Chicago Cubs – the Addison Recorder

Thoughts from the Dugout: A Day at Wrigley Field

April 16, 2015 by Travis J. Cook Leave a Comment

The baseball season is long and arduous. It’s often compared to a marathon, which credits the enormous physical toll that 162 games can exert upon the human body. The comparison, however, serves a slight discredit to the immediacy of the individual games themselves. Careers are made and broken on a nightly basis, and a lost or blown game here or there can have a monumental impact upon the postseason race in September. Think of it as something similar to the Butterfly Effect (not the movie), where a butterfly flapping its wings in April can blow the course of a season off pace when a monsoon takes out a pitcher’s elbow, or causes a game winning home run to die on the warning track. In a game of inches, that damn butterfly can wreak untold, and often unknown, havoc.

It’s also pretty damn fun.

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Thoughts from the Dugout: Let’s Play Two

January 26, 2015 by Travis J. Cook Leave a Comment

Image courtesy Getty Images

Ernie Banks passed away on Friday, January 23rd, 2015, eight days before his 84th birthday. He was a Chicago icon, a Hall of Fame shortstop who won two MVP awards while playing his entire career for the Chicago Cubs. He never made it to the postseason, but was widely regarded as “Mr. Cub”, a beloved figure in spite of his team’s mediocrity – or because of it. He was the first player in the modern era to be identified as an offensive force while playing shortstop, a position not known at the time for prolific offense.

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Comedy Fellowship: The Nerdologues “Lord of the Wrigley”

May 26, 2014 by Travis J. Cook Leave a Comment

The proceedings start simply. Ethereal music plays, familiar music that one might have seen in a blockbuster movie or three over time. Our minds imagine sweeping mountainsides, deep canyons, and ground-covering mists filled with secrets. Two hooded figures take the stage and narrate (with the aid of pictograms) the dark history of the rise and fall of an evil dragon and its wraith servants, trapped within the bowels of dark, chaotic temples, of legendary times when an ancient city was governed by corruption and desolation, and of the hundred year peace since those dark times.

Well, hundred-plus. The Cubs haven’t won a world championship since 1908, after all. That pesky dragon has been kept under wraps beneath U.S. Cellular Field, with the wraiths sealed inside a certain, demonic statue outside of Wrigley Field.

So goes the latest offering by the Chicago-based Nerdologues, The Lord of the Wrigley: Fellowship of the Cubs. Having opened at Public House Theatre on Friday, May 23rd, the long form sketch troupe has crafted a piece that brings together the separate worlds of Chicago baseball and Lord of the Rings-inspired nerdisms. Well, not so separate, theorizes Nerdologues founder/producer/actor Kevin Reader. “Think about it,” says Reader. “you and a bunch of friends get together and pick a band of fighters to fight each other week after week. Whoever has the most points, based on the players stats wins. Sounds a lot like some role playing games if you ask me.”

Director/actor Chris Geiger agrees, echoing many of the similarities between sports fans and nerd fans. He also points out that one of the guiding focuses of the Nerdologues is to “make people laugh and bring them together”, something which Lord of the Wrigley does with abandon.

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