Curse of the Goat

Now, y’all know I don’t give a skinny rat’s ass about baseball, but the weapons-grade lunacy that surrounds everything in Chicago is so fascinating that I can’t look away.

Yesterday afternoon an unidentified individual delivered a box containing a goat’s head to Wrigley Field, addressed to Cubs’ owner Tom Ricketts. I’ll spare you the bizarre back-story about the goat; you can read about it here.

This current goat-related kerfuffle seems to center around the Cub’s troubles getting much needed renovations to Wrigley underway. Anyone who has even driven by it knows the place is a dump. A powerful alderman who represents the residents around Wrigley, and the deep-pocketed “roof-top” owners who put him in office, don’t want the Ricketts family—ya know, the people who actually own the Cubs and the ballpark—to mess with their, ahem, golden goat.

You see, these people own homes and businesses next to Wrigley with more or less unobstructed views of the ballpark. They can sit on their roofs, suds in hand, and watch a game for free.

Now, I may be just a caveman, but isn’t that, um, stealing? Well, never mind…

Anyway, one sunny afternoon, while enjoying a double-header, again for free, one of these free-loaders entrepreneurs got the idea to let other people watch the game from their roof for a small charge. It has since grown into quite a lucrative business for the roof-top owners. They even managed to grift the Tribune Company—former owner of the Cubs—into a 20 year deal to let them legally wet their beak off Cubs games, while preventing any changes to Wrigley which would serve to spoil things.

It just so happens that there are any one of a number of nearby municipalities that have been speed-dialing Tom Ricketts offering him anything, up to and including anything, to move Wrigley and the Cubs to their fine communities.

Uh oh.

Suddenly, the roof-top owners, their paid alderman (is there any other kind?), and the Mayor’s office are all accommodating and stuff.

“Hey now, let’s not do anything rash. We can make this work!”

So concessions are made. Now the mopes—to use the popular vernacular—who catch fly balls out on Waveland Avenue are getting all uppity.

“What will we do to add meaning to our vacant little lives if we can’t catch errant fly-balls and home-runs to resell as souvenirs?”

Did they send the goat head? Who knows. Who cares. It’s the Chicago way.

You know, Kim Jong Un could take lessons in crazy from Chicagoans, especially Cubs fans who have been milking that goat for a loooonnnng time!