Michael Hunt’s column in the Journal Sentinel:

If the schedule is the only measure, then, yeah, go ahead and give the National League Central to Chicago. The divisional dregs plus Florida are something like a combined 50 games below .500, the martial equivalent of facing the French army reserves when it matters…

Yet in a Brewers-Cubs sprint to the finish, so many other factors will trump schedules as the determiner. In fact, it says right here that the Brewers will win.

Historically speaking, only Constantinople has collapsed more than the Cubs.

There are lots of reasons why this is a bad piece of writing: “divisional dregs”, “something like 50″ instead of “54″, using the adjective “martial” when you mean “baseball”. The joke about the French army is as inaccurate and lame as the tiresome tendency to rank countries based on their military’s performance in World War II. But what really makes this column a priceless treasure of ignorance is the reference to Constantinople as a weak and surrender-prone city.

Is there a city anywhere with a stronger reputation for durability and resilience than Constantinople? The city was sacked by the Vikings in 860 and the Crusaders in 1204, their empire waxed and waned, and at times they held onto little more than the city itself, but for almost a thousand years after the fall of the western empire they survived, surrounded by hostile neighbors who were almost always richer and more populous than the Byzantines. “Historically speaking”, Constantinople collapsed only once, and the shock of that collapse helped revolutionize all of Europe.

The Cubs, by contrast, have collapsed in 1909, 1910, 1911…

Posted by Ben Brothers at 10:51 am, 14 September 2007 and filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.