Kuzul

In the over century-long World Series drought the Cubs are currently experiencing, they’ve had their fair share of heartbreak. Sometimes they’ve been downright bad, but sometimes they’ve actually had reason to get excited. Such is the case for the Cubs right now as they are building up a solid hitting farm system with potential future stars like Javier Baez, Albert Almora, Kris Bryant and Jorge Soler. 

However, the Cubs have been in this boat before, and it hasn’t always panned out. The difference between now and the past in Chicago is that the Cubs have stockpiled multiple prospects at the same time, but they’ve had highly touted prospects before that ended up flopping big time. Here are five players that the Cubs’ “Core Four” will not want to emulate once they reach the big leagues.

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There is perhaps no franchise outside of the Chicago Cubs that is more cursed than the Cleveland Indians. Most would agree that Cleveland as a sports city is the most cursed in the entire country. While the city has had small amounts of time in the spotlight, such as when LeBron James came to town for just under a decade. Before LeBron was even born, something much more important to Cleveland sports was brewing. 

The Indians haven’t won the World Series since 1948, the second longest drought in the sport, and between 1948 and the 1990s, the team was absolutely abysmal. However, through the tireless efforts of new owner Dick Jacobs, the team began to turn it around. 

George Christian Pappas’ new book “A Tribe Reborn” tells that story through many lenses as he recalls the Indians’ unlikely ascension to the top of baseball’s food chain. It began with Jacobs’ initial purchase of the team and then continued as the team adopted a completely new philosophy in many areas of business both on and off the field. 

Pappas goes on to explain how Jacobs, who loved the city and the team before he was even their owner, was the perfect man to turn around baseball in Cleveland. With the way Jacobs completely revolutionized the team’s scouting process, front office evaluation and locker room culture, it’s hard to disagree. 

With worse fortunes than the lovable losers themselves from the 1950s through the 1990s, the upswing the Indians’ experienced is really one of baseball’s underrated rebuilding efforts. Not a whole lot of people remember those teams, but they were great for the better part of a decade and sparked the imagination of a city. 

Interviewing star players like Mike Hargrove, John Hart, Jim Thome and Omar Vizquel, Pappas really gets the whole story like nobody has before. In fact, nobody has bothered to write in depth on the topic when it was one of the more remarkable success stories in baseball history. Really, most of Jacobs’ efforts in turning around the team were very Moneyball-like in how unconventional they were for the time period. 

Even though the Indians never won a World Series during their run in the 1990s—and still haven’t won one since 1948—the team gave the city more than a title ever could. What they gave the city of Cleveland was hope, which is one of many reasons the city hosted a victory parade in a season the team didn’t win the World Series.

Through Pappas’ smooth reporting and story-telling, those who experienced the turnaround first-hand can relive the magic. 

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

The good news for the Chicago Cubs is that most of their top prospects have been true to form to start this season with very few hiccups in the first month. The bad news, which is normally inevitable in baseball, is that some have still gotten off to some disappointing starts. As an organization, the Cubs’ top 20 prospects have performed well, but three out of their top 15 have been particularly disappointing thus far.

All prospects go through struggles at different times in their minor league careers, and the ones that shake those struggles off quickly are usually the ones that go on to have long and successful major league careers.

The three players on this list are hoping to reach that success at the big league level relatively soon, but unless they turn around their early performances, their arrivals in the big leagues could be delayed.

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This season was expected to be a very solid step in the right direction for the Chicago Cubs.

However, this season hasn’t given much reason for optimism yet on the North Side. There have been several players, including many in the bullpen, that have disappointed so far. That being said, there have been just as many players who have gotten off to good starts. 

It’s been only a month and plenty of storylines could change as the season wears on, but as of right now, here are the four players that fall on opposite ends of the spectrum.

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At the beginning of every Major League Baseball season, hope springs eternal. That is, of course, until the first couple weeks of games are played.

Once that grace period is up—a period that has been all too short for Cubs fans in recent years—it’s interesting to take a less emotionally charged look at the team. After all, many players on teams will fall short of lofty expectations while others will put on performances that nobody saw coming. 

It’s only three series into the year, but players on opposite ends of that spectrum have emerged—or descended—for the Cubs. Since it’s only been about a week and a half, it’s nothing to get too caught up in, but if these trends continue, the club could be forced to head in a different direction entering the final years of its rebuild.

Here are the Cubs’ three most disappointing players and three most surprising players at this point in the season.

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It’s only a week into the regular season in major league and minor league baseball, but the Cubs‘ top 10 prospects have all changed their stock in some way. It could be minor or major (no pun intended), but many are either moving closer or further from the major leagues. 

Based on how they’ve performed in spring training and the minor leagues so far, here is how the stock of each of the club’s top 10 prospects has changed.

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Traditionally, Cubs fans don’t have a lot to look forward to with each new season. At least that has been the case on the north side for several years now and fans surely want to find some solace in different aspects of this year’s team. Unlike in the past few years, they can actually find a few things to give them comfort about the year to come and the next couple years of Cubs baseball.

There are several aspects of the 2014 Cubs team that should give fans more to watch this season as well as more to watch for in 2015 and beyond. In other words, the major league product should see an upgrade on the field while displaying some of what the future has in store. Really, 2015 is the first year that the Cubs realistically want to be competing for the playoffs and the progress they make in 2014 will go a long way toward determining whether that becomes reality or not.

Through offseason additions, spring performances and other things that have happened behind the scenes, expectations for the 2014 season are starting to take shape. While expectations aren’t sky high for this year’s team, these five things should give Cubs fans some hope in 2014 and beyond.

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There has never been a book that chronicled the entire history of a baseball park by the year. That is, not until now. Author Sam Pathy spent the last 25 years of his life researching for Wrigley Field Year by Year, spending between 10,000 and 12,000 hours on it. His passion for the project matches the passion that so many devoted Cubs fans have for the magical ballpark. 

Along with a rich written history of the park, the book also uses pictures from every era, which add historical context to already famous events. In fact, most of the stories told in the book have never been told to the general public before. 

“There’s the most complete historical list of advertisers on the billboard on the roof across Sheffield Avenue. There is a list of the 60 longest home runs in park history. I’ve done enough research to logically repudiate the ‘goat curse’ folktale,” Pathy says. 

Clearly, the fact that Wrigley Field has even survived as long as it has is a long shot, which makes its 100th birthday something worth celebrating and appreciating. Only Fenway Park has been around longer than Wrigley Field, and the next oldest stadium is Dodger Stadium, which is 48 years younger than Wrigley. 

Included in the book are several features in every year and every chapter including “Home Opener,” “Games of the Year” and “Quote of the Year.” These go more in-depth and provide an even richer history of the park than has ever been seen before. 

For someone who has spent over half his life researching for this book, Pathy realizes as well as anyone that Wrigley Field provides a certain constant in people’s lives that the team on the field can’t always provide.

“You never know what the Cubs will do—they may be good occasionally, but it’s never constant. But Wrigley Field is a constant. I know that I will always see the marquee at Clark and Addison, that the ivy always sprouts in early May, and that numbers are always twirling on the scoreboard.”

The fact that Wrigley Field has been able to be a comfort to so many for so long is pretty amazing. This book, which will be available on April 1, commemorates the countless amazing moments the park has seen over its improbable century-long history. 

Like so many others, Pathy is obsessed with the ballpark and the team that plays in it. Pretty much every Cubs fan can remember their first game at the famous park no matter how long ago that was and Pathy‘s tale is no different.

“I can still visit the place where I saw my first ballgame in 1969. Only five ballparks from that year still exist. So I have this thing that few other baseball fans can claim—and I savor it.”

Every other Cubs fan should savor it too: 25 years worth of research, 100 years worth of history, a lifetime worth of memories. Wrigley Field Year by Year will help fans to relive those moments and perhaps learn about some new ones along the way.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

From the time Weeghman Park, the park that would eventually become Wrigley Field, opened and the time the Cubs played their first game there, two full years would pass. Even though Weeghman Park opened on April 23, 1914, it housed the Chicago Federals of the Federal League; the Cubs didn’t play a game there until April 20, 1916. The unlikely story of how the Cubs became housed in what is now viewed as a baseball and national landmark is the subject of this book by The Sporting News writer Sean Deveney.

As Wrigley Field celebrates its 100th birthday this season, it’s only natural to look back at its long and storied history. Everyone knows about Babe Ruth’s “Called Shot,” “the Homer in the Gloamin,” “The Sandberg Game” and the “Bartman Game.” Those stories will forever live in Cubs lore. However, very few Cubs fans realize that Wrigley Field very nearly never existed. 

Deveney explores this issue in great depth while also providing in-depth analysis of the futile, yet thoroughly interesting Federal League. In fact, had it not been for the Federal League, Wrigley Field almost certainly wouldn’t exist. How it all came to be truly is a baseball drama of epic proportions.

“With [Cubs’ owner] Charles Murphy as the villain and [Chicago Federals’ owner] Charlie Weeghman as the hero in Chicago, the story really is a classic drama,” Deveney says.

Even though it’s told from a historical perspective, the book really does read like a novel with the climax reached as the Cubs move into their eventual north-side home. For quite some time, it was unheard of for the Cubs to move from the west side to the north side of town with residents of the north side threatening lawsuits if a stadium was even built on the north side of Chicago. Sounds kind of like rooftop owners nowadays who aren’t the biggest fans of video boards.

Furthering the drama, one story that was run by the Daily News actually claimed the entire situation that eventually led to Wrigley Field’s existence “threatened to split baseball apart altogether.” As fate would have it, the coming about of Weeghman Park coincided with a very tumultuous time in baseball history. It is that tumultuous time that many Cubs fans may be unaware of altogether.

From the very first day of the ballpark, there was foreshadowing of things to come. On April 23, 1914, the first-ever game was played at Weeghman Park, fans crowded rooftops of nearby apartments and children chased home run balls on Sheffield Avenue. Sounds an awful lot like the fan actions that have become norms in the modern day. 

Deveney, who has primarily lived in Chicago and Boston for most of his life, realizes that a park like Wrigley Field (or Boston’s Fenway Park) has a way of impacting the city and residents that surround it.

“Parks like this are centrally important to each city and really impact the growth of the city as a whole. Aside from downtown, Wrigley Field is the top tourist attraction in Chicago,” Deveney says.

Certainly, as Wrigley Field celebrates its 100th birthday, it’s a great time for Cubs fans and residents of Chicago in general to look back on what made the magical ballpark possible. Very few people have any knowledge of how Wrigley came into existence or what exactly took place in the first couple years of the famous ballpark. 

Before Wrigley Became Wrigley: The Inside Story of the First Years of the Cubs’ Home Field examines exactly that and hits bookshelves everywhere April 1, just a day after the Cubs open the season in Pittsburgh.

Perhaps the Cubs organization realizes the importance of these first few years of the park’s history as it will wear throwback 1914 Chicago Federals jerseys on April 23 of this year when it takes on the Diamondbacks on the exact 100th anniversary of the opening of the ballpark. As the 100th anniversary inches closer and closer, it’s important to remember just how differently the Chicago baseball landscape could look today. Without knowing it, Weeghman foreshadowed this point when addressing Chicagoans before opening the ballpark.

This great park, dedicated to clean sport and the furtherance of our national game is yours, not ours. Its destiny is in your hands. Believing that Chicago Fans are champions of fair play, believing that the great North Side of this city needs a Big League Ball Park, believing that the baseball public will respond to a Chicago Ball Team Owned By Chicagoans, I have devoted my time, my energy and my money to help bring this project to the point where it stands today.

The two years that explore this process are truly fascinating. Boy, what a far way the historic park has come since then.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

While the Cubs don’t have a whole lot of decisions to make this spring, there are still a couple of spring position battles that have played out over the course of the last month. Even though there’s a small sample size for most players, the numbers for each player speak for themselves. How well they’ve passed the “eye test” and how their numbers stack up against each other is how each player will be judged. 

While most spots on the roster were decided before this spring, there were a few positions and roles that were open for competition. Among them were the starting second and third base jobs as well as the final spot in the bullpen. Unfortunately, the Cubs don’t want to call up top prospect Javier Baez quite yet because that would make him arbitration eligible one year sooner. 

In each case, one player made a case for themselves that separated them from the other candidate(s). There’s no guarantee that manager Rick Renteria and his staff will see things the same way. But based on their performances this spring and where the team appears to be headed in the future, this is how the team’s key position battles figure to shake out.

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