One Day At a Time

After we criticized Tribune sports columnist Fred Mitchell last week for some horrid examples of Cubune bias, he became quite friendly to the White Sox. First he wrote a whole entire column about Paul Konerko and Jim Thome's work on behalf of Children's Home + Aid, and then he nicely noticed out loud that some of the players in the NFL Draft wore Sox caps. Check it out:

Don't know why, but two of the first 11 players selected on Saturday—Redskins safety LaRon Landry from LSU and 49ers linebacker Patrick Willis from Mississippi—wore White Sox caps when they received their calls.

You spotted the leakage right away, didn't you? It's that phrase "Don't know why," which certainly would not appear if the same sentence were written about someone wearing a Cubs cap. (Everybody knows why people wear Cubs caps: Because "everybody loves the Cubs!" Especially on WGN.)

Don't know why those football guys were wearing Sox caps. Maybe it just happened to be raining Sox caps. Or maybe Ken Williams trained a monkey to put Sox caps on people's heads right before they go on teevee. It couldn't be that those guys are Sox fans, of course, because Fred can see those guys with his own eyeballs, and everyone inside the Tower knows that Sox fans are invisible. Or, when something resembling a Sox fan does appear, the spectre oft appears in black and white, while the team itself sometimes appears faded, almost translucent. Like ghosts.

Fred and many of his Tribune colleagues don't know why anyone would wear a Sox cap, because they seem incapable or unwilling to appreciate the fact that the White Sox have fans. The Tribune even downplayed the significance of the 1.75 million Sox fans who appeared on the streets of Chicago, where it was awfully hard to ignore them, in October 2005. Maybe they can't see Sox fans because Sox fans don't behave precisely like Cubs fans (Thank God), or maybe it's a culture clash, like the way they can't see places like Englewood and Back of the Yards, or maybe it's just because they can't see beyond the 25-year Tribune/WGN/Cubs collaboration — the 25-year Cubune campaign — to put Cubs caps on everyone in the nation.

(That has been a largely successful 25-year campaign, we might add, involving lots of trained monkeys. Colonel McCormick was right: you can wrap snake oil in newspaper).

Psst: During the 20th Century, hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans migrated to other parts of the United States. A lot of them were from the South Side. A lot of them were Sox fans. So, now there are Sox fans all over the U.S. We know this, because some of us have been some of them. Some of us are also related to some of them. Maybe WGN hasn't always featured expatriate Sox fans on TV as prominently as it does expatriate Cubs fans. But we're out there. That's why "Sox World Series products have emerged as the 'third-greatest hot market' following the 2000 Yankees-Mets subway series and the 2004 Boston Red Sox," according to the Sun-Times (the Tribune missed that story). So yes, there are Sox fans in Chicago and there are Sox fans in America, but the Tribune doesn't know it, because the Tribune doesn't cover Chicago and the Tribune doesn't cover America. The Tribune covers its own private Wrigleyville. Nationwide.

Anyway, this was just a little slip by Fred. He really does seem to be trying. Easy does it, Fred.

How Tribune Views the 'City'

We're about to treat you to another classic case of Freudian leakage in the Tribune, a false and self-serving assumption that slipped out of its cage in a Tribune writer's mind and appeared in print in the newspaper. Doesn't the Tribune have any editors? This one disrespects not only the White Sox, but the Bears, the Bulls, the Blackhawks, and every other Chicago team that has won a championship in the last century. From a March 15 story by, you guessed it, Dave van Dyck again:

So Ted Lilly has gone from being a pitcher never more than two games above .500 in a season to one with $10 million expectations for this season. And in a city that is approaching 100 seasons of unfulfilled expectations.

"A city that is approaching 100 seasons of unfulfilled expectations." Here's how Cubune Watcher Dan Grillo received van Dyck's sloppy sentence: "Um ... city? Excuse me? CITY? I guess the events of October, 2005 never did happen. Not to mention the events of October 1917. And 1985 and every other Bears championship, along with the Jordan Dynasty. Poof. Gone in a flash. It seems that the opinion of Trib employees is that because the company team hasn't won anything in close to 100 years, then all of Chicago is wallowing in disappointment. The 'city' won't truly feel fulfilled until the Cubs win it all.

"I feel a better choice of words might have been 'Lilly has gone from being a pitcher never more than two games above .500 in a season to one with $10 million expectations for this season, and for a team that is approaching 100 years of unfulfilled expectations.' That wouldn't have been so hard."

No, that wouldn't have been so hard. Dan also reminds us of the eternal thread at White Sox Interactive called Write Tomorrow's Cubune Headline: "One of the running jokes is that the Cubune is denying the events of October, 2005. Well, truth, as they say, may truly be stranger than fiction."

Much of the work on this entry was done by Cubune Watcher Dan Grillo and by Hangar18 at SoxandtheCity.net.

Finding the Dark Cloud in the Silver Lining

It's no secret that the Tribune has it out for the White Sox pitching staff. Since the Tribune has tried its damnedest to sow dissent by openly opposing Ken William's off-season trades (and then falsely attributing its opposition to Sox fans), it really needs the pitching staff to fail. You can hear them muttering prayers to Satan when you walk past the Dark Tower. So we haven't heard much about the outstanding performance of some pitchers, and when we do hear about it, the Tribune often manages to qualify the praise with some overstated concern, like this Tribune tidbit:

Left-hander Andrew Sisco allowed his first run in four appearances, Howie Kendrick's game-winning homer in the eighth. Sisco will need to retire right-handed batters to be an important part of the Sox's bullpen.

Sisco has allowed only two hits all Spring, and the Tribune has decided, on the basis of one of those hits, that he can't handle right-handed batters? Please. By the way, we got Sisco for Ross Gload.

Hey Tribune, You're Standing in a Puddle

Sigmund Freud wrote about something called "leakage" that happens when unconscious impulses ooze and drip and splatter and spill into daily life. Our Tribune frequently arrives wet from just such leakage, and here's a good example of incontinence in a story published yesterday at Chicagotribune.com and Chicagosports.com:

"The signing (of Vazquez) means that 60 percent of the Sox's rotation — Jon Garland, Jose Contreras and Vazquez — are signed through 2008. Vazquez's signing also increases the likelihood that popular left-hander Mark Buehrle will leave for free agency after the season."

Why does the signing of Vazquez increase the likelihood that Buehrle will leave after the season? Can you think of a reason? Neither can we. And neither, it turns out, can Mark Buerhle, who had this to say later in the day, as quoted in a later story:

"Congrats to Javy," Buehrle said. "I don't think it has any effect on my outlook."

After Buehrle made that comment, the Tribune pulled the earlier story, but the leakage was already out there, splashed all over their khakis.

As one Cubune Watcher pointed out, the Tribune could have spun Vazquez's signing the other way, like this: "The signing solidifies the White Sox pitching staff through 2008, increasing the likelihood that popular left-hander Mark Buerhle will want to re-sign before his current contract expires at the end of this season." The Tribune often spins a signing as a positive incentive for other players to stay with a team... when the Tribune wants to spin positive. But a lot of Tribune writers desperately want to see Mark Buerhle leave the White Sox, for no greater reason than they've already reported, erroneously, that Mark Buehrle is gone.

What better way to save face than to see Mark Buerhle actually leave? Then Mark Gonzales and Dave van Dyck and their ilk can claim to be prescient instead of looking incompetent and unethical.

So we can look forward to a year of the Chicago Tribune showing Mark Buerhle the door at every hint of an opportunity. Likewise, the Tribune has criticized Ken William's pitching acquistions all winter, so we can expect a less than objective Tribune to seize every opportunity to make those young pitchers look bad and to ignore, as much as possible, every game that makes them look good. What fun.

Is it really too much to ask, in a city the size of Chicago, to have a real newspaper staffed by real professionals instead of a tower full of malicious bunglers with investments, both personal and financial, in the exclusive success of the Cubs?