Okay, lets be honest here:
WAY too much attention has been paid to these petty rivalries against the St. Louis Cardinals, the Milwaukee Brewers, the White Sox...
The Cubs need to get with the times and focus on their newest deadly rival, the Pittsburgh Pirates.
I want to hear Mike Quade say, "I understand Chicago. Of course we'll try to win a championship, but the road to the World Series goes through Pittsburgh."
It's probably asking too much to expect the Cubs to win a majority of games against the Pirates.
In 2010, the Pirates won fifty. seven. games!
How can you compete against that?
You can't.
10 of those proud victories for the City of... uh - what do they do in Pittsburgh? Keep Big Ben Rothlisberger out of bars and make steel or something, right? Anyway, 10 of those proud victories came against the Chicago Cubs.
You can add the team salaries of the Pittsburgh Pirates AND the Chicago White Sox and still not pay what the Cubs paid for the Cubs last year.
And don't forget, there's only one Paul Maholm pitching in the Bigs today, and as we learned in 2010, you don't try to beat him, you simply try to contain him.
Paul Maholm had a 5.10 ERA in 2010, along with 9 wins and 15 losses. One third of his wins came against the Cubs.
Evan Meek actually had a winning record at 5-4 for the Pirates last year.
2 of his wins came against... the Cubs.
In his sophomore season, Andrew McCutchen hit .458 against Cub lefties, but that's okay since he only hit .429 against righties.
Hell, I'd trade Carlos Silva, Alfonso Soriano and Kosuke Fukudome for McCutchen in a second even if I had to keep paying their salaries if for no other reason than to KEEP MCCUTCHEN FROM HITTING AGAINST THE CUBS.
THE CUBS MUST FIGURE OUT HOW TO STOP THE PITTSBURGH PIRATES.
It's as simple as that.
Now... GO CUBS!
