Craig Counsell is visibly upset. The Chicago Cubs manager is staring down the barrel of a logistical nightmare so terrifying, so fundamentally disruptive to the human spirit, that he immediately ran to the press to vent his frustrations. The league office, looking at a Sunday weather forecast in Boston that promised torrential rain, did the unthinkable. They moved a baseball game to Friday.
I had to read the quote three times over my morning coffee to make sure I wasn’t suffering a localized stroke. A disadvantage?
We have reached the absolute nadir of modern athletic entitlement. A manager of a historic franchise is standing in front of microphones, completely straight-faced, suggesting that his professional athletes are being competitively compromised because they have to play a children's game 48 hours earlier than they originally penciled into their shared digital calendars.
What Counsell fundamentally fails to understand is the agonizing burden placed on the league office. The true victims of the Cubs' schedule change are the broadcast executives and scheduling coordinators forced to endure this whining. I was at the winter owners' meetings in Orlando. I sat next to the men who actually make this sport function, and let me tell you, you cannot imagine the crushing stress of looking at a radar app on an iPad and deciding to move a regional television broadcast.
The front office is doing the heavy lifting to ensure these guys don't have to stand ankle-deep in a New England thunderstorm, protecting the players' health and the integrity of the field. And how is Rob Manfred's visionary proactive weather management repaid? With a manager crying about his bullpen availability. It is a staggering lack of gratitude.
When I started covering this league, a schedule change wasn't a disadvantage. It was a crucible. You didn't look at the calendar, you looked at the opposing pitcher, and if the commissioner told you to play him at 3:15 a.m. in a flooded municipal quarry, you laced up your cleats and you thanked him for the opportunity to generate revenue.
I remember covering the 1978 pennant race. The grounds crew in Baltimore went on strike, and a hurricane was rolling off the Atlantic. Did Earl Weaver complain about a disadvantage? No. He handed his starting rotation a set of rusty shovels and told them to build their own pitcher's mound out of wet gravel before the first pitch. Men bled on the basepaths, and we respected them for it because they understood that surviving a natural disaster was part of establishing a baseline competitive edge.
Friday baseball requires intangibles. You can’t teach that. The analytics nerds in the Cubs' front office can pull up all the spray charts they want, but there isn't a spreadsheet in the world that measures a team’s ability to wake up on a Thursday, pack a duffel bag, and play a professional sport before the weekend officially starts. That’s just old-fashioned grit.
I watch these modern clubhouses, with their hyperbaric sleep pods, their customized nutrition shakes, and their sports psychologists, and I see a complete absence of the fortitude required to handle a slight chronological shift. They have optimized all the toughness right out of the building.
If a guy can't handle his start getting bumped up two days, he's basically admitting he lacks the mental flexibility to survive a basic daylight savings adjustment.
Counsell claims the Cubs are at a disadvantage. A disadvantage against who, exactly? The Boston Red Sox are playing the exact same game, on the exact same dirt, on the exact same Friday afternoon. The only difference is that Boston has an organization that understands accountability and how to read a revised itinerary without calling a press conference to mourn the loss of their Sunday off-day.
I spent twenty minutes in a postgame presser with Alex Cora last month, and I can assure you, that man does not care what day of the week it is. He doesn't even own a calendar. He just wants to win baseball games and please the television networks that sign his paychecks. That is what a focused franchise looks like.
This is what happens when the modern babying of athletes rots the brain of an entire sport. We have coddled these men to the point where an extra day of rest on the back end of a weekend is somehow viewed as a competitive handicap. The Cubs are looking at a Friday double-header as a curse, instead of what it truly is: a chance to play 18 innings of baseball in front of paying customers who skipped out on their finance jobs early to drink nine-dollar beers in the bleachers.
I have heard the apologists crying about hotel check-out times and disrupted throwing programs. Give me a break. If a starting pitcher loses his command because he had to switch rooms at the Boston Marriott Copley Place, he never had the mental composure to pitch in the postseason anyway. Real aces can throw a complete-game shutout out of the back of a moving Greyhound bus.
Do you think the umpires are complaining? Of course not. Joe West used to call a game in a torrential downpour just to prove he could outlast the precipitation. Today's umpiring crews are professionals who understand that their job is to stand behind home plate and enforce the strike zone, whether it is Sunday afternoon or a Friday evening during a state of emergency. They don't need an extra day to stretch their hamstrings.
Once you start letting the players dictate the terms of time and space, you have lost control of the locker room. Today it's a Friday game. Tomorrow they're refusing to play day games because the sun is too bright, or asking to skip the seventh inning because they have dinner reservations in the North End. The league has a problem, and it starts with managers who think their job is to protect their players from the concept of a Friday.
The role of a manager is not to act as a travel agent. It is to look a player in the eye and tell him that his shoulder might physically detach from his torso, but the franchise needs six innings out of him anyway to satisfy the regional broadcasting contract. When you start making excuses about schedules, you are giving your roster permission to lose.
Walk into any sports bar in America and ask the guy nursing a domestic draft if he cares about the logistical hurdles of the Chicago Cubs' bullpen availability. He doesn't. He cares about showing up and doing your job. He cares about players honoring the sacred contract between the men on the field and the men in the luxury suites who generously allow them to be there.
If the Cubs want to be taken seriously as contenders, they need to stop looking at the weather channel and start looking in the mirror. Friday is just Sunday with a better nightlife. If Craig Counsell can't figure out how to manage his roster with 48 hours' notice, maybe he should step down and let someone who owns a waterproof jacket take over. Until then, the rest of us will be watching real baseball on whatever day the league office graciously dictates.