Major League Baseball’s all-time hits leader, and lifetime ban-achiever, Pete Rose offered his thoughts to Fox Sports’ Clay Travis on the runaway success of the 2016 Chicago Cubs.
Rose told Travis that the Cubs are unquestionably the best team in baseball right now, but, added (portrayed fictitiously here in the Pete Rose sliding-on-in meme version):
The Cubs right now no question have the best team, but I can’t root for a team that hasn’t won since 1907. The Cubs will find a way to screw it up I think. They’ve got a good ball club, probably the best ball club in the league right now. They’re playing like it, but again, they can be pitched to, their pitchers can be hit. It’s just a matter of who’s going to give them a fight at the end of the season, in the playoffs.
The Cubs, are they going to play good all year like last year when they won 97 games and then got swept in the playoffs? We’ll have to wait and see, because in the playoffs, you’re a different animal.
Hey, fair enough on the playoffs (if we can skip over the bit on the Cubs’ last title (1908, not 1907), and the fact that the Cubs first beat the Pirates in the Wild Card Game and then the Cardinals in the NLDS before being swept by the Mets in the NLCS). They are something of a crapshoot, and you couldn’t rightly say that even a 120-win Cubs team was a lock to win the World Series. Baseball simply doesn’t work that way.
But will it be the Cubs screwing it up? Bah. I don’t know about that part. But any excuse to use the Pete Rose sliding-on-in meme is a good excuse.