Chicago Cubs: 70 years of a whole lot of ups, downs and in-betweens

I have been watching the Chicago Cubs play ball since the 1951 season. My mom would tell me how she put me in a contraption called “Johnny Jump-up” and set me in front of our Emerson black and white television set, with its 12 inch (diagonal) screen.

Now admittedly I wasn’t really fan for the first couple years but my mother assured me by the time I was three I knew my favorite player Hank Sauer was number nine and I would get excited whenever he was up to bat.

Since then I have been a die-hard Cubs fan, as was my mom, and my grandma before me.  My four daughters are Cubs fans, too. My dad, a Cardinals fan (he grew up in Iowa listening to the St. Louis games on the radio) took me to my first game when I was four years old. I took my girls to Chicago for one Ladies’ Day game and they actually got to go out onto Wrigley Field.

In my life, the Cubs as of today, Sept. 17, 2021, are 5326-5583 with 24 ties. If you’re doing the math at home, that works out to about a .497 winning percentage – 257 games under .500. Much of that is augmented by our last six seasons where we had winning records to the tune of 140 games over.

Chicago Cubs: The success of the golden era is now a thing of the past

The success of the last six years will end this year unless the Cubs win out, which seems highly unlikely, especially when you watch things like their best pitcher giving up a seven-run lead as we all bore witness to on Thursday night.

In my 70+ years of watching, the Cubs have finished first in their division just eight times, with three of those coming in the last six seasons. In those same seven decades, the Cubs have finished last 14 times and in the lower half of their division in all but 20 of those years. They appear to be headed that way again this year.

I do count us lucky that we won’t lose 100+ games this year as we have done three times in my life. Still that’s hardly enough to hang my 7 5/8″ fitted Cubs hat on.

But like this year’s Cubs, I’m not going anywhere, as far as I know (fingers crossed). With any luck I’ll be back to root for whatever Cubs team shows up in 2022. See you there, “Go Cubs!”