Season Preview: ChiTownDeepDish


By Ryan A. Gold
Wahoo! Sports
Too Late On A Friday

Some years back I had occasion to roll into Chicago on a Greyhound bus. My plan was to find a reasonably priced hotel and a pizza place, have a couple of beers and get up the next morning to head to the ballpark. Where I ended up was at Rush and Division. I spent the next three to eleven hours, give or take, trying to pick up girls from the U of Wisco (unsuccessful). Closing time in Chicago came unexpectedly and I found myself on the sidewalk, full of beer and short of ideas or good sense. A bum came by and bummed a cigarette and I asked him if he knew anywhere to get more beer or some weed or both. The guy said I needed to go down to K Town, which I came to learn later is also known as North Lawndale. To get an idea about K Town, if you recall a few years back the law finding 15 abandoned kids living in one room eating dog food…that was in K Town. Eventually this bum showed up with a dime bag of really lousy shake and two malt liquours which I bough for $60. I then walked the streets of Chicago for who knows how long and at the end, looking very much the part of a man who hadn’t slept in a bed for several days, I found myself at the entrance to a hotel called the Palmer Court on Wabash and Monroe. Very posh. I attracted some odd glances in the lobby as I booked a not half bad room. I went upstairs, took a shower and lay down on the bed in fresh clothes with the tv on. I left a wake up call for 11 and I slept on and off for a couple of hours. The phone rang and I got up and went to the ballpark. What followed was a story to better the day before in both excess and strangeness, but that’s a story for another time. The moral? When you’re out there, when you take chances, anything can happen. You rise and you fall in the street and then something else happens.

And so it is for the ChiTownDeepDish this year. Anything could happen. I sometimes think a fantasy team is a kind of Rorschach Test. We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we be, to misquote Anais Nin. Well this team speaks of a man willing to take chances. Mr. Vegas. An aggressive gambler. Allow me to demonstrate. Soto (fat, stoner, skinny). Berkman (old, something hurts), Barmes (Coors Field, upside, swing and miss). Reynolds (homer, steal, strikeout but in what ratio). Reyes (hammy, thyroid, ‘roid). Bourbon (rookie rookie rookie). Jones (should I break out?). Quentin (one good season). Escabar (might be something). A. Soriano (what’s the deal?). R. Soriano (my arm, she hurts). Billy Wags (see previous). Hanson (for real?). Jenks (my arm she hurts in my calf). Zambrano (see Soriano, A.). Gonzalez (Yankees? Again?) Price and Cueto (boy we might be good).

Point of order: Braun, Hernandez and Jimenez are good.

So where will these guys finish? A roll of the dice. And I do love dice. I’d say in craps lingo, the point is four. That means a winning roll pays 2x but a seven wipes you out.

Prediction: Seventh out…line away.

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