Cardinals Providing Cubs Fans With Straw to Grasp

It's been a rough week and a half for Cubs fans.  The sweep at the hands of a Pirates team that currently has been outscored by 95 runs this year was bad enough that the Cubs threw caution to the wind and called up a kid who was not alive yet when I graduated from high school.  Then they lost two of three to toothpick-munching Dusty's Reds by having the bullpen disintegrate enough in one game to make Lou scared to let them come in the next game, resulting in a game-winning Joey Votto homerun that has just glanced off Saturn's rings towards the space object formerly known as the planet Pluto.

Then they came home and managed to salvage just one game from a Marlins team that had lost 10 of their 14 previous games and who scored only 10 runs in the series.  Plus, a good amount of Cubs fans decided to rain boos down on the aforementioned 20-year old rookie shortstop making the rest of us want to change allegiances to a fanbase that isn't quite so assholic and stupid.

Given all that has gone wrong since the Cubs last series win roughly eight million years ago, one would think that the Cubs must be trailing the Cardinals by about 10 games in the standings by now.  Nope.

While the Cubs are doing their damndest to assure the fan base that there really is no reason to get excited about this team's chances, the team down in St. Louis is stepping up and lending a hand.  The Cardinals just got swept at home by the Houston Astros.  Unless you are someone who has a shrine to Jose Cruz, spends the anniversary of J.R. Richards' career-ending stroke in a fetal position, and sleeps while cuddling Craig Biggo and Jeff Bagwell bobblehead dolls, you would not have ever made that prediction in a million years.  You know what was even worse for the Cardinals?  Roy Oswalt was not the starter for the Astros in any of those games.

So after a week and a half of horror that started with the Cubs trailing St. Louis by 4.5 games.  The Cubs enter play today trailing St. Louis by 5 games.

So that is where the false sense of optimism is going to come from this year.