The blue-and-white “L” flag hung drearily above the center-field scoreboard at Wrigley Field Thursday afternoon, informing commuters on the nearby elevated train the Cubs had lost another ballgame.
They are known for their rich history of futility, but these Cubs are outdoing themselves.
The way in which they almost seemed eliminated from serious contention on Opening Day, the way in which their hitting and fielding have failed them, the way in which they were beaten on Thursday . . . in many ways, this team is separating itself from all the other bad teams in the cursed history of the 121-year-old franchise.
Incredibly, these Cubs somehow have managed to out-Cub themselves. Eight games into the season, the aroma around Wrigley is unbearable.
On a cold, gray, cheerless Thursday, these Cubs etched their names into the team record book, breaking the 1962 club record for most losses to start a season by falling to 0-8 with a 1-0 loss to the Florida Marlins.
And they did it by almost being no-hit–by Alex Fernandez, an ex-White Sox pitcher, no less.
The team has gone 89 years without a World Series championship and 52 years without a pennant, practically inventing the June Swoon in the process. It now claims another dubious distinction: The Cubs are the only winless team in baseball.
And on Thursday they lost with panache, coming within two outs of being no-hit for the first time since former Dodgers great Sandy Koufax threw a perfect game at them on Sept. 9, 1965.
The Cubs had a chance to break the losing streak in the ninth when three runners reached base in succession. But pinch-runner Jose Hernandez was thrown out at third on a base-running blunder and Ryne Sandberg struck out for the fourth time, ending the game with Cubs runners at first and second.
All in all, a fitting end.
The toll the losing streak is taking was apparent after the record-breaking defeat. The players conducted a closed-door meeting, ostensibly to keep themselves from getting discouraged, but catcher Scott Servais acknowledged no one in the clubhouse is having any fun.
“We’re playing the greatest game in the world and we get paid to do it,” he said. “We’re playing in the greatest ballpark. Just try to enjoy it. We’re not enjoying it.”
The Cubs have been the butt of jokes for decades thanks to the franchise’s longstanding aversion to winning. The ’69 Cubs added to the lore by blowing a 13-game division lead in August and watching the hated New York Mets surge past them to a World Series title. The ’84 Cubs added to the mystique when they lost the National League Championship Series to San Diego, letting a two-games-to-none lead slip away with the grounder that slipped through first baseman Leon Durham’s legs in Game 5.
Only three years ago the team lost 12 games in a row at Wrigley, their worst home losing streak of the 20th century. That prompted the infamous Firehouse Chat by then-manager Tom Trebelhorn, who held a raucous question-and-answer session with some fueled-up Cubs fans at the Waveland Avenue fire station.
Didn’t work.
Would Cubs manager Jim Riggleman consider a chat with fans to assure them the boat has not yet capsized?
“No!” he said sharply, and left it at that.
“Long-suffering” doesn’t begin to describe Cub fans’ legendary patience, but 0-8 is 0-8, and Riggleman is hearing about it, in the papers, on talk shows, on his voice mail at Wrigley Field.
“I’ve never had time for sarcasm,” he said. “It’s a cheap laugh. It’s very easy for people to use sarcasm. A lot of people use it . . . it’s their `shtick.’ There will always be a market for it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
But Riggleman had better get used to it as David Letterman, Jay Leno and the rest of America’s wise guys clamp onto the Cubs’ skid.
The company line is that the season is still in its infancy, that April is no time to panic.
“Any time you start off like we have, it’s magnified,” Frank Castillo said after losing Thursday’s pitching duel with Fernandez. “If it comes during the middle of June, July or August, people more or less brush it off. But we realize we have some work to do. We’re a better ballclub than we’re showing. Things are going to turn around. It’s still early.”
But that rationale is starting to wear thin with other Cubs.
“Yeah, it’s early,” center fielder Brian McRae said. “But you’d like to win a few ballgames here and there.”
That’s difficult to do for a team batting .167, with a 5.05 earned-run average and a league-leading 12 errors. So awful has the Cubs’ hitting been that announcer Harry Caray blew off his traditional seventh-inning plea of “Let’s . . . get . . . some . . . runs” Thursday, and when you lose Harry Caray, you lose all of Cubdom.
But the sun is sure to rise again over Lake Michigan on Friday, and a new day brings the promise of another chance to raise the “W” flag over Wrigley.
Dave Hansen, who broke up Fernandez’s no-hit bid with an infield single off Fernandez’s hip, tried to be the voice of reason:
“We win or lose as a team,” Hansen said. “There were a few chances where maybe we could’ve scored some runs and we didn’t. But in America, we get to come back and do it again tomorrow.”
The Cubs will try again against former teammate Greg Maddux, whom they never have beaten. Maddux, now with the haughty Braves, held the Cubs to three hits in shutting them out last Sunday in Atlanta.
But hope springs eternal for diehard Cubs fans–snow is in the forecast.
