The inevitability of Cubness

Maybe it's just a nostalgia deal. Sure, that's it.

Took a gander at the baseball standings this a.m., and I saw that your Chicago Cubs have lost six games in a row and are now comfortably out of the playoffs, four games behind Milwaukee for the second wild card spot with a week left in the season. Just a week ago they were hanging onto that spot by the skin of their teeth, but then an outbreak of extreme Cubness broke out, and they lost four one-run games in a row in Wrigley Field to their fiercest rival, the Gosh Bleep St. Louis Cardinals.

Four one-run losses in a row! In the Confines! With a playoff berth on the line!

This is not just extreme Cubness, it is epic Cubness, given that it hadn't happened since the Wilson administration (1919). And it hadn't happened against the Gosh Bleep St. Louis Cardinals since the Harding administration (1921).

So, yes, this suggests the Cubs secretly pine for the days of yore, when world wars weren't yet numbered, men handled the voting for all you lovely ladies and "That's a doozy" was what you said when your snooty neighbor came home wheeling a Deusenberg. The Cubs were just a decade removed from winning the World Series, but they could still say, "Gosh, we haven't won a World Series since 1908." And they could go right on saying it for another 97 years.

Now?

Well, 2016 spoiled everything. Complaining that you haven't won a World Series in three years, after all, just isn't the same as complaining that you haven't won a World Series in 108 years. There is not that tinge of endearing pathos to it; it's just complaining. And from a fan base that's grown used to winning -- until now, the Cubs have made the playoffs the last four years, and until last year had reached at least the NLCS three straight years -- it's not endearing at all.

And not nearly as interesting.

The entire culture of the franchise, after all, has always been built around the inevitability of Cubness. No matter how bright the outlook every year when they came north from Arizona, you knew in your bones something Cubbish would happen to the Cubs. Sometimes there would be a breathtaking cruelness to it, like when Steve Bartman became the wrongfully blamed architect of Cubness on a ball Moises Alou was never going to catch anyway. And sometimes the Cubs just sucked.

Either way, it all ended up the same.  The sun's shining, the Old Style's flowing and fer crissakes, Dusty, Prior's thrown 147 pitches, get him the hell out of there.

But then Theo Epstein showed up, and Cubness went dormant. Under his hand, the Cubs became just another big-spending overdog -- the Yankees or Red Sox, only more cuddly. Which is why this all must feel, on some level, like the Cubs merely returning to their comfort zone.

In other words: Dammit, Cubs, you did it to us again. All that talk back in the spring about a new urgency? Yeah, right. Shoulda known it was a setup.

And the Great Choke of  2019?

Just stick it up there alongside the Great Choke of '69, the Great Choke of '84 and the Great Choke of '03. And welcome back, Cubness.