Review of The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse," by Rich Cohen

 Review of

The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse, by Rich Cohen, ISBN 9780374120924

Five out of five stars

Curse, or bad management?

 While there may be no supernatural justification to claiming a curse, there is one certain way one can exist. That is when the people considered cursed believe in the curse. In sports, it is when one or more members of the team think they are going to lose no matter what happens. In baseball, the time you make errors is when you believe that someone is going to make one.

 Until they finally won the World Series in 2016, ending a string of over 100 years with no such victory, the Cubs were generally awful. This had lasted so long that many people attributed the continuous failure to the “fact” that the team was cursed. As Cohen points out, much of that was in the heads and bodies of the players, he says several times that the primary reason for their decades of success is that the Yankees had better players (physical bodies) and that they believed that they would win (better heads.)

 Cohen also pointed out that the Cubs loss in the famous Bartman game was due more to the infield error and how the Cubs as a team suffered a mental collapse, and was not due to any supernatural force. He also points out that the primary reason for the lengthy failure is due to horrible management practices throughout the organization. One of the amazing facets of this absurd situation is that when the Cubs signed future star and Hall of Famer Ernie Banks, one of the club officials said they signed him, “So that they would have another black to room with the one black player they had on their roster.”

 This is a great book about a team that suffered from a great deal of bad luck over decades, most of which was self-generated.