Piniella just latest not to get it
Lou Piniella doesn't get it.
No Cubs manager, coach, player or general manager has during the past several decades.
Leo Durocher didn't. Dallas Green didn't. Andy MacPhail didn't. Jim Frey didn't. Even Don Zimmer didn't.
Guys like that simply and naively come and go, like Brink's trucks crashing through a tollbooth on the way to their next payday.
Left behind are the people who actually pay the toll to be frustrated Cubs fans game after game, season after season, generation after generation.
"I hear if we don't win the World Series that it was a lost year," Piniella said the morning of the day the Cubs clinched this year's National League Central title. "That's a bunch of (bullbleep)."
Of course, Piniella was reminded, his perspective is considerably different from that of many a Cubs fan. You know, considering the Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908.
Derek Lowe will be the Dodgers' starting pitcher in tonight's NL division series against the Cubs in Wrigley Field.
Lowe was asked a couple of times Tuesday what the atmosphere was like in Boston when the Red Sox were trying to win a World Series for the first time in eight decades.
They finally did in 2004 after 86 years. Er, 86 years? That's a several blinks short of the Cubs' drought.
Seriously, what Piniella doesn't get is it won't be up to him to determine whether 2008 was another Cubs' lost season.
Cubs fans will do it for him. Some have waited since 1945 just to see their team in the World Series.
For a century the people on the field and in the front office have come wide-eyed in pursuit of a world championship and left bleary-eyed without one.
Cubs fans don't leave. Oh, maybe they do geographically but they don't emotionally.
"It isn't fair to put all the expectations of past failures and past successes on the '08 team," Piniella insisted.
Oh, why not?
"You let this team stand on its own merit and let them do what they can do as well as they can do and let them go as far as they can," Piniella added.
Except for this franchise regular-season accomplishments are like winning a presidential nomination. They don't mean anything if the candidate doesn't get to the White House.
"The problem is that only one team can win," Piniella said. "People say if we don't win the World Series we're not successful and I don't buy it."
OK, don't. Maybe that's the way for the Cubs to reach the World Series - in an oblivious state of mind.
Piniella went on to say, "I understand it's been a long, long, long time here. I really do."
No, sorry, you really don't. If you did, you wouldn't have stopped 97 "longs" short of a load.
"You get to this time of year, there's pressure," Dodgers manager Joe Torre.
But there's a difference between the expectations the Yankees felt when Torre managed them and the expectations over the Cubs.
The pressure on the Yankees was because they had won so many World Series, and the pressure on the Cubs is because they haven't won any for a century.
Here's a compromise out of respect for Piniella.
If the Cubs don't reach the World Series, they can consider themselves a success by baseball's standards if they want.
But within the context of Cubs history, sorry, this franchise will be considered a failure again.
mimrem@dailyherald.com