Still Gotta Come Through Chicago

Another Wintry Week Down

Happy Friday Chicago!

Another wintry week is down, and you know what that means. Construction signs are going up behind my teeth because the top of my mouth is going to be regenerating new skin for the next three weeks after I house a piping hot Home Run Inn pizza straight out of the oven tonight, while twiddling my toes out of pure enjoyment.

It’s Friday Night, baby.

As of Thursday, this has been a great week. I just finished another book and I got one too many compliments at work. On the weekends, I’m eating breakfast alone with my phone off in my pocket, listening to the table next to me talk about THC-infused energy drinks and how they feel naked without their Apple watches.

I can’t help but smile, man. I’m so much better than them it’s embarrassing.

They’re laughing at me, too, because I’m bald before 30. But they’re not going to be laughing when I skadaddle out of the joint with a ski mask on and have no concerns about how it will affect the hair on my head. I may give them a couple of finger guns on the way out.

Is it time for a stop at the book store? Don’t do it to them, young man. Am I really going to go in there, fresh off finishing yet another book, and ask one of the helpful workers what they’ve been reading to expand my horizons further? Am I going to rely on the worker, and not algorithms, to dictate my next literary choice?

I don’t think I need that. I don’t need to put my book down next to the treadmill and get a Saturday morning sweat in. I just don’t. I may start thinking about launching my own company and lecturing people about how working from home is nonsense because I’ve been mandated to five days per week in the office.

I don’t need to tell everyone obsessed with artificial intelligence that they love it because they’re bad at being a human, and I don’t need to tell everyone not obsessed with it that they’re going to lose their remote jobs while I’m chumming it up over coffee with the higher ups.

No, if I do that, I may just get “41” tattoo’d on my arm, because that represents George H.W. Bush, and the HW stands for “handsome and wealthy.” I can’t have the crowds rubbing my arm and asking what it means, and rubbing my head saying, “Is it true that balding is tied to high levels of testosterone?

Mike Singletary voice: “Can’t do it.”

One’s psyche, I feel, should always be floating between “I’m the fucking man, there’s no one like me. One in 8 billion.” and “I am woefully inadequate, a dime a dozen.” As you do float between the two, the only rules to remember are to not stay on one side for long and to never verbalize where you currently sit on that scale.

I’m riding too high right now, but not high enough that I’m blinded by the altitude.

It’s time to self-regulate and bring the body temperature back down to 97 Fahrenheit, before I begin telling people that I have a newsletter because everyone needs a passion outside of work.

So after I funnel the pizza into my mouth and down a plastic carton of chocolate chip cookies, I’m going to let my hairy belly hang out and lose $50 on a college basketball game featuring two teams I know nothing about.

Then I’m going to grab my brain remote and replay the time I mispronounced a word this week in a meeting, over and over.

Finally, after 10 replays, I’ll concede to myself that it’s not worth admonishing someone every time they call a tortoise a turtle. Tortoises are land-dwelling, but not everyone knows that like I do. (The family has a Tortoise, creatively named “Davin,” because little brother could not decide between David and Kevin.)

I probably won’t start that company, and I’m actually kind of tired from taking the train back and forth to work all this week.

By the time I hit the hay, I’ll start to realize all sorts of nasty things about my current self. My knuckles are cracking from the cold weather and too much hand washing, even though I fake like I’m washing my hands half the time after I take a piss. Still crusty.

If I tell one more person I “didn’t see that” because I’m not on social media, my head may explode from arrogance. And it’s better if it explodes from a well-done Home Run Inn pie than that.

My father said during the Super Bowl that the halftime show’s audio was prerecorded, backing up his point by saying it “had to be,” and to “ask any musician about that.”

As I racked my brain, I could think of one musician the guy has talked to in the last decade. The local Irish singer he likes. And the only time he talks to him is when he’s demanding a song be played that the singer has never heard.

This guy had been floating on his argument’s cloud all week, spewing nonsense, expecting for no one to ask him “what musicians have you talked to?” I checked his ID at the door, and then the logical fallacies came pouring out of his pockets.

What he didn’t realize is that I was doing him a favor. In that moment, he was floating closer to I’m The Fucking Man Street. I gently brought him back over to Dime a Dozen Lane.

I’ll be back there with him on Saturday. We’ll be back to square one.

Right now, I think this newsletter is going to be a banger, a must-read. So tell someone to subscribe today, up top, dammit.

Just know that on Saturday, I may send you an email. “Please tell that person to unsubscribe.” My quill has failed me again, and I should be ashamed to have thought anyone would want to read this.

I’m getting old and have nothing to show for the passage of time. Write a book? You couldn’t write a postcard, bitch.

But it’s still Thursday, so let’s get into it. Read More to be amazed.

---

White Sox fans do not need to be reminded that they had the worst baseball season in MLB history last year. They also don’t need to be reminded that their front office did absolutely nothing to rectify the worst team in baseball history this offseason.

Baseball fans love to clown owners that pay big money for big stars and end up being mediocre anyway. That doesn’t deserve clowning.

What does is being the worst team in the league and then telling reporters with a straight face that the team is going to experience some “growing pains” this year, but that you “expect more wins.” Thanks Chris Getz, if you win 42 of 162 you’ll meet expectations.

White Sox management is so bad that they’ve killed a rivalry. I feel nothing ill toward White Sox fans, and frankly, I feel bad for them. There’s nothing worse than heading into a summer and knowing your team has no chance of stripping an ounce of happiness out of you. That’s how people become alcoholics.

I’m serious, man. Ray Lewis got made fun of for saying the NFL lockout would make crime go up, but there’s not a scarier sight for a case of beer or a bottle of whiskey than a white boy with a bad PECOTA projection in his face as the seasons turn.

If you’re a Cubs fan, you can take that 90+ win PECOTA projection and look at it three ways: “they should win the division, let’s go”; “man, would this have been a nice time to really go for it, and stop talking about the ‘budget’”; or “why the fuck do I care about a PECOTA projection?”

All are fair.

The Cubs front office’s message this offseason has been the exact opposite of a rap song. We cannot go a line without talking about fiscal responsibility or budgetary constraints. It’s embarrassing.

But, like the intro to this newsletter, you can also take this past week one or two ways. There’s I’m The Fucking Man Street and the Justin Turner signing. Then there’s the Dime A Dozen Lane and the chatter around a Kyle Tucker extension being unlikely.

Let’s start with Turner.

After the Cubs struck out on Alex Bregman, Justin Turner was a great consolation prize. He’s 40, and certainly is not some everyday third baseman that can carry the corner of the infield if Matt Shaw flames out, but the dude just hits.

His career got started late, but he has been impressively well above average at the plate for a very long time. Plus, he’s a former long hair guy that didn’t realize he was balding until the rest of the world pointed it out to him, so he has a fan and empathizer in me.

The unwise man looks at the Cubs roster and says “they got a lot of good players, man.” The mediocre man explains that is an incomplete view of a team that will inevitably have holes if things don’t go exactly as planned. The wise man looks at the Cubs roster and says, “they got a lot of good players, man.”

In 2013, Turner had a league average OPS. Since then, every year, he’s been above to well above league average. Last year, he had a .740 OPS in 139 games. He’s just a Major League hitter.

He scared the shit out of me on the Dodgers, and I had the hypothesis that he was a Cubs Killer. Upon review, that is not true. In fact, he was dreadful against the Cubs in their peak years.

Nevertheless, I’d rather have Justin Turner and Matt Shaw than Alex Bregman at $140 million.

It’s likely that Turner will be playing more at first base and DH than at third, but he adds more bricks to the floor of this Cubs team.

The Cubs are projected, precisely, to win 91.7 games this year, per PECOTA.

Projections are projections, but if the Cubs float near 92 wins this year, it will be hard to complain. We’ve been asking for meaningful baseball games come September for years now, and we may just get them.

When the Cubs traded for Kyle Tucker this offseason, it finally felt like that September air — which can only be appreciated with a competitive baseball team — was closer than ever.

It felt like the Cubs were finally stepping on the gas pedal, embarrassed by their mediocrity in the 2020s.

I scoffed at those that said they gave up too much for a player with one year left in arbitration. There’s no way they’d make that trade and not sign him long term, I thought.

It appears I thought wrong. I am still suspending belief, but all reports are suggesting the Cubs will not be signing players to big deals — including Tucker — in the near-term future.

Why? Last week, I put it in the most simplest terms: that the Ricketts are happy to rest on their bags of money post-World Series, and ecstatic to let Jed Hoyer take the blame on the way.

Now that could be true, and so could this: the current CBA expires at the end of 2026, and instead of competing against the Dodgers, it seems a lot of teams will push for a salary cap to stop them.

If there’s a salary cap in the future, the Ricketts don’t want to pay a guy without the built-in excuse of a cap that will suppress wages.

If that is true, it’s of course disappointing. It validates last week’s suggestion that “Good Enough” is the mantra the Cubs are going with for now.

Keep the fans at bay, raise the beer prices, and hope we can pay someone other than Kyle Tucker less money later when there’s a cap on spending.

For now, I’ll have to just enjoy the PECOTA projections, think about the September air, and hope Kyle Tucker has a career year to prove himself to another team. At least that will benefit us in the interim.

At the same time, as the Cubs toy with Seiya Suzuki, who has been one of their best players when healthy for three years, I hope he has a career year.

I hope that the Cubs shatter the artificial limits their own orchestrators are trying to place on top of them.

But man, I could use some baseball. We’re less than a month out. Keep those heads down, and those feet moving.

See you next week.

---

Thanks for reading another edition of Still Gotta Come Through Chicago. Tell someone to subscribe before moving onto your next email. They can do so above. And comment below.