The Rookies

My name is Speaking Sputnik and I am a Cubs fan. Why, you might ask, root for a team so famously bad, a cursed team, one that hasn’t won a championship for 101 years, a team known more for its ballpark’s atmosphere (Ozzie Guillen continues to assert that it is, indeed, simply a bar; I think that he just means the bleachers), than for anything it has done on the field recently? I was at Game Six of the 2003 NLCS, the Bartman game. I saw my team six outs from the World Series, and I saw them collapse as they are so want to do. I also was privileged enough to attend Game Two of the 2005 World Series, and, frankly, I enjoyed the Bartman game more. The Sox victory, while thrilling, could not compare to the feeling of my team, my cursed, sure-to-lose, choketastic team, being so close to the World Series that we could hardly fail to grasp it. I really thought I was witnessing history. Of course, reality intervened and the Flubs are the Flubs. I don’t blame Bartman, but, well, what if Alou had caught that foul pop?

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This is still a hot mess.

So I’m from Wisconsin, born and raised in America’s Dairyland (take your “happy cows” and shove off California), an ardent fan of the Packers and Badgers and a follower of the woeful Bucks. So it should come as no surprise that my favorite baseball team is…the Houston Astros. Read the rest of this entry →

That's right, two of these are about Buffalo. Deal with it.

I hate fan rules. Fan rules, in general, make me angrier than apartheid and Triple H combined. Don’t say ‘no-hitter’ or ‘perfect game’! You can only have one team you root for in a specific sport! If your team moves, you should still root for them! Are people fucking serious? It’s sports. No, it’s not even sports – it’s watching sports. You know what making rules about watching sports is like? No, you don’t, and neither do I because IT IS REMARKABLY INCONSEQUENTIAL. It reminds me of all the inane conversations that happened at keggers in college about how drunk someone needs to be to actually be ‘drunk’, or what constituted a muscle shirt. (Also, to anyone who went to college with me, or talked to me about college, or has ever seen Animal House: FUCK YOU)

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Why I Root is an occasional feature at The Rookies in which we discuss our allegiances, or, in Samer’s case, excuse that Barry Zito article from a while back.

The only two Barry Zito fans. They couldn't find two more people to finish his name.

Whenever I wear my San Francisco Giants hat out in public in the New England area, I get really weird looks. It’s hard to explain why I started liking them.

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