Baby It's Cold Outside

Lets face it. It doesn't matter who fills out the lineup card, or more importantly, who is listed on the lineup card. Fact of the matter is, year in and year out, the Chicago Cubs cannot hit in the springtime.

No matter who we trot out there, in April and most of May (depending on how long the cold snap lasts) it just doesn't matter. They hit for shit. We could resurrect the 1927 Yankees and put them in Cubs uniforms to the same effect. A prolonged, two month slump. Sure, every once in a while the team will doggedly try to obliterate this theory by putting a 12 spot on the board, skewing the results of my extremely informal study, but they will then inevitably follow up the aforementioned 12 run outburst with a 10 game stretch where they fail to score 12 runs total.

Sure, it's cold out, but it's cold out for the other team too. Shit, you know. And no, I don't have fancy stats to give this theory any credence. Who am I, Bill James? Lets be honest, if I can't find it on Wikipedia I'm just going to make stuff up or go off of gut instinct. To quote Tommy Buzanis, "I don't have time for this shit."

Some may call the silent bats part of a curse. I just call it a rite of spring.

Luckily the NL Central is eminently winnable. If we can hang around .500 long enough for our bats to come around and Ted 'Machine Gun' Lilly and 12 year-old baby faced phenom Rich Hill can keep on banishing the ghosts of Prior and Wood, we should be ok.

Delusional optimism. Yet another rite of spring in Cubs Nation.