The Aroldis Chapman Music Incident Might Be The Most “Cubs-y” Thing Ever
Before I get started…Yeah, I know the Cubs are hot right now. I know they are still a sexy pick to win the World Series. But even if they do…no matter what happens, they will always be the Chicago Cubs. There’s a simple reason for that. The Cubs have become one of the richest franchises in baseball by building on a tradition of being lovable losers, and one way you become a “lovable loser” is to have a long tradition of questionable to outright laughably stupid decisions.
With their handling of the Aroldis Chapman/Stadium music debacle, the Cubs are showing me even if they take down a championship in the near future, they are still keeping the “bad decisions” tradition alive and kicking.
A few days ago, a Cubs employee played a song by British tech-noise band The Prodigy called “Smack My Bitch Up.” Frankly, I thought it was a bit funny, but in today’s panty-waste PC world, somebody bitched about it, and voilà, we have yet another manufactured controversy on our hands.
The trouble here is the ginned-up outrage over what I’m guessing is “insensitivity to domestic violence” is hiding a crushing amount of stupidity by the Cubs. Here’s how.
There’s the race ipso loquitor choice of the music itself. It’s bad enough that an organization which is trying to market its product as “family-friendly” pumped this crap through its speakers, but when you toss is the fact that Chapman is coming off a 30-day suspension from Major League Baseball after an alleged domestic-violence incident in which Chapman was accused of choking his girlfriend and firing eight bullets in his garage. That’s what put the bullets in ESPN noisemaker Sarah Spain’s tweet-gun, which is how this became an issue.
Now, I’m not here to defend what the Cubs did in the playing of that song. I’m here to call “bullshit” on how they handled it.
The first problem is the Cubs fired the employee who actually played the track. Don’t even try to tell me that some soundboard operator had editorial control over what was being played. He either got handed a playlist, or had a playlist he suggested be approved by some management prick. The dead give-away for that comes in a quote from a Cubs executive.
“The selection of this track showed a lack of judgment and sensitivity to an important issue,” Crane Kenney, Cubs business operations president, said in a statement. “We have terminated our relationship with the employee responsible for making the selection and will be implementing stronger controls to review and approve music before public broadcast during our games.”
Did you catch the part about “implementing stronger controls?” That means there were controls…controls which failed at multiple points.
1) The person in charge of being the “control” didn’t do his job. I’ll bet you a significant amount of money what happened was the “control” guy was some 50-something who doesn’t know anything about music since MTV stopped showing Whitesnake videos. Then, some punk-ass hipster kid hands him a playlist, he either doesn’t recognize what’s on the list or just signs off on it because he’s got other things to deal with.
2) Whoever hired the punk-ass hipster kid to operate the sound board managed to find one who doesn’t understand the concept of smack-talk is for the VISITING team. You blast “Smack My Bitch Up” when Chapman takes the mound in St. Louis, if for no other reason than to drown out the “Rizzo is a fag” chants.
3) Let’s never forget that several layers of asses got covered by canning the punk-ass hipster kid. Shit rolls downhill, and once Cubs baseball operations president Theo Epstein started getting heat under his ass, the shit sled headed down the mountain, and guess who got to be the scapegoat for a bunch of six-figure chunks of breathing office furniture not doing their jobs? That’s right, some poor-ass soundboard operator making $25,000 per year.
No matter what happens with this latest incarnation of non-suck Cubs baseball, shit like this is why they have always been, and always will be the Chicago Cubs.
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