Schwarber Hops IPA

Check out the the photo above, yup that is Kyle Schwarber elevating! There really isn’t a new craft beer named Schwarber Hops, but in this case IPA means – Impressive Pilfering Athlete for the way he robbed Tyler Smith of this potential HR yesterday.

For the second straight game the Cubs had a lead going into the 9th inning and found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The Cubs lost to the Mariners at Sloan Park 8-6 yesterday as Seattle scored 4 runs off Brian Duensing in the 9th. While the loss may not have played well to many of the 15,107 Cubs faithful at Sloan, I quote Bill Murray’s character Tripper from the film Meatballs – “It just doesn’t matter, it just doesn’t matter.”

I say this every spring, but the plain truth about spring training games is, the outcomes do not correlate to regular season success or failure. I haven’t done any quantitative studies on the subject, but it’s simple reasoning to figure out that the Cubs lineup who finished yesterday’s game – Candelario, Jimenez, Kawasaki, Dominguez, Bote, Hannemann, Corporan, Davis, and Burks is quite different than what you’ll see from the Cubs to open the regular season. To assure any doubters, look back to last spring where the Arizona Diamondbacks finished the Cactus League with a 24-8 record, while the Cubs went 11-19, one team won the World Series and the other lost 93 games. “It just doesn’t matter!”

There certainly is plenty of good intel to take away from these games for the astute fan.  As well as getting to see some of the Cubs minor league prospects in action before they work their way up to Wrigley. However, from my perspective spring training is about two things, getting the team ready for the regular season, and for the fans to have a good time. So grab a cold beer, Chicago dog, soak up some sun and enjoy a relaxing Cactus League game in March…final scores don’t matter until April!

Here are some of John Antonoff’s photos. Go Cubs!