our bullpen. Still, our division is pretty weak, and at the very minimum should be in the division race all year. Past that, who knows? We’ve still close to a 150 games left.
Not helping is that our $18 million a year man (for eight more years!) Alfonzo Soriano injured his leg last night catching a routine fly ball in the first inning. Soriano does this retarded little hop when he catches the ball, sort of like Sammy Sosa did when he hit a homer (or thought he did), and it seems like it was in doing this that Soriano hurt his leg. Only a Cub. Hopefully we can limp along while, well, he’s limping along.
Aside from the fact that you always want to see a winning game, we’re also hosting division foes the Reds tonight, they being the new home of both the highly loathed managerial fraud Dusty “It’s not MY fault” Baker, and former Cubs embarrassment Corey Patterson. Man, I really don’t want to see us lose to those guys. Both Baker and Patterson got heavily boo’d by the crowd last night, which is lame. I was as happy as anybody to see the back of both those guys, but they aren’t our problem anymore, so why boo them now?
The baseball gods are smiling in my favor, as it turns out: Staff ace Carlos Zambrano is pitching tonight, against their ace Josh Fogg. It should be a good game, although when Zambrano is bad, he’s really bad. Still, that’s true of most, and if I could have picked a pitcher, it would of been Big Z, so all I can do is root for the Cubbies and hope for the best.
I’m also excited because this will be my first in-person look at Koske Fukudome, who is shaping up to be about as good an acquisition as we’ve made in a while. Apparently in Japan they still, you know, know how to play baseball. You know, take walks, hit bunts, that kind of thing. My tickets are for the upper deck a bit past first, so I’ll be perfectly place to give Fukudome a good looksee.
