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At a century and still counting, Cub fans are either the dopiest of most patient bunch in sports. And over the course of all that losing, they've learned to savor the distractions that are often more interesting than anything the team has been able to cobble together on the field. That's why they happily blame black cats, real goats and imaginary scapegoats like Steve Bartman for the ballclub's unending run of futility.
Winning is great, but in these parts entertaining is still good enough.
Last week's brouhaha was over whether Joe Ricketts, the conservative patriarch of TD Ameritrade and the family that owns the Cubs, was really planning to finance a nasty political attack campaign against President Barack Obama -- and whether that would make it harder for the Cubs to gain concessions to modify Wrigley Field from the city's staunchly Democratic mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and the city council.
The week before that, it was the nostalgia kicked up by the retirement of one-time pitching phenom Kerry Wood and an essay in The Wall Street Journal calling for the destruction of Wrigley Field, suggesting the aging shrine was actually the reason for all that losing:
"Destroy it. Annihilate it. Collapse it with the sort of charges that put the Sands Hotel out of its misery in Vegas. Implosion or explosion, get rid of it. That pile of quaintness has to go. ... When a house is haunted, you don't put in a new scoreboard, add ivy, get better food or bigger beers-you move!"
Sounding more like a fan than the Cubs left-fielder, Alfonso Soriano considered the option for the briefest of moments.
"Leave this place? No, never," he said after going 3 for 4 with a homer and three RBIs. "You saw how much it was jumping when we got it going. Let's see what can happen now. We just had some tough moments before."
Which is, give or take a few years, is how the Cubs still refer to the last century.
[Associated Press;
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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