Pete Rose has been in a news a bit of late due to Ichiro Suzuki approaching his career total -- though we need to use Ichiro's NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball, which is Japan's major league) in order to do so. Rose said that some people are "trying to make" him the "hit queen." In somewhat related matters, Pete has a hot take on baseball's best team, the Chicago Cubs.
Via foxsports.com, Rose said the following on Fox Sports Radio:
The Cubs right now no question have the best team, but I can't root for a team that hasn't won since 1907. The Cubs will find a way to screw it up I think. They've got a good ball club, probably the best ball club in the league right now. They're playing like it, but again, they can be pitched to, their pitchers can be hit. It's just a matter of who's going to give them a fight at the end of the season, in the playoffs.
The Cubs, are they going to play good all year like last year when they won 97 games and then got swept in the playoffs? We'll have to wait and see, because in the playoffs, you're a different animal.
So right off the bat, there's a stunning lack of context here. Between those 97 wins and the sweep in the playoffs, the Cubs beat the 98-win Pirates in the Wild Card Game and then beat the 100-win Cardinals in four games in the best-of-five NLDS round. So the implication that they folded in the face of the "different animal" playoffs is absurd -- not to mention the Cubs were pretty much a year ahead of schedule in their turnaround and had a bunch of rookies and second-year players.
Further, the notion that somehow players -- several of whom already have won the World Series -- wearing a Cubs uniform inherit more than 100 years (it was 1908, not 1907 the last time the Cubs won it all) of choking is pretty laughable. The playoffs are a short-series tournament that sometimes crown the best team (like last season or 2013) and sometimes don't (such as 2014 or 2011). Losing doesn't mean it's a choke job, and it certainly doesn't mean the uniform somehow caused a choke job.
Here's the rub for the Cubs and their fans, though: You have to listen to this type of stuff until the team wins the World Series. That's just a simple fact. People will always say things like this and dig their heels in on it being some kind of scientific fact that the Cubs will always be chokers until there's a World Series championship. Ask Red Sox and White Sox fans about it.
There is no way to have a rational conversation otherwise until there's proof that this discussion is complete and utter nonsense (which it is, but you'll still see people saying I'm full of it because the Cubs will never win because they are chokers and blah blah blah). That proof has to be a World Series title.
Again, until that happens, there is no proof -- just rational thought, and that's not enough for some people. The Hit King included, apparently.
