Lowering the Bar

The Chicago Tribune’s baseball coverage hit a new low Monday, and its writers had everything to do with it.

Since the Cubs have won ten of their last fourteen games, Sully had to dig deep to find something to kvetch about. Here’s how low he had to go:

The Cubs reached another low point in their season Sunday, though the players had nothing to do with it.

With the Cubs at bat in the bottom of the fourth inning, the crowd of 40,320 began doing the wave.

I’m no fan of the wave, either. But it’s something I keep in the “Who Cares?” file, along with stuff like sausage races, guess-the-attendance games, T-shirt tosses, and post-home run fireworks displays on sunny afternoons. In other words, things that really have no place in baseball games, but a lot of people seem to enjoy.

But evidently it’s something Sully and his bosses at the Trib care about, as evidenced by Sully’s 196 words on the subject Monday (compared with 548 words about the actual game itself). The eds care about the wave so much they pimped a feature on it above the masthead in today’s paper (the story, naturally, was a complete piece of fluff from the usually-reliable Melissa Isaacson).

Yes, people at sporting events do the wave. And when it happens at Wrigley Field, it somehow reflects poorly on the Cubs. I’m surprised this hasn’t been spun as Dusty Baker’s fault.

Meanwhile, Rick Morrissey dusts off one of his favorite chestnuts to help pad his column on Michael Barrett:

What would possess an otherwise sane person to come to Wrigley Field to watch the lowly Cubs take on the lowlier Pittsburgh Pirates? OK, besides the beer?

…Anyone who expected Barrett to be batting .329 in early August needs to check himself back into rehab.

Delightful! The great scribe points out how Cub Fans go to Wrigley Field to drink beer (apparently, fans of the other twenty-nine Major League teams don’t). And some of those Cub Fans are so beer-addled they need to go back to rehab (since the first go-round didn’t work).

Is the Tribune biased? That’s a question that’s been kicked around since 1981. I’ve said before that of course they’re biased – in favor of anything that will sell their advertisements (and if they sell some papers at the same time, all the better).

These folks say that the fact the Tribune printed a piece by its architectural critic about the new bleachers at Wrigley Field without running a disclaimer that the same media conglomerate owns both the newspaper and the baseball team is proof positive that the paper is hopelessly biased.

Meanwhile, what passes for news in the sports section goes unnoticed. Cub Fans drink beer! They need treatment for alcohol abuse, the major metropolitan daily tells us. And they do the wave! The foolish fools!

I guess that’s the kind of material that sells advertisements. And if it paints a sizable portion of the readership as rubes, that’s just the price of doing business. No one will care, as long the architecture guy keeps his nose clean…