Game 14---Nationals 5 Cubs 3

Product---Kosher hot dogs
Temperature---54 degrees, sunny

Cubs-Sox is this weekend. The Red Line series. The battle for Windy City bragging rights. The Trib and Sun-Times obviously are over-excited about this, and in my opinion, its all good fun. But people who say that these are the most important games of the season are obviously smoking way too much of that Ricky Williams stuff.

Rick Telender, the great columnist for the Sun-Times, wrote this today about the city series: These three games make up a whopping 1.85 percent of the regular season, the equivalent of the first 18 minutes of a single NFL game. So what’s this prove? Are these games meaningless? Of course not. Every game in the regular season is important, and a win over the defending champs could be the start of a turn-around for the Cubs season. But are these the three games that all North Siders circled before the year began? I sure hope not. Because despite all the hoopla and hype, these games are far from being a top priority.

Worst-case scenario for the White Sox this weekend is obviously a Cubs sweep. Add to that a three game sweep by the Tigers over the Reds, (Since when is that an inter-league rivalry?) and the White Sox are a shocking four games back of first with only 119 games left to play. Reverse this for the Cubs, and lets say we sweep the Sox and the Cardinals drop all three games to Kansas City. Now the Cubs are only five and a half games back.

But lets say the Cubs sweep those very Cardinals and the White Sox drop three consecutive to the Tigers. The standings I brought up earlier are still the same, but wins over an inter-division rival mean so much more. The Cubs gain momentum versus other National League opponents, and they have a mental advantage for the rest of the season against their foes from St. Louis. The Tigers begin to think of themselves as contenders instead of the perennial losers that they have been known as for years.

When Sunday’s game concludes, regardless of the results, the Cubs will head back to the NL grind while the Sox head back to the American League. The standings will be different then they are today, and maybe one of these teams will have gained some much-needed momentum. They’ll need it, because there are some really important games coming up.

Observations:
You may be asking yourself, ‘Why did Eli take kosher hot dogs?’ The answer is that I didn’t pick them as much as I was given them. There were a lot of vendors at the game yesterday and only so many spots for jumbos, so I was forced to take koshers? They did OK (A total of $106.44), but I would have done better with the jumbo dogs…Yesterday was a value day at the park (half-price tickets), so there were a lot of senior citizens and kids groups in the building. Those two groups are notoriously bad tippers…I saw a kid (who shall remain unnamed) who graduated Dawes, Chute and ETHS with me, so he is obviously my age. Yet he was drinking a beer when I saw him. One of my fellow vendors must not have done a great job at checking I.D.’s…I was almost hit in the back of the head by a Todd Walker foul ball, but I luckily saw it at the last second and got out of the way. If we were allowed to, I could have easily caught it and kept it as a souvenir.