DanMargarita.com

This is Boston and there is no off-season for baseball. The Red Sox continue to make news even though the only baseball being played anywhere professionally would be in the Southern Hemisphere.

As locals are by now well-aware, longtime Red Sox General Manager Theo Epstein has moved on to take over the reins of the Chicago Cubs. For those unfamiliar with the game, for decades the Cubs were essentially the Red Sox National League fraternal twins.

The Cubs World Series championship drought is at 103 years and counting. There may still be a couple of people who were alive at the time they last won but certainly there can’t be anyone alive who remembers them winning (or much of anything...sorry).

The Cubs last won in 1908 (after having also won in 1907), with a talented team that featured the double play combination of Tinker to Evers to Chance.

That would be Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance, all of whom were elected to The Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.

If you’ve heard of them, it’s likely because of a poem written about them in 1910, called “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon,” which many believe to be the only reason that the light-hitting Evers and Tinker were inducted into the HOF.

The poem is written from the perspective of a New York Giants (there was once a baseball team by this name) fan, dreading the defensive wizardry of the trio.

These are the saddest of possible words:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."
Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double –
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
"Tinker to Evers to Chance."


I should note that according to Wikipedia, my source of last resort for anything important and my source of first resort for anything trivial, a gonfalon is a flag or pennant. There’s something you can win a bar bet with some day.

The success of this poem relies on the musicality of their names. It wouldn’t have worked as “These are the saddest of possible words/Andollini to Goldberg to McCarthy.”

However, after those halcyon days (heh heh, I threw that in to match “gonfalon”) of championships, the Cubs fell on hard times, not reaching the World Series again until 1945. This is where it starts to get weird.

Legend has it that when Billy Sianis, owner of The Billy Goat Tavern, was asked to leave a World Series game in ’45 because the smell of his pet goat was offending other fans, he declared, “Them Cubs, they aren’t gonna win no more.”

A couple of points here, if I may…just why anybody would bring a goat to a baseball game defies explanation. Secondly, I realize that this was long before 9-11, but it doesn’t seem reasonable that even in 1945 Wrigley Field security was so lax that a guy was allowed to bring in livestock.

There are other variations to the story but essentially Theo Epstein has been brought in to break that curse much as he helped break the Red Sox so-called “Curse of the Bambino.”

Well, it seemed that supposed curse had been broken until this past September when the Red Sox took a classic nosedive as though the planets had collided in epic fashion.

To the best of my knowledge, the Sox collapse had more to do with lousy pitching than it did with farm animals.

While Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia and first baseman Adrian Gonzalez may have Hall of Fame careers, shortstop Marco Scutaro, a solid player, is probably not headed for the Hall. Thus, to give him a chance for glory, I have decided to write a poem to praise the Sox trio, while also commenting on the state of other members of the team.

These are the saddest of possible words:
“Scutaro to Pedroia to Gonzalez”
Good for the Sox and fantasy nerds
“Scutaro and Pedroia and Gonzalez”
Though pitchers were wolfing down chicken while drinking
Lester and Beckett and Lackey were stinking
Folks who bought tickets thought, “What was I thinking?”
“Scutaro to Pedroia to Gonzalez”

So, I say to Theo Epstein, “Thank you and good luck in Chicago.”

Oh, and in case you were wondering who was the Cubs third baseman back in the day, it was a guy named Harry Steinfeldt.