mathematically eliminated #29 the Chicago Cubs

a better time in America, when a man could at least entertain the idea of taking his favorite goat to the ball game, being denied, and then curse the team for eternity; as a man who has known goats, I understand Jack Bales thinking

All you hear about is the wild card battles, and rightfully so, but as we enter the last few weeks of baseball, teams at the lower end of the W-L charts will start to be mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, perhaps as many as five this weekend alone. They will be whittled down to ten, and then to one. For the hapless Cubs, that happened this afternoon, even with a matinee victory. And to the Cubs credit, they teetered at the very edge of mathematical elimination for about a week. But finally, the games left were reduced enough to take them out of even wild dreams of magical comebacks. Not to their credit, the Theo Epstein era came in with a whimpering thud on the cellar of the NL Central. If not for the even stupider Astros, the Cubs would be last in their division, and last in baseball. And it couldn't have happened to a more deserving team. I am not sure what it is about this franchise, but it attracts a vile breed if thick glasses, scruff bearded, hipster doofuses. In fact, the younger demographics of their fanbase, which expands across the upper midwest like, well, like your average midwesterner's malnourished belly, are the hipster wretched of this American earth. In fact, large chunks of Chicago itself made me uncomfortable as I crawled through on a Boltbus, left to wander their gentrified streets for two days, looked down upon by those who would be dressed similarly and similarly scruffy, but with the smooth skins of affluence covering their bodies. These are white people - even the non-whites in large swaths of the city - but not my white people. They are the former vegans and microbrew aficionados and IT professionals of the emerging ruling middle class, those that the Obama ads speak at and the Romney ones dream of. They are not my people at all, and it is easy to feel. Lucky for me I wandered south, and ended up getting high as fuck with some Salvadorans somewhere along that outlaw blur between Chicago and Gary, Indiana, and a chunky flirtacious Latina woman sang her Mexican songs and would ramble at me where I only understood certain words, and her cursive tattoo peeked out from the frilly edges of her lowcut cream tank top, and they did not care about the Cubs. They did not care about that part of Chicago - it was foreign outside of work assignments. Not a one of them gave half a fuck about the Cubs either. So good night wretched Chicago Cubs. You were not even relevant enough to mock this year. Come back next year, and continue to judge those who would not be of smooth skin or smooth heritages or should befriend goats or Mexicans or black people who did not graduate from brick-and-ivy universities. Come back next year, and continue to be stymied for eternity.