Rozner: New era can't erase old questions — yet

Cubs fans are naturally resistant to change.

Some of it's inherent, especially the fear of believing something good could actually happen.

Some of it is personal history, having witnessed tragedy after tragedy, mistake after mistake, failure after failure.

Some of it's that you don't want to believe it's possible because any time you've bought in you've been hurt — and don't want to get hurt again.

That line of thinking is understandable. A bad relationship will do that to someone. It can haunt a person for decades.

So even those who understand the plan and embrace it are susceptible to the irrational, brought on by waves of overwhelming positives.

“It was the same way in Boston,” said Cubs president Theo Epstein, before the home opener Monday night. “Any time you have a vacuum, it's usually filled with the more neurotic elements of people's collective personalities. That's just true. That's just a human thing.

“The players do a great job of filling their vacuum with hard work, with preparation, with focus on that night's game. And so that's what drives them. That's their world. Their narrative is about that night's game, about getting ready to face that starting pitcher.

“But when you're just observing — or when you're paid to present what's going on with the team — there's a lot more space, a lot more air to fill, and so it's filled with worry and drama and narrative and things like that. It doesn't surprise me.

“If we win, that space will be filled with testaments to the players and toasts and the kind of stuff that everyone likes reading. We just have to go out and win and then people won't be fretting anymore.”

For a Cub fan, fretting is as ordinary as breathing, but the incompetence of the past has been replaced with a professionalism that includes an explanation. Management describes how it will execute a plan, and then goes about doing it.

Imagine that.

Win or lose, they are always moving forward, and those who witnessed Opening Night at Wrigley Field on Monday had no choice but to concede the difference 12 months can make.

The opener a year ago featured a half-baked ballpark and a half-built team. There was a toilet shortage, shuttered bleachers and a very expensive pitcher on the mound who probably wasn't ready to pitch after a dead-arm phase arrived late in spring training.

There was a hint of what was on the way, but it had the look of a team-in-training and a rehab-in-progress.

Welcome to 2016.

The bleachers are open, the ballpark sparkling, the washrooms working and a brand new clubhouse greeted a team that arrived home after a brilliant road trip to start the season, a confounding result for those still trying to understand — or accept — Epstein's plan.

The confines are now so friendly that Cubs manager Joe Maddon and his bosses faced questions about whether the Cubs would go soft because they have professional training facilities, decent bathrooms and indoor batting cages.

“Yeah, we moved into a new house and it really took the edge off,” Epstein chuckled. “My work ethic hasn't been the same since.”

Maddon, meanwhile, could only laugh at the suggestion that the Cubs' good start was hard for lifelong Chicagoans to understand.

“I anticipate the good to continue,” Maddon said. “I don't vibrate on that negative frequency. I wasn't here when all the bad things happened and I don't get caught up in all that minutia.”

Regardless of how this season progresses, the Cubs will have to deal with the endless array of bizarre questions dealing with goats, curses and foul balls.

It's a tired story and a tiring storyline, but Epstein knows that until the Cubs win the only prize that matters, a lazy narrative is the easy narrative.

At least in that sense, 2016 doesn't feel any different at all.

• Listen to Barry Rozner from 9 a.m. to noon Sundays on the Score's “Hit and Run” show at WSCR 670-AM.