MESA, Ariz. - Curse, what curse?
If you listened carefully within the confines of the Chicago Cubs' clubhouse at HoHoKam Park during spring training last month, you would have thought that Steve Bartman were still regularly attending games at Wrigley Field and that simple baseball logic explained why the team hasn't won the World Series in nearly a century.
"Whenever this so-called curse happened, none of these guys were even born, including me," said manager Dusty Baker, who at 55 was born 41 years after the Cubs most recently won the World Series and four years after the team last went to the Series. "You can't think about it. You have no control over it. You just have to be careful not to put extra pressure on yourself and not believe in it. If I did, I wouldn't have come here."
Since watching his first Cubs team come within five outs of winning the 2003 National League Championship Series, only to have Bartman get in the way of former Cubs outfielder Moises Alou on a catchable foul pop and give the Florida Marlins new hope, Baker has done his best to turn his clubhouse into a veritable curse-free zone.
For those who believe otherwise, let them eat goat.
But for those who choose to think that the Boston Red Sox winning the World Series last season was more an exorcism than one of the game's most exhilarating moments in history, the Cubs now stand alone as baseball's ghost-busters.
Their task this season seems formidable.
Former phenom Kerry Wood, who has been on the disabled list three of the past five years and missed the entire 1999 season after reconstructive right elbow surgery, sat out most of this exhibition season with a sore right shoulder. Mark Prior, whose meteoric start in 2003 was later sidetracked by injuries, joined Wood on the sidelines this spring because of inflammation in his right elbow.
Just when it seemed as if the Cubs were getting promising reports about their top two starters, they got more bad news about relief pitcher Joe Borowski, who missed much of last season with shoulder problems and now is expected to be out at least a couple of months after suffering a broken right wrist while fielding a ball.
"Last year, with all the injuries we had, we were still able to pull together and have a winning season and win one more game than we did the year before," said catcher Michael Barrett. "That's a credit to management, to [general manager] Jim Hendry, to Dusty Baker, for how they kept us together during those times and how they were able to fill holes at a time when at any given point, with one of those guys out, we could have fallen out of the picture big-time."
