Still Gotta Come Through Chicago

The Correa Question + Everything Else Around Chicago

Good morning again, Chicago. Back-to-back newsletters to take you into the holiday weekend.

Again, I urge you to sign up someone for this newsletter today and tell them you bought it for them as a Christmas gift. I’ll make no mention of this newsletter being free for the foreseeable future. Seems like a no-brainer to me:

And before we get started, make sure you read yesterday’s newsletter here if you didn’t get a chance.

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The Cubs have been linked to Carlos Correa through some reporting by 670 The Score’s Bruce Levine and everyone on Twitter.

There’s “mutual interest,” we’ve heard, and we’ve also heard the Cubs are fine with paying him a lot, just not for ten years.

In my mind, those two “reports” mean absolutely nothing. Correa and his agent would be fools not to show “interest” in one of the most (allegedly) cash-rich teams in the MLB. Saying he wasn’t interested would just take a suitor out of the race and thus hurt his negotiating power.

All the other shoddy reporting on Correa calling Javier Baez to see how it was playing for the Cubs seems pretty baseless.

It also makes sense that the Cubs, of course, do not want to bind themselves to one of these albatross contracts that never work out for the final five years or so. But again, that’s the deal, and essentially what you’re paying for is the good ones on the front end.

Either way, I don’t think either report is really all that telling. Could the Cubs get Correa? Sure they could. But I don’t think these developments — especially during a lockout — mean all that much.

So, with that out of the way, the question is whether or not I’d want Correa on the Cubs.

I want to preface this by saying that I am not putting myself on a pedestal here. By no means to I think I’m morally superior to anyone on either side of this argument. If I did, I’d simply put (Vaxxed AF) in my Twitter and Instagram bylines.

Before you call me a dumbass, I’d like to lay out the predicament. Correa, minus the real criminals in the MLB, is probably one of my three least favorite players. The other two are probably on the Astros too.

It would be really hard rooting for him, no matter how productive he could be.

The conventional wisdom in sports is that winning heals everything, but man, I would despise having to acknowledge Correa as the Cubs best player and having to root for him 162 days out of the year. That’s a commitment to a guy I’ve called a piece of shit on hundreds of occasions.

This comes up a lot in sports, right? The idea of whether you care more about your team winning or your team being filled with (mostly) good dudes. It’s a hard balance.

Right now, we’re blessed with a Bulls team that has a bunch of really, really easy guys to root for.

That Cubs team in 2016 was filled with them. Addison Russell then became an example of this exact predicament, though. Luckily for the Cubs, his play wasn’t good enough to make it a hard decision, and they eventually parted ways.

The same goes for the off-and-on Deshaun Watson/Bears trade rumors. The most chatter came before he was accused of over 20 counts of sexual harassment. But even after them, I feel like there were plenty of Bears fans who either silently — or a little too loudly — agreed with the concept of trading for him.

I personally think rooting for a real shitty person at the quarterback position would be too much to handle. Even if Watson took the Bears from the embarrassment they are right now to a contender, it almost wouldn’t be worth it.

Chasing that feeling of being a contender again all to have the caveat be rooting for a guy I cannot stand just would not hit the same.

We spend a lot of our lives thinking about and discussing these players. Lord knows, probably way too much. That trade off doesn’t seem worth it to me.

Watson aside, there are plenty of people who reasonably care about winning and only winning. We don’t know these guys personally, so if they help our viewing experience while we’re on the couch watching from afar, it’s fair game.

I’ve wondered if I could be swayed to that side. But then I think about teams like the 2013-2014 Bulls, the ones who were playoff contenders but nothing more, and yet still gave me some of the best sports memories of my life.

Those teams represented something that you could be proud of, and it made all of it so much sweeter. I’ve seen in person the ovation that Joakim Noah gets at the UC, and I’m not sure it would even be heightened had he won a ring in Chicago.

We’ve been lucky of late. There’s that Bulls team — plus the good ones — as well as the good Bears teams of this century. They’ve been few and far between, but when they have been good, there’s been a lot of easy guys to root for. The same goes for the Cubs in 2016 and the 2005 White Sox.

There are obviously exceptions there, and there’s probably a few guys you didn’t love just from a personal standpoint. But mostly, you had the best of both worlds.

You’d always love to have both. But if I had to choose, I still think I’d side with the playoff contender with a bunch of guys that served the city well over a title contender with some scum bags leading the way.

Correa didn’t do anything legally abhorrent, so that puts him outside of the category that contains guys like Watson and Russell. Or guys like Tank Johnson who played on the Bears not that long ago.

Josh Bellamy just got nailed with COVID-relief fund fraud, but he was maybe the least exciting guy to root for in the first place.

But Correa also cheated the game. From a purely baseball perspective, he did the worst thing imaginable — in fact, you couldn’t even imagine what he did before it actually happened. It’s worse than steroids, for my money, given that that is at least for the most part an individual violation. Sure it can harm the players you’re playing well against thanks to your intake, but it’s not necessarily cheating the actual game, between the white lines.

To make matters worse, he continued being a smug prick afterward. Hardly offering any apology even after he got off scot-free, he continued making an ass out of himself by acting like a victim even though his culpability in the situation is more than evident. Remember his arrogant rant about how people were dumb for saying Jose Altuve isn’t a true MVP despite being involved in all the trash can banging?

It’s just hard for me to get past that. Not only did he commit the wrongful act, he also paid no punishment for it, and seemed to be smug throughout the rest of the process.

But he’s the best free agent on the market, so naturally, after a shitty year for the Cubs, people want him. He’d immediately make the team way better. So, again, I get it.

The more you care about sports, the more you’d think you’d care about winning. It’s true in some sense. But when you spend as much time with these players remotely as us die-hards do, eventually, those character flaws can wear on you.

Hell, even little shit that generally good guys do end up pissing me off. So I guess I’m fine missing out on Correa — even if it hurts in the short term — in lieu of selling my pure, little, pathetic baseball soul.

If I didn’t think winning was the no. 1 priority, I wouldn’t type here into the abyss every week. But there are exceptions.

I’d love to hear subscriber thoughts on this one. What’s your thought process look like for this? Is it win at all costs? Or is there some gray area?

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On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, the Cubs went out and signed one of the easiest guys to root for in the league in Marcus Stroman.

And hey, maybe if you have enough guys like Stroman on the team, having Correa up once every three innings doesn’t sting as bad.

I fell in love with Stroman when he participated on behalf of the USA in the 2017 World Baseball Classic. The dude has an energy to him that’s unlike anyone else’s in the league.

He pitched in the championship game against Puerto Rico and just absolutely dominated.

I love Kyle Hendricks, but Stroman’s demeanor on the mound is refreshingly the exact opposite. He also doesn’t look like he’s going to cry when he gives up a homer, so that makes him different than Hendricks as well.

Stroman is respectfully animated and his love and passion for the game is so evident while he’s playing it — something that’s strangely hard to come by in baseball more than in any other sport.

More than anything, it’s a great baseball move for the Cubs. Between this signing and the Wade Miley one, the Cubs have already upgraded their starting pitching massively.

The deal — 3 years, $75 million — is completely reasonable. The annual average is small compared to other big-time pitching contracts, and it’s two years less than what most insiders thought he’d get on the market. That could be a bet on himself for another contract later on, but either way, it serves the Cubs well.

Stroman has pitched at least 179 innings in four of the last five years he’s played. He sits at 92 or 93 miles per hour, but relies on his sinker mostly as the pitch to get hitters out.

He’s very keen on taking care of his body, which leads me to believe that he’ll be durable for years to come, though it doesn’t matter all that much in the Cubs case, given the deal is only for three years.

Last year, he started 33 games, had a 3 ERA, a 1.1 WHIP, struck out 8 guys per nine innings and had a 3.5 strike out to walk ratio.

Now, the Cubs have three good starters, assuming Hendricks turns things around next year, in Miley, Hendricks, and Stroman. That leaves the back half of the rotation for the guys the Cubs would like to see be a part of the starting rotation moving forward, including Justin Steele and Adbert Alzolay.

With that starting pitching mix, the Cubs are likely a move or two offensively away from competing in the division again — already.

We’ll see if the Ricketts have recovered their “biblical” COVID losses yet and pull the trigger on a bat or two. (Yeah, Correa, idiot.) And, or, will they round out that rotation with a Carlos Rodon?

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Due to the lockout, we really have no idea what the Sox will do with the rest of the offseason.

At the very least, the lock out will keep White Sox fans from being suicidal if Rick Hahn takes a shit without saying the Sox are in the mix for top free agents.

The only thing they’ve done thus far is re-sign Leury Legend — Tony La Russa’s favorite White Sock — to a three-year, $16.5 million deal.

That Garcia deal was so reasonable and predictable that no one could get on their high horse on either side of the Leury debate. For that, I am forever grateful.

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The NHL is on pause right now, so I can’t feasibly cover the Blackhawks right now.

I kid.

If the Blackhawks hit .500, I’ll keep my promise and start writing about them more. If the Blackhawks and Bulls are ever good at the same time again, though, my sleep is really going to take a hit.

“But, but, you wrote about the Bulls when they were below .500!” Someone, my children, had to man the fort.

Having said that, it was pretty cool to see Marc-André Fleury get his 500th win the other week — third all time! What an insane statistic.

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The only reason I’ll bring up Matt Nagy again here is that if the Bears fired him today, they could begin interviewing candidates for the job next week.

If the plan is to fire him after the season, there’s no reason to fall behind in that search. Rip the band aid off. I assume, at this point, Nagy wouldn’t mind it either.

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The Bulls play tonight against a Raptors team that is quite decimated by COVID. If the game isn’t postponed, this is close to a must-win for them.

That would give them a 3-0 record without LaVine and others, and miraculously allow them to not miss a beat before getting the whole team back after Christmas.

Devon Dotson entered protocols, which would be worrisome from a virus perspective, but only Alex Caruso (who is hurt) and Lonzo Ball have not had the virus yet, essentially.

Meanwhile, the Bulls signed Mac McClung — mixtape legend who kind of sucks — and veteran Ersan Ilyasova.

Troy Brown Jr. exited protocols, so he’ll be available tonight.

LETS GO BULLS

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Merry Christmas. STILL GOTTA COME THROUGH CHICAGO!