One reason baseball fans stay baseball fans is that baseball is a sport with weird, unexpected plays. For example, the Brewers scored three runs on a wild pitch. A wild pitch???! You don't see that very often.
However, there are times when weirdness is not a baseball play but how a baseball team is run.
An outfield of Coghlan, Lake and Ruggiano would spark an Iowa or Tennessee minor league line up card. But no, that was the Cubs starters in Sunday's game.
On a day when the Algerian national soccer team scored more goals than the Cubs scored runs, as a baseball fan, you know something weird is going on. It is more probable that more Cubs fans were watching the soccer games than tuning into to see the Cubs go nearly hitless against the Pirates.
It is a weird time in Cub history. Repeated stories have quoted television officials as saying that last year the Cubs had several telecasts with zero ratings. That means the viewers have turned off the Cubs as they sank toward the bottom. Well, the Cubs are back on the bottom so ratings are probably floundering more than a weak team soccer goal tender.
When people begin to understand the nuances of soccer, and its set plays and strategies, the same type of fan of baseball can follow soccer. It has a similar pace with baseball. But no one in U.S. ever thought that soccer would ever surpass baseball in TV viewership. But at the local level, and for the World Cup, it probably has done so. Whether it can grow the sport at baseball's expense is a debatable question (as with each World Cup, pundits predict that soccer would explode professionally in the U.S. but that has never happened).
The one event that Ricketts has not touted for his new Wrigley entertainment venue is soccer. Maybe he thinks soccer is too much competition for the Cubs.
