Just North of Wrigley Field

posted by James - 1:00 PM

Yeah, it's gotten this bad here. All of our teams, not exactly performing how we'd hoped.

The Cubs' under-.500 record against two teams I thought would be terrible (sandwiched around an encouraging series against the Braves) forced me to a Britney Spears concert (don't worry, I won't go into that any further).

The Utah Jazz failed to make Skippy's Playoff Prediction come to fruition, so his modem fried to save us all the vitriol of a jilted fan. It wasn't really the Jazz' fault; the Nuggets just won a couple games they shouldn't have, but that's not much consolation to a fan of a .500+ team that misses the playoff.

And you know it's bad when David is so bumfuzzled by the Mariners' pathetic start that he starts talking in program language.

I was hoping the Jazz would make a better showing in their last two games instead of tanking it against the Suns (HA HA Skippy. I get to talk all the smack I want about your lottery-bound team, and the Modem Gremlins have rendered you powerless to stop me), then I could talk about the ridiculousness of the NBA Playoffs.

If the Jazz had won their last game against Phoenix, they would have finished with a season record identical to Denver, who won the eighth and final spot in the Western Conference.

In baseball, they have a one-game playoff to determine the last entrant.

In football, there are so many teams fighting for so few places, so the last three weeks of the season are filled with discussions of if x team beats y team than z team gets in, but if a team beats b team by c points than d team gets in. It's dizzying, but it's great.

Maybe the NBA has a one-game playoff somewhere down the line, but (if the Jazz had won their last game) we'd be talking about tiebreakers determining the 16th (!) playoff team. I'd rather be talking about the intrigue of Denver and Utah facing off, especially after Utah beat Denver leading into the last three weeks of the season in the "Arroyo game."

But maybe it's for the best for the Jazz, who like Portland hadn't missed the playoffs in 20 years. Now, they'll look forward to their highest draft pick since... well, I can't even find when they've had a draft pick this high, so it was a long damn time ago.

Just another reason basketball, and similarly hockey, is so far down on my sports radar. Maybe I'll start paying attention when they're down to four teams.

Enough of this, I'm going to go walk around Wrigley for a little while before the game starts. There are already people making their pilgrimage outside my window to the Mecca down the street.

I love living in Wrigleyville.