Yesterday, it came out that the giant Wrigley Field replica cake made for the Cubs’ birthday bonanza by the Cake Boss was tossed away uneaten into a dumpster.
News spread quickly.
I was shocked because this came so shortly after the Cubs got caught tossing away a bunch of stuff in Wrigley dumpsters that included a sympathy card to Ron Santo’s family that was signed by hundreds of fans. But as the story gained traction, it also became clear that the Cubs were not the culprits to throw the cake away. They sent it to the Field Museum where Cubs Charities was having a fundraiser and the cake was disposed of by the Field Museum after the event.
(Via @EliGieryna)
OK, so it’s not on the Cubs. It’s still somewhat embarrassing as a Cubs fan because the parallels between the actual crumbling Wrigley and Cake Wrigley sitting in the trash with its upper deck collapsed are too obvious to ignore when the team itself isn’t worth watching, but whatever. I was at first flabbergasted that the Cubs seemed tone-deaf once again by dramatically underestimating how the visuals of a Wrigley cake in a dumpster would cause people who follow this team like a religion to go apeshit, but once I knew it WASN’T THE CUBS that threw it out, I have no issues at all.
But the media has smelled blood in the water and I fully expect CNN to break away from its missing Malaysian plane coverage to go all Cubs cake all the time.
Keith Olbermann has once again included the Cubs in his Worst in Sports series as a result.
USAToday has (hopefully tongue-in-cheek, but who knows) latched onto the fact that the Cubs shouldn’t even be calling it a cake because it was made with such a large percentage of inedible materials.
Jed Hoyer went on The Game with David Kaplan and David Haugh this morning and that question got top billing despite much more interesting topics about C.J. Edwards, Javy Baez, Mike Olt, and the closer role.
At this point, the Cubs can’t even throw a birthday party without having a P.R. issue and this is just something they are going to have to live with.
The cost of providing nothing interesting on the field for most fans is going to cause them to fixate on things that don’t matter. I said on Twitter yesterday that the Yankees could probably murder Yogi Berra on the field in the middle of a game and it wouldn’t get this much play because championships. Winning makes this all go away.
So I don’t feel bad for the Cubs. This is their strategy and there is a cost. The cost to fans is that any money spent on this team may as well be burned. The cost to the Cubs is they are going to have to deal with this shit regularly.
Already this season alone they have the introduction of a mascot following an off-season that was devoid of any move that would make the major league team any better than last year. they got involved in a dispute between a curmudgeon season ticket holder and an 11-year old girl who apparently cheers too much, or something. They have a non-Cubs authorized Cubby Bear mascot (that they can’t seem to get rid of despite involving the courts) getting into bar fights after games. They just declared that Sammy Sosa is going to have to suck a few dicks of his old teammates to earn forgiveness before they stop pretending as an organization that he never existed. And now this.
Throw in the previous years where they had an owner on a reality show, multiple ham-fisted attempts to extract money from a bankrupt city and/or state government, an unhealthy obsession with urinal troughs, pissing off the mayor for being affiliated with a racist campaign to make the President look bad, multiple rounds of will they/won’t they over Old Style beer in the stadium, and the constantly evolving, never progressing battle over making renovations with their own money and they don’t exactly have a lot of good will left with most fans when there is no actual winning to fill that tank back up after incidents like these drain it.
So get used to it, Cubs. Until there is something on the field worth watching, people will apparently be busying themselves by staking out Field Museum dumpsters and God knows what else. Until then, what did Rick Renteria know about the cake and when did he know it and how will this impact his use of bunting?