Baseball is back. How good will it really be for Chicago clubs in 2016?

We have about six weeks to go before baseball is truly back with regular season ballgames that actually count for something.

But with professional ball clubs reporting this week to their warm-weather spring training camps, we can start thinking of those summertime moments when we can dream our local teams actually have a chance to win a championship for the glory of Chicago.

WHAT WITH THE Chicago White Sox having pitchers and catchers reporting to their training camp in suburban Phoenix on Friday, followed by the Chicago Cubs on Saturday, we can stop obsessing our sports interest over how god-awful the Chicago Bears were, or how disappointing the Chicago Bulls have become.

Personally, I’m not sure what to expect from Chicago baseball this season. I don’t think the White Sox are as bad as they played last year, and definitely think the Cubs peaked with their 2015 third place finish that actually managed to qualify for a playoff spot – what with the screwy new rules that try to put as many ball clubs as possible into the post-season.

Although I’m sure of one thing – 2016 won’t be the first year in 110 that the World Series is an all-Chicago affair. In fact, I won’t be surprised if both ball clubs come close to – but fall short of – qualifying for a playoff spot.

So excuse me for thinking that USA Today is overly optimistic, what with their predictions of what the upcoming season is going to be like. They’re definitely falling for the nonsense talk of the Chicago Cubs as an established elite – rather than just a team that might come close to being competitive this season.

A TOTAL OF 101 wins and the best record in baseball would definitely be un-Wrigley-like. And the idea of the White Sox winning their division with 90 wins?

It seems so unlikely, and so unlike anything a Chicago baseball fan would ever wish for. Because the reality of the character of Chicago baseball is that many of us probably wouldn’t want an all-Chicago World Series.

We get too much joy from seeing the opposition fall short as much as the success of our own ball club. Personally, I’d want to see an all-Chicago World Series in my lifetime, primarily as a means of shutting up Cubs fans once their team loses.

Of course, there’s also the Baseball Prospectus prediction, which is based off mathematical formulas that their proponents support so much that they refuse to contemplate any argument over.

WE MUST BELIEVE that the Cubs will have the second-best National League record with 92 wins (only the Los Angeles Dodgers with 94 wins will be better), while the White Sox will have a winning record with 82 wins (and 80 losses).

But they want to believe the Cleveland Indians are on a resurgence to win that particular division of the American League. Something that I’m sure will bother White Sox fans more than the thought of the Cubs being considered more worthwhile.

It may be the big difference in character between the fans of Chicago’s two ball clubs. Particularly after the early-season fanaticism over the White Sox fizzled out into apathy, the denizens of the quarter-century old U.S. Cellular Field aren’t going to believe anything until they see it.

While Cubs fans think they won the whole thing last year (even though they fell short of a National League championship, let alone a World Series appearance) and expect all of baseball to worship at their feet.

OF COURSE, THERE is that eternal Chicago/St. Louis rivalry, expressed by the USA Today predictions having the Cardinals winning 97 games, compared to Baseball Prospectus making them no better than the White Sox at 82 wins.

I’m sure some people will be looking forward to those Cubs/Cardinals games, and I’m sure St. Louis baseball fans will want to show how much better their preferred ball club is than the Cubbies.

Which is something that White Sox fans can’t get into. Because we always figured that St. Louis showed its second-class status as a baseball town when it let the Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles.

Any city that chose a National League team over an American League one can’t have too much in the way of common sense!

  -30-

End of the world? We can't be so lucky

Where do you read the date Dec. 21, 2012 in this?

If the conspiracy theorists (a.k.a., tin foil hat wearers, paranoid wackos) are correct, this is the last piece of copy I ever will write.

For the day has finally arrived on Friday that our society, our planet, our very sphere of existence, will come to an end.

FOR ALL I know, I wasted my time writing this, because you won’t be in any position to read it.

But I did take the time to write it, because I fully expect you to have plenty of time to read it. Along with all the other thoughts I plan to express during what remains of my life. Which I don’t expect to end anytime soon!

In short, I have always found a certain level of absurdity to those people who actually take seriously the idea that many centuries ago, the Mayans (one of the societies that have melded into the modern-day Mexicans) predicted that our world would end as of Dec. 21, 2012.

Of course, the people who interpret those round Mayan (whose own demise as a separate people came long ago) calendars to come up with Friday’s date are probably the same ones who can’t really read those Egyptian hieroglyphics. So we really don’t know much of what all those pharaohs of old were thinking.

BESIDES, IT WAS never really clear to me exactly what is supposed to happen Friday that will bring our society to its demise.

Earthquakes? A massive meteor smashing into our planet to knock it off its orbit just enough that it becomes uninhabitable?

And how long will it take? Will we suddenly just cease to exist? Or will it be one of those things that is nothing in the overall scheme of time, but seems like an eternity to us?

Which means that when we are still alive and thriving come 12:01 a.m. Saturday, the conspiracy theorists among us will probably come up with some picayune event that they say proves the truth of their beliefs – and that the end of the world has begun.

PERSONALLY, THERE WOULD be one advantage to having the end of the world at hand – we wouldn’t have to listen any longer to these paranoid people with their doomsday predictions. Because it’s not like they have some sort of secret rocket ship that will allow them to escape the demise of Planet Earth.

The idea of people who want to believe that one of those “X-files” movies gave their paranoid delusions credibility (by claiming that David Duchovny’s “Fox Mulder” character found the evidence that our government knew about the reality of Dec. 21, 2012 and was deliberately covering it up as part of a plot to hide the reality of extraterrestrial life) is something I could do without.

In fact, reading back that last sentence and what was forefold in that film shows just how absurd all this rhetoric is.

Because that film’s storyline is about as absurd as the reality espoused by the individuals who really believe that Friday has any real significance. Personally, the only significance to this date is that this weblog made it to the five-year mark in its existence.

BUT IF THIS date truly is the “end of the world,” then what’s the point? Somehow, I doubt the content of this weblog will be the one aspect of life on this planet that survives to be found by some future concept of life in this universe.

Which means that my real point is to mock the doomsday predictions, particularly in that no one followed the lead of “Dr. Strangelove” and came up with an underground bunker containing 10 women for each man to protect us!

Even that schpiel that computers would crash en masse on Jan. 1, 2000 had a tiny bit of truth to it – in that computer software can be so temperamental at times that nobody really knows what triggers a crash.

In reality, I expect Friday to be as uneventful a day as that one was (so uneventful that I can’t even recall what I did). Although it will be ironic for those people who pass away on Friday – because it WILL be the end of life as they knew it.

AND JUST IN the oft-chance that something cataclysmic does occur on Friday, I’ll leave you with R.E.M. and their song, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I feel fine).”

It will probably be the only time in my life that I don’t find that song completely annoying to listen to.

  -30-

EDITOR'S NOTE: This commentary also will be published at The South Chicagoan, a younger sister (by three months) weblog of this site.
 

End of World as we knew it? Not likely

Let me state up front that I fully expect to awake on Sunday with little or nothing around me having changed.

So yes, I’m skeptical of all this talk of “the Rapture,” which is the moment when the faithful will be carried off this Earth to a better place (Heaven?) while the rest of us are left here to suffer the End of the World.

A RELIGIOUS BROADCASTER has said that this event is destined to happen on Saturday. Sometime today, those of us who have been faithful to the Christian religion (or more likely, certain sects of it) will be rewarded for their piety while the masses are punished for our wickedness.

Not that any of this is new. There always is someone predicting the End of the World, trying to scare us all into repenting our “sins” and making amends so we can be among the few who do not suffer and can relax for all eternity.

So the idea that May 21 is a significant date? I take it about as seriously as I do those people who seriously believe that the Aztecs (or was it the Mayans?!?) predicted we’re all going to die on Dec. 21, 2012.

Of course, most of these “doomsday” dates don’t get the international fanfare that this particular date does. I haven’t seen Garry Trudeau doing a series of his “Doonesbury” comic strips that this particular date is getting.

I ALSO HAVEN’T experienced anyone making a generous gift of their worldly possessions to me because they won’t need them after Saturday (unlike Doonesbury’s “Zonker” character, who was given a luxury automobile that he thinks will make his experience on the “Hell on Earth” that this planet will become all the more comfortable).

Yes, I find the people who are taking this kind of talk seriously to be scary.

Should we feel adequately warned? Or is this much adieu about nothing? Images provided by The American Jesus (above) and The Practice Room.

It bothers me whenever I hear these religious-types talk of how we’re going to suffer. Because it seems like what they really enjoy is NOT the idea that they have a chance at an eternal life of peace and harmony.

Instead, they want the idea that everybody around them is going to suffer. As though they can’t be happy unless everybody else is miserable.

ANYBODY WHO SERIOUSLY needs THAT factor in their life ought to quit hanging around a clergyman so often and ought to spend some time with a psychiatrist.

Because they’d all be seriously happier in life if they could learn to quit taking pleasure in others’ misfortune.

But then again, those people are all going to be gone from our lives after Saturday – if the prediction is true. For it also says that this planet is going to become a miserable place to exist; making us wish we were dead.

Of course, that will happen on Oct. 21 – which is the date that the Universe as we know it will cease to exist. No more Earth. No more us. Somewhere, all these holier-than-thou types will be snickering at our misery.

THE SCARY THING is that it is true. This planet we call Earth will come to an end some day. Mere science says it is so.

Because the star we think of as “the Sun,” which provides the heat in just the right proportion that allows our planet to support life (all types, not just human) is NOT a ball of gas that will last forever.

The day will come when the Sun becomes a dried-out wad of nothingness. Before that, it will expand to a size so big that it likely will engulf our planet, incinerating it into ashes.

Now I’m sure some people are going to want to think that it is a “God” who is determining when this happens, and that it will happen for a purpose of punishment of the wicked – instead of just being the natural cycle that every star goes through.

NOW HAVING SAID that, I’m also aware that this is a process that takes millions of years to go through. Scientific-types will be able to provide us ample warning for when this planet becomes uninhabitable.

The Sun isn’t about to explode in the next few months.

Not that there’s anything we’d be able to do about it – unless space travel has significantly developed to the point where we can evacuate the masses and go somewhere else (to a place that could support life, which means we don’t know yet of its existence).

So like I wrote earlier, I don’t expect life to be significantly different when I awake on Sunday. I don’t expect the holier-than-thou among us to suddenly disappear from our midst. I fully expect to see Tim Pawlenty begin his presidential campaign come Monday.

WHICH MIGHT ACTUALLY be the ultimate punishment for the rest of us. We’re stuck with these self-righteous types amongst us who try to disguise their arrogance under the cover of religion.

If there really is a God, he’d spare us these miserable people – allowing us to live our lives in peace.

 -30-

EDITOR'S NOTE: It seems The Simpsons gave us a vision of Saturday some 18 years ago. I still get my kick out of the thought of a picnic in Hell including German potato salad.