I was perusing the Tuesday chat by Chicago baseball blogger Bruce Levine over at espn.com (WARNING: I think you need an Insider account to view the chat archives) and one question in particular irked me.
Tim (Portland, OR)
Bruce, I see people in Cub hats even out here in Oregon. My question is: why do people want to associated themselves with a losing organization? My only answer is that they are losers themselves, a lower life form. Do you agree?
My immediate reaction was a predictable, “ass hat”. However, as I grumbled and groused through the rest of the chat a little lightbulb came on for me – are the Cubs really a losing organization?
In my twenty eight years of fandom I’ve seen multiple division titles, including three in the past decade, and ten seasons end with a winning record. Certainly not the stuff of legends, but in a sport where playoff berths are more scarce than any other, I think it’s enough winning that the “loser” tag needs to be put to pasture. I am fairly sure that at no point in the Cubs history the goal at the beginning of the season was to finish last.
The other thing that bothered me was the notion that anyone who roots for a losing team is, by association, themselves a loser. By Tim in Portland’s reasoning why would anybody follow a single team? Instead we should just wait for the games to the played and then decide which hat to go buy. And I certainly hope poor Tim never fails at anything himself, how awful it must be to find yourself devolving into a “lower life form”.
