Opening day is always a special time in Wrigleyville.
The bars and restaurants that have been collecting dust all winter welcome the incoming wave of Cubs fans like long lost friends at a college reunion. The ballhawks take their assumed positions outside the left-field wall on Waveland Avenue, waiting in vain for home run balls to defy the wind and land in their 40-year-old gloves.
Cubs president of business operations Crane Kenney emerges from his office in the Cubbieplex building next to Wrigley and goes on a media tour to reassure fans the revenues are all going straight back to the baseball operations department … but if anything goes wrong this year, Jed Hoyer’s office is down the hall.
It’s a great day for baseball, beer drinking and bellyaching, three things Cubs fans truly love.
Is new closer Ryan Pressly the next Mitch Williams or a Hector Neris’ clone? Will the Cubs re-sign Kyle Tucker, or should fans just enjoy his presence for now and worry about that come November? And if the torpedo bats really work, why don’t they make every Cubs hitter use one instead of just Dansby Swanson and Nico Hoerner?
Those were but a few of the questions heard at Wrigley on day one of the home season as Cubs fans returned to their home away from home. So I was eager to see whether the anxiety level had subsided by Saturday in the second game of the series against the San Diego Padres, which the Cubs won 7-1 before 35,391 while wearing their new baby blue alternate jerseys, affectionately known as the “Montreal Expos knockoffs.”
Spoiler alert: Not really.
The Cubs bullpen is the main cause of the serial nervousness, thanks to a 5.61 ERA and 1.90 WHIP heading into Saturday’s game. Pressly picked up saves in his first three opportunities but did so in Neris-like fashion, allowing eight hits and walking five in his first five innings of work.
His jittery, 33-pitch ninth inning while saving Friday’s 3-1 win reminded me of my first opener as a baseball writer for the Tribune in 1989, when Williams loaded the bases in the ninth on three singles before striking out Mike Schmidt, Chris James and Mark Ryal to save a 5-4 win over the Philadelphia Phillies.
Williams was soon nicknamed “Wild Thing” after Charlie Sheen’s crazy closer character in the film “Major League.” He lived up to the image, averaging 5.7 walks per 9 innings in 76 appearances while still managing to save 36 games and help lead the “Boys of Zimmer” to a division title.
Cubs fans would rather avoid the inherent drama that comes with a closer experiencing control issues, especially after last year’s problem closing games. Still, it’s too soon for manager Craig Counsell to make a change to Porter Hodge, despite all the groaning from the not-very-cheap seats. Check back in May.
So why are Cubs fans so panicky so early?
A confluence of events has led us to this point — a four-year playoff drought, the arrival of Tucker, the reluctance of Chairman Tom Ricketts to go that extra mile on payroll and perhaps the added anxiety of not knowing whether your 401(k) will ever rebound from the stable genius’ tariffs plan. These are not ordinary times.
The Cubs are the only legacy team in Chicago to finish over .500 in the 2024 or 24-25 seasons, and with Tucker in the house, the onus is on them to break the city’s postseason drought — not counting the Bulls’ play-in berths.
They began the year with an energy-sapping trip to Japan and now face an April schedule filled with landmines. Twenty of their first 26 games are against three teams, the Los Angeles Dodgers, Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks. The Dodgers are the best team in baseball, and the Padres and Diamondbacks figure to win 90-plus games.
“It’s a really hard schedule,” Hoyer said Friday, pointing specifically to the Padres and Dodgers, both of whom were unbeaten at the time.
“You have to look at the glass as half-full and say that’s a good thing,” he continued. “We’re getting challenged early. We’re going to be on the West Coast twice. We were in Japan. We play the Dodgers seven times in April. But everyone plays the same number of games against those teams. We just happen to be consolidated in, like, three weeks at the beginning of the year.
“But we’ll find out a lot about ourselves early on in the season, and we have to be aware of the schedule and evaluate your team according to the competition. … They’re not changing the schedule for us.”
MLB sources confirmed the league would not change the Cubs schedule to alleviate any fan anxiety. They’re just going to have to show they can play with the best right off the bat. And when that NL West-dominated stretch ends, they’ll play a three-game series against the Philadelphia Phillies, the best team in the NL East.
Upon returning from Japan, Counsell said in Arizona that the grueling travel and the tough early-season schedule would not be used as an excuse.
“We’ve got to go play the games and live with the results,” he said. “The great thing about the schedule now is that it really is the same for everybody. When you play teams, you’ve got no control over who is hurt, all that stuff. The schedule is the same and I think that’s a good thing.”
Perhaps the Cubs could petition MLB to have those first two games in Tokyo tossed from the schedule. The official magnet schedule the team handed out to fans at Wrigley conveniently did just that, starting the season on March 27 in Arizona and showing just 160 of the 162 games. That would mean two fewer losses for the Cubs, which could be beneficial in a close playoff race.
Until then, maybe it’s best to put down the Prozac and let the season play out.
Your therapist will appreciate it.
