30 Teams in 30 Posts: #30

Each Spring Training, MLB Network broadcasts a series called 30 Teams in 30 Days, where they preview each team as it prepares for Opening Day. At Cards on Cards, I looked at this being the end of the regular season and figured there was no time like the present to roll out a new feature. At some point, some blog somewhere (most likely a great one that I read regularly) came up with a running list of their favorite/least favorite teams and milked some posts out of it. Others followed. And then, a year and a half or so passed and I decided to steal the idea. My twist is that, like many of my other efforts, this is by and large an attempt to get rid of cards in my collection. Every card represented by every image in this series is up for trade. I tried to pick a few interesting ones.

One thing I will give Cubs fans- if you see someone on the streets wearing a Cubs cap, they're probably an actual Cubs fan. Cubs fans wear this on their sleeves, heads, shirts, etc. It's their cross to bear, so to speak. Sometimes it takes real guts to show your pride, and sometimes it's just obnoxious, like some sort of delusional fraternal comradery. Cubs fans always seem to have an excuse or a scapegoat.

This isn't about the fans, however. This is supposed to be why I ranked this team 30th out of 30 teams in Major League Baseball. As a Cardinals fan, I'm supposed to hate the Cubs. While I try to keep the seemingly forced hatred in check, the fact is that I cannot ever find anything to like about this team. Guys like Derrek Lee suddenly become less insipid as soon as they take off the blue jerseys, while seeing my favorite player from the past decade or so put on their version of the pinstripes suddenly made me want to reconsider my decision to make a special effort to collect his cards.

Favorite current Cubs player: Xavier Nady. I'll have to go with the ex-Portland Beaver by default, because I really don't like any of them. I tried to pick someone with local ties, and I could have picked former Oregon State Beaver Darwin Barney, but I can't in good conscience say anything positive about Oregon State baseball now that the Ducks have a team.

Least favorite current Cubs player: Carlos Zambrano. This could have been tougher, especially with Alfonso Soriano on the team, but Zambrano has established himself at a completely different level of disdain with the way he carries himself and acts as a "professional".

Favorite Cubs player of all-time: Andre Dawson. I normally would choose someone who had spent more time with the chosen franchise, but I feel like the fact that The Hawk only spent 6 of his 21 seasons with Chicago makes him more likable than other Cubs legends that probably did very little to deserve my wrath.

Least favorite Cubs player of all-time: Sammy Sosa. To me, Sosa will always be the most disingenuous of the steroids era sluggers. I don't care if he hugged Mark McGwire or made thousands of children happy. I loathed every second he was on the field. I always have felt that Mark McGwire was a really solid person who made some incredibly poor decisions because his ability to stay healthy never really caught up to his own talent for hitting. Sosa is just a scumbag scam artist, plain and simple.