The State brings up an interesting argument: Which baseball fans have had it worse – Cubs or Rays? The site goes into great detail and suggests that Tampa fans have had it worse.

Enough is enough: The poor, beleaguered Rays fan deserves a defense…Cheering for the Cubs is like carrying on with a rotten tooth; cheering for the Rays has, until this year, been like being stabbed in the face repeatedly with a butter knife.

Consider the plight of the Tampa Bay baseball fan. For pretty much the entire 20th century, he didn’t even have a team. If you don’t count that as suffering, consider that in the 1980s and 1990s, his city was regularly used as a means to extort other baseball-having cities into building new stadiums—the Twins, White Sox, Rangers, Mariners, and Giants all teased Floridian fans with threats to move to Tampa/St. Petersburg, but none of those deals came to pass. When Tampa did finally get a team in 1998, they instantly became the worst franchise in baseball—and perhaps in all of American pro sports.

Since 1998, the Cubs fan has watched his team play in October four times; the Rays fan has watched his lose 90 games 10 times. While the Cubs fan has taken in games at Wrigley Field, the finest park in the major leagues, the Rays fan has trudged into Tropicana Field, the only park in baseball whose ground rules distinguish between four possible calls that can be made on balls that strike one of several catwalks suspended over the field…Cubs right fielder Sammy Sosa hit 129 home runs in 1998 and 1999; former Rays right fielder Aubrey Huff is the team’s career leader with 128. On a given game night there are probably 8,000 Cubs fans drinking on Clark Street; the Rays could muster only 8,000 fans to a recent rally celebrating their epic ascent to the postseason.

I guess the question really becomes, is it a great suffering to have your team make the postseason but never win anything? Or never make the postseason at all? Personally, I would much rather have my team make the postseason every couple of years than to know they have no hope and then proceed to watch them lose 90 games. Although I’m never going to be the one to tell a Cubs fan they haven’t suffered.

After being swept by the Dodgers in the NLDS, Rick Telander of the Chicago Sun-Times writes that this is the worst Cubs postseason collapse to date.

The Cubs are now 9-22 in postseason play since 1984. They’re 0-6 the last two years. They’re 18-50 since they last won a World Series in 1908.

In this final game of 2008, starting pitcher Rich Harden was average, and everybody else … aw, the whole team simply stunk.

This is the thing about Cubs players and managers. They always say they don’t believe in curses, they don’t believe in any of that nonsense, they only play ‘em one game at a time.

This may all be true. Indeed, there are times when I believe Soriano is not sure what planet he is on, let alone what century.

But the fans, the people who live in Chicago, the ones who aren’t on free-agent contracts but who throw in with the Cubs year after year, without fail, from childhood ’til senility — those are the people who get wounded again and again, without let up, without relief.
One hundred years are over, and now we start on another century.

To trust in the Cubs is to expect — and get — the worst.

Cubs fans deserve better. There seems to be the belief that Cubs fans almost want the club to lose so that they can remain everybody’s “lovable losers.” But not true Cub fans – they’re dying right now with each excruciating loss. When a team wins 97 games and runs away with their division, one would think they could produce one postseason victory.

Maybe curses are real.