I Hate Your Team: NL Playoffs

It’s time for the playoffs and everyone on twitter has apparently decided that this is the “most lovable group of playoff teams” ever.

But what if I was to say that this is actually one of the least lovable groups of playoff teams ever? What if I was to say I hated these teams?

Let’s be honest, there’s a lot to hate about all of the teams playing for the World Series this year. We have both Los Angeles and New York, we have two cities that Christopher Nolan’s Batman blew up (Pittsburgh and Chicago), we have a CANADIAN TEAM, and of course we have two teams from the Worst State Ever™, Texas.

Without further ado, I Hate Your Team, NL Edition.

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The Los Angeles Dodgers

Oh, great, the city of Los Angeles has a team in the playoffs. What a freggin relief, you guys.

LA used to be great, I’m sure. I played LA Noir and that game has a really extensively detailed look at the city and I don’t know, it seemed like a cool place back then.

But the problem with most good things is that everyone hears about it and decides they want to go. LA is like a bar your friends take you to that they say is awesome but when you show up the beers are 11 dollars, it takes an hour to get a drink, and the music is so loud you can’t even talk so you’re left to staring at girls and dancing to crappy trip hop.

Not even mentioning the Dodgers are actually incredibly unlikable. Have you ever been to a Dodgers road game? Suddenly everyone you ever meet has a “dad from California” or “went to school there for a semester”. The only thing worse than a bandwagon fan base is a bandwagon fan base that lies about its origins, look man I don’t care if you love the Dodgers because when you were 7 you decided you liked the blue color on their jersey and stuck with them, I don’t even care if you chose the Dodgers at 17 because your high school girlfriend was from LA and you’re still in love with her, just don’t sit there and tell me some yarn about a fake dead grandparent being a LA real estate mogul for 35 years before moving the family out to Denver.

Outside of Yasiel Puig and Zack Grienke, the Dodgers are a bunch of dweeby losers who I have no interest in cheering for. Clayton Kershaw is good and all but would you hang out with him? Honestly though, would you? Kershaw and his wife are absolutely the couple that hosts Homeland watch parties and Clay spends every Saturday wondering if he should paint the upstairs hallway a different shade of blue.

The Dodgers are the Scrooge McDuck of baseball; they have literal piles of money that they use to influence their surroundings. The Dodgers are now in the business of paying bad players to play for other teams. In 20 years, every player in baseball is going to be under contract from the Dodgers and they’ll just be funding the league with whatever players they don’t want.

I hate the Dodgers.

Pittsburgh Pirates

Everyone tells me the Pirates are a team to root for because they were bad for so long, which is like cheering for your dog for finally not pooping on the carpet but pooping in the hallway.

Pittsburgh is most famously known for employing degenerates at quarterback, a gas station restaurant that isn’t as good as Wawa, and for Bane holding it hostage in the worst Batman movie.

Pittsburgh is so terrible even Chris Nolan couldn’t make it a likable city and he made me like known mom-beater Christian Bale so it’s actually a miracle Pittsburgh couldn’t pull it off. But here we are.

The Pirates were bad for 20 entire years, they got rid of Barry Bonds and then weren’t good again for an entire generation of people. Consider this, there were people who were graduating high school in 2013 that had no idea the Pittsburgh Pirates could win more than 75 games. It’s fully plausible that they thought it was illegal for the Pirates to be good.

Not even mentioning the fans of Pittsburgh protested the signing of Mike Vick. God, could you imagine if Steelers fans supported a player with a criminal background? Imagine if their quarterback had been accused of something terrible but the fan base defended him because he won them football games? I couldn’t imagine, that sounds terrible. Good thing it’s not something that happens. The Steeler Way.

Pittsburgh considers itself a blue collar city because it was forged in the steel mills of Western Pennsylvania and that might be true, but the way sports writers and the fans of Pittsburgh pick up on that narrative is embarrassing. Every team, every athlete, every person has to fit that blue collar, worn hands way of life or they’re chastised for being too pretty.

There’s nothing to love in Pittsburgh, except maybe the pizza, I hate the Pirates.

St. Louis Cardinals

This one is too easy.

The Cardinals fan base is just a fan base, they’re more loud and obnoxious than most fan bases sure, but they’re just a fan base.

Drew Magary and twitter accounts aside, I’ve seen Rockies fans say some of the same things Cardinals fans say and the Rockies are an insanely smaller fan base than St. Louis. I’m not going to pile onto a fan base that is just as garbage as most fan bases.

That doesn’t stop me from hating the Cardinals.

They’re good beyond words, this year they shouldn’t have even smelled 70 wins and they led the league with 100. They’re like a Bond villain or Jason Voorhees; you can’t kill them they just keep growing stronger. It’s obnoxious, frankly. They tell you to not be jealous of others in grade school but they never prepare you for a team like the Cardinals.

At this point, in 2017, the Cardinals will employ a team of children and zombies and they’ll still win 93 games and the division. It’s almost comical; I mean it would be funny if St. Louis journalists didn’t use this success to pile on this Best Fans in Baseball narrative like it was a real thing that could be quantified.

I hate the Cardinals.

New York Mets

If the Mets resided in any other city outside of New York, people would feel no sympathy for them. They’ve been plenty successful, two World Titles, a playoff appearance in the last ten years, legitimate superstars throughout the history of the club.

But because they play a few miles from The Yankees it’s suddenly pushed that we should feel bad for the Mets. Why? Because their big brother is wildly more successful? Should I start feeling bad for Dave Franco too because James has been nominated for an Academy Award? ‘Because I’m not going to. Dave Franco is engaged to Alison Brie and is friends with Zach Efron, he’s fine and so are the Mets.

Yeah the Mets owners got burned by Bernie Madoff and yeah they had heartbreaking collapses in 2007 and 2008 after a horrible NLCS loss to the Cardinals in ’06. But you know what team hasn’t had heartbreaking losses? No team. Every team and every fan has a moment where the game broke their heart, stop trying to corner the sad market in New York by claiming you feel the most of it. The Knicks haven’t won a title since 1847 and the Rangers seem to choke in the playoffs ever year, I won’t feel bad for you I have a hard enough time feeling bad for myself.

Not even going to bring up how awful the 7 train is if you’re late to a Mets game. Just kidding, of course I am. After the game starts the 7 becomes a wasteland of Queens’s subway riders and teens. If you judge a Boroughs population density based on its public transit riders, Queens is 84% rowdy teenagers and 10% condescending immigrants yelling at you in foreign languages about your bag being too big. The other 6% is Astoria, which is wanna be Brooklyn if we’re being honest.

The woe is me shtick is tired, I hate the Mets.

Chicago Cubs

I saved the best for last, you guys.

People call the Cubs the lovable losers but there’s really nothing lovable about the Cubs or their fans.

I hate the Cubs for the very reason some people love them, their fans are everywhere. One time I went to a Rockies-Padres game and this guy was in a full Cubs jersey and cap combo. The Cubs were 1,000 miles away and he was dressed like he was walking into Wrigley.

This isn’t an outlying thing either, this type of thing happens in every ballpark outside Chicago all year-long. Hell, some people wear their Ryne Sandberg jerseys to freakin’ hockey games and they think they’re being cheeky and clever. No, you’re not. You look like a doofus and your team hasn’t won a World Series since the Ottoman Empire existed.

Their stadium is fine, Wrigley isn’t as bad as people like to say, but it’s located in a layer of hell known as Wrigleyville and that cannot be atoned.

Wrigleyville is a neighborhood where someone asked “what if I made a bunch of buildings and then put the world’s worst white people inside them?” and then a bunch of investors let them do that. I tried to get into a bar in Wrigleyville and the bouncer wouldn’t let me without THREE forms of ID. Three?! You know how many forms of ID I needed to get into the United Nations? One. I needed one ID to get into the same building as important world leaders and I needed three to get into a crappy bro bar to drink whatever god awful Goose Island beer Chicago wanted to brag about that week.

The Bears hired John Fox to coach their football team which is a great decision if you hate winning by any sort of margin. John Fox had four very successful years in Denver if you think about it in terms of wins and losses, but the man coaches like he read an NFL How to Coach textbook in 1986 and refused to let any new thoughts enter his brain. You punt on fourth down no matter what, NO MATTER WHAT.

Finally, it’s time to talk about Anthony Rizzo and his batting stance, or the worst thing about the Cubs current team. Stand over the plate more you giant stone head. No wonder he’s on base twice a game, you can’t throw anything inside or he wears it on his shoulder. I know this is a silly thing to complain about but you know what else is silly? A goat putting a “curse” on your team. There’s no curse, your team just sucked for an entire century.

I hate the Cubs.

I hate these NL playoffs.