In hindsight, I bet Big Z wishes he had already signed that extension

Today is not going to help Carlos Zambrano's case at all when they're negotiating over his contract extension. It was by far the worst display of baseball I have seen since last September. You might be thinking right now, "But they haven't played since September." Well you'd be wrong, they played in Spring Training. And I only watched one game. And they didn't suck nearly this much.

Every cloud has a silver lining though, and this game was really just one big, dark, gloomy, depressing storm cloud. So there has to be an upside to it. Take a look at the results of the past season openers the Cubs have had and how their seasons turned out:

2006

• Season Opener: Win against the Reds, 16-7
• Season Results: 66-96, worse than the Pirates

2005

• Season Opener: Win against Arizona, 16-6
• Season Results: 79-83, 21 games out of first

2004

• Season Opener: Win against the Reds, 7-4
• Season Results: 89-73, actually a better record by one game than 2003 but the season was viewed as a disappointment because we missed the playoffs by two games

2003

• Season Opener: Win against the Mets, 15-2
• Season Results: 88-74, almost made it to the World Series but we dropped the ball (literally and figuratively) in the NLCS. Biggest disappointment since the summer of '69.

So there you go. In the past four seasons we've always started things off very well, and everything spirals out of control from there. So this year we lost, so what? It can only get better from here. I have high hopes that this just means that this season is going to be completely different from the previous four.


Game Summary for April 2nd, 2007:

• Score: Cubs lose to the Reds, 5-1
• Player of the Game: Matt Murton. Scored the Cubs' only run and made a great diving catch late in the game.
• Subject of Lou's wrath tonight: Carlos Zambrano. Absolutely terrible pitching, does not bode well for the rest of the season.
• Comments: I've said all that needs to be said. Let's just get ready for the next game people. If we can take the series my hope will be fully restored.
• Magic Number: Still 163