Though he labored under a crippling handicap, last spring Chris De Luca, now the sports editor of the Sun-Times, successfully predicted six of the eight teams that would play in Major League Baseball’s 2009 postseason. That’s why he’s our man of the hour: the winner of this year’s Golden BAT.
His reaction was a familiar one, sportswriters thirsting for even a drop of the glory with which they shower Neanderthals.
“With virtual drinks?”
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It’s turned out that baseball writers frequently outclass the sardines. But a critical exception must be acknowledged—the occasional pennant race when, on paper, either the Cubs or Sox are hands down the team to beat. Sardines are immune to mindless optimism, but Chicago’s finest scriveners always succumb. This was the handicap De Luca labored under last year: the mass delusion that because the Cubs looked unbeatable in 2009, no one in the National League Central would beat them.
The Cubs ended the ’09 season seven and a half games behind the Saint Louis Cardinals and out of the playoffs. With one exception, every baseball writer in the competition picked the Cubs. Rick Telander’s choice in the NL Central was the Cardinals, and if he hadn’t weakened in the end and gone with the Cubs to make the playoffs as the wild card team, he’d have earned the Golden BAT for strength of character.
“I’ve been here since ’96, and the outlook has never been this good,” said De Luca. “I came here from the Contra Costa Times and my editor told me, ‘Don’t go to the Sun-Times. It’ll be dead within a year.’ It’s always felt here like the blade was going to drop.” De Luca vividly remembers last autumn. There is bankruptcy, and then there is bankruptcy, and what De Luca was hearing from management back then was that if Jim Tyree’s offer to buy the Sun-Times Media Group fell through, the company would run out of money in three days. Tyree was telling the Newspaper Guild that if it didn’t make major concessions he’d walk away from the deal, and the various guild units were taking votes that basically told Tyree to go screw himself. De Luca figured the guild wouldn’t back down—so that was pretty much that. “I just didn’t see a way out of it,” he told me. “And then it changed.” The guild made the concessions. Tyree closed the deal.
Even worse, PECOTA got just as sappy about the Cubs as the sportswriters did. What was that in the water? Is Cubs fever a virus that can spread from humans to computers?
