The Cubs are cursed??

Maybe I should stop this whole prediction thing. First I pick the Patriots to win it all in football...then Tom Brady can't even play a whole quarter before he's out for the year and now the Cubs have been swept out of the postseason again after I pick them to win the World Series. You can't really blame me though, this October was supposed to be different. It turned out to be different only in the sense that this year expectations were higher, so the disappointment will be even deeper for Cubs fans.

The Cubs scored six runs in three Division Series games against the Dodgers, the lowest output coming in the 3-1 loss on Saturday night that sealed their exit.
They had a terrible pitching performance in Game 1 and a brutal fielding performance in Game 2. They didn't produce timely hitting throughout. Add it up; 0-3 was all that could be expected.
This was a club with 97 regular-season victories, the National League's best record. That record was supposed to be a springboard to postseason triumph. Instead, the postseason performance was agonizingly short of the regular-season record.

The Cubs, though, added a new element to the possible range of postseason blunders. The Cubs' mistakes started early in this Division Series, even before Game 1 started. The Cubs' mistakes started with an attempt to undo a curse.

Manager Lou Piniella has spent two seasons trying to convince his players that the past counts for nothing, that the only thing that matters is the baseball that is played now. And then the chairman of the Cubs gets a Greek Orthodox priest to perform an exorcism of sorts, in order to counteract an alleged 63-year-old billy goat curse on the club.
Cubs management should be criticized for missing the entire point of what might be wrong with its baseball team.
A TBS camera recorded the priest spreading holy water around the Cubs dugout, which is how the Cubs players and the rest of the civilized world learned of it.
At the very moment the Cubs were trying to break the 100-year championship drought, by just playing baseball, the focus on the curse moved the Cubs backward into the past and into superstition.
There is no curse of the billy goat unless you believe that there is. And believing in that is like believing in this:
"Step on a crack, break your mother's back."

The Cubs are not losing games because a guy's goat was denied admission to the 1945 World Series. But they might be losing games because a lot of people keep distracting them from the task at hand by asking them about junk like the curse on a daily basis, annoyingly planting the seed that they have the weight of history on their shoulders, and/or that they are playing for a hopeless cause.
The blessing of the Cubs' dugout did not exactly transform the team's fortunes. The Cubs' play was tense, tight, and stretched to the breaking point by 100 years' worth of expectations. That's their real curse.
The story of the billy goat and the curse is a funny story. When you take it any further than that, you sink into the depths of superstition.
But by bringing in the priest and the holy water, the organizational position of the Chicago Cubs is that there is a curse. And if the Cubs really believe that they are cursed, there doesn't seem to be much point in playing the 162-game schedule, not to mention the postseason. Then you're just playing the games because of all the money there is to be made. By the way, if somebody really cursed the Cubs, wouldn't he make sure that they were, you know, broke?

Not winning a World Series in 100 years puts a load on a team. It isn't fair, but it's there. The Cubs had a golden opportunity to make some history and break some history here. They blew it. But it wasn't because they were cursed. The single bad thing about a curse would be believing in it. And when the management of your team actually tries to counteract a curse...well...you get swept right out of the playoffs.