I love Wrigley Field. I do. It's one of my favorite places in the world. I say that to inform you that nothing in this post is out of spite for the venue I revere as a mecca of the baseball world. And as much as I give Cubs fans a hard time, I don't really think they're worse than the fans of any other team. There are some great Cubs fans and some abominable ones just as any fan base is prone to including members from both ends of the spectrum of tolerability.

But the home-field advantage at Wrigley, for the last several decades, has been the worst in all of baseball, and I've got the numbers to prove it.

I started out investigating home-field advantage in general in the hopes of proving something about the significance of psychology in baseball. The first wave of research showed that as far back as I could look (1901) there always has been a home-field advantage league-wide. In every season of Major League Baseball, the home teams have, collectively, registered a winning record. There have been 4 seasons in which the teams of either the National League or the American League had a collective losing record at home, but it has never happened across baseball.

Allow me to elaborate on my post from yesterday (which came in almost muted reaction to the Chicago magazine article on Sammy). This will require some imagination on your part. When you see Alan Shore, I want you to picture Sammy Sosa. When he talks about the legal profession, I want you to imagine he's talking about baseball. And when he describes Eugene Young and pie and embezzlement and lying, I want you to replace it all by conjuring up thoughts of Jim Hendry and retired numbers and egotism and steroids. If you can do that, you can understand how I feel about how the Cubs treated Sammy Sosa.

If you can't, well, it was worth a shot.

Sammy Sosa: Cubs 'Threw Me into the Fire' - Chicago magazine - September 2010 - Chicago

Goodbye, Lou. Thanks for leading the Cubs to three winning seasons and one worth leaving early.

Lou Piniella is about to manage his last game with the Cubs and probably his last ever. He'll retire with more than 1,800 wins and more than 100 more wins over .500 as a manager. More importantly than where he'll spend the rest of this season, he will be near his mother for the rest of his life. If you have ever been there for someone in their final moments, whether it's for mere seconds or over the course of many long years, it is simultaneously painful and rewarding. (When anyone says that about being a Cubs fan, I hope they're kidding. There is no comparison. Watching losing baseball is a mild annoyance. Losing someone you love redefines you.)

In baseball terms, Lou has been a great manager for the Cubs and the Rays and the Mariners and the Reds and the Yankees. But honestly, I don't really know what that entails. It is strictly impossible to quantify what anyone else would have done with the teams Lou had. The people who didn't manage his teams have nothing but what if's and would have's. Lou did it. No one can measure what someone else would have done in his place, but what you can measure is that for 3,548 games, an owner of a Major League Baseball team entrusted Lou to do the job.