Can the Cubs activate Sammy?

It's fitting that the Cubs are in Atlanta with their roster falling apart around them, because the playoff "chase" is starting to feel a lot like it did in 1998, but without somebody hitting a homer every day to entertain us.

Kyle Tucker remains out again, his fourth missed game in a row, with his strained calf. The Cubs keep saying he's close, and even though they have Moises Ballesteros hanging out on the taxi squad just in case he's needed, they keep playing shorthanded without Tucker. I'm sure Moises can do a number on room service in Atlanta, so he's probably cool with just hanging out.

The Cubs have no replacement for Tucker, and how could they? Nobody can replace their best player with 19 games to go in a season. Once again, they have Seiya Suzuki playing right, but this time Petecrow and his bruised knee served as the DH instead of either of their quadragenarian options, Justin Turner or Carlos Santana (quadragenarian is a real thing, but Carlos doesn't actually qualify. He's just 39.)

What would a Cubs playoff lineup look like if Tucker is out for the season? It would look an awful lot like what the 1998 Cubs playoff lineup would have looked like without Sammy. The only difference is, we'd only have to look at this 2025 version twice and then it would all be over.

Sammy was inducted, along with Derrek Lee into the prestigious Cubs Utility Tunnel of Fame over the weekend. Nobody noticed, again, because they did it, again on the first day of the NFL season. This time the Bears were off, but still it's a terrible time for this. One big difference this year is that the Cubs finally have a way to see who is in their "hall" online.

Last year, this either didn't exist, or nobody bothered to find a way to link to it. But there they are in all their glory.

The Cubs released one of their Breakdown videos late last week and it featured Sammy hitting homers 61 and 62 on September 13, 1998.

Sammy had a lot of fun helping them make this video.

That was quite a weekend. I got into some of it last week with my Orlando Merced thing, but it an incredible three days for Sammy. He went into the Brewers series with 57 homers. He was five behind Mark McGwire who had broken the record against the Cubs just a few days before.

And when the dust settled on that batshit crazy series with the Brewers, Sammy and McGwire were tied at 62.

Sammy hit 58 and 59 on Friday, 60 on Saturday, and then 61 and 62 on Sunday. And as ridiculous as that seems now, at the time we were excited and thrilled by it, but not surprised.

Sammy's numbers against the Brewers that year were I guess fairly decent. In 12 games he hit 12 homers against them. Twelve. He drove in 18 runs, stole three bases and slashed .378/.481/1.178.

So when he says this, he's not exaggerating.

The only team he slugged more against? His old pals, the White Sox.

Three homers in three games with a 1.250 slug. White Sox fans hate Sammy for all the best reasons.

Sammy would only hit four more homers the rest of the way, and McGwire hit eight, giving him 70 homers to drag home with him to Southern California while the Cubs were having all the fun, beating the Giants in the wild card play-in game, and then...well, never mind.

Just enjoy the video, and pray for Kyle Tucker's calf.

I've never been the biggest Dan Bernstein fan. I never hated him, but I always found him a little much. But where we missed him during his self-imposed sabbatical was when any story that needed some nuance would come up.

Had Dan still been on The Score on Monday, he'd have covered the Tyler Dunne series of articles on Caleb Williams and the dysfunction in the Bears organization last year, but he'd have been limited in the time they could devote to it.

On his podcast, he has no such limits, and so yesterday he gave Jack Silverstein nearly 45 uninterrupted minutes to explain the problems with Dunne's reporting, and how unfair the way the stories were written, sourced and credited are to Caleb, and to a lesser, but still real, extent, the Bears.

The result of the 45 minutes with Jack was a sane, rational, informative discussion of how Dunne's reporting manages to undermine whatever actual facts he actually did dig up. I'm not going to try to summarize what Jack talked about, because it deserves to be heard from him. It's well worth your time. But it's an eye opening look, not just at a guy with a Substack (Dunne) throwing a bunch of rumors at a wall, but it's pretty easy to take Jack's explanations of the shortcuts that Dunne took in it, and realize just how much of the real news we get has long ago stopped being properly sourced and vetted.

A lot of people who want to see Caleb fail went ahead and just retweeted the article without bothering to read it with any kind of objective eye, or even worse, without bothering to read it at all.

But you can't win with any of those morons, anyway.