Open Letter to Matt Marrone – We’re Good

It is true, there are a great deal of Chicago Cubs fans that are having a, hmmm…, hard time adjusting to actually winning a championship. Part of our identity has been taken away from fans, and the team we have bled for over this 108 year dry spell. But we are figuring it out. With thanks to the Internet, most notably @Cubs Twitter page, Facebook fan sites, and the dozens of fantastic YouTube channels dedicating their work to Chicago Cubs videos – we are figuring it out.

It has certainly helped that the first Cubs title came during the digital age, a time in which we can relive that moment we’ve dreamt about over-and-over again. Today strangers are friends, thanks to Social Media, and we share our stories almost like recovering addicts in support groups. We have learned how to deal. The Cubs World Series championship is part of us, whether you’re an 84 year old super fan that hasn’t missed a home game since the Johnson administration, or you just wanted to be apart of the party and bought your first Cubs hat hours before rushing down to Grant Park for the celebration.

You see Matt Marrone, we have always been a fan base of unique perks and perils, and we hardly needed an ESPN article written for clicks to tell us how to fan. See, we’ve always fanned. We flooded rooftops across from Wrigley in attempts to fan. We helped finance an entire neighborhood off of the idea that we wanted to keep the party going.

While this winning stuff is new to the Cubs, it’s not new to our fan base, or our city – this is something many non-Chicagoans forget. We’ve seen the best football team in the history of the NFL win a Super Bowl – after they sang about it. We’ve seen the greatest basketball player to ever play bring home SIX NBA titles. We have seen the Chicago Blackhawks come from one of the worst NHL franchises, to becoming the model of the league – oh, and winning three Stanley Cups along the way.

We have even seen our crosstown rival win a World Series  (btw… it’s not a subway series here Matt), and we felt that pain, and we asked ourselves – “why can’t that be us.” 11 years later we did, and now they are trying to replicate the Cubs path.

Since we won the World Series on November 2nd I have seen more Cubs hats, more “W” flags, more Kris Bryant jerseys than ever before. You want to know what I’ve never asked? How long have they been fans?

No, I more often than not give them a smile and they nod back like we are passing a secret message between to spies. We are part of a club now, that is for sure, but we don’t need someone in the right-coast headquarters to let us in on when the super secret meetings for champions are being held. In fact, we don’t need the special treatment at all.

Your whole piece is the last slap in the face to a fan base that has built up an extra layer of skin because of how often we’ve been slapped (as a bonus it helps us get through the blistery winters in Chicago as well). While it is a slap in the face, it feels like a rejected fan of another team trying to “get in on the fun” we’re all having celebrating the historic feat the Cubs organization accomplished.

You see Matt, we don’t want to be apart of the Yankee or Boston party – we’ve started our own and it appears you want an invite to the greatest celebration a baseball franchise has felt. You’re better than this Matt, we’ll at least I assume so, afterall ESPN did hire ya.

Wanna know the real perk to winning the World Series? We get to decide who’s invited and who isn’t.

And the biggest peril? We continue to let national media with no insight to Chicago sports in.

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