Chicago Sports

Jim Post was one of the most irrepressible stars of Chicago’s folk music scene in the 1970s and 1980s.

He could sing, act, write a hit song and plays, make you believe he was Mark Twain reincarnated, shred on his guitar and reach — and endlessly hold — the high notes with a ringing tenor that would raise goosebumps.

“He was a lovable imp on stage,” said theater producer Richard Friedman, a longtime friend. “He’d do anything to entertain.”

At the end of his shows, he’d tell the audience, “If you keep coming to see me, I’ll never get a real job.”

“He told his life story pretty much in any show,” said musician Randy Sabien, who toured the country and Canada with him.

When the singer first approached him about working together, “He exploded into the dressing room,” Sabien said. “That’s how Jim Post entered any room.”

Mr. Post, 82, died of heart failure Sept. 14 while in hospice care in Dubuque, Iowa, according to his friend Bob Postel, who said he had been in failing health for two years.

He made more than 20 records, most of them solo performances but one recorded with his first wife Cathy Post as Friend & Lover, in 1967, for which he wrote his one major hit song: “Reach Out of the Darkness.”

Produced by Joe South and Bill Lowery, its earnest flower-power lyrics have been used endlessly since then on TV soundtracks and in commercials to conjure the ’60s.

“Mad Men” featured the song in its season 6 episode “Man With a Plan.” Its chirpy refrain — “I think it’s so groovy now that people are finally getting together” — was used to jarring effect as the show ended with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

It also was sampled in “People Come Together” by the group Len in the 2003 Steve Martin-Bonnie Hunt film “Cheaper by the Dozen.”

“Jim told me he got the idea for the song when he was at a festival and walking through a crowd and heard a guy say, ‘You know it’s so groovy now that people are starting to get together,’ ” said Lilli Kuzma, host of “Folk Festival” on the Glen Ellyn public radio station WDCB-FM.

The album cover and 45 read: “Reach Out of the Darkness.” But Friedman said the duo sang: “Reach Out in the Darkness.”

“The record company blew it,” Friedman said. “They gave it the wrong name — and that became the name that stuck.”

The hit earned Mr. Post “mailbox money” from royalties.

“He could go to the mailbox once or twice a year and have a hefty reward from that one song,” Sabien said.

The song has been performed nearly 1.9 million times on U.S. radio, according to Broadcast Music, Inc., a company that handles rights and royalties for songwriters.

Before forming Friend & Lover, Mr. Post played in Chicago with the Rumrunners, a Kingston Trio-like group, singer-songwriter Ed Holstein said.

He lived at various times in Chicago, San Francisco, a converted one-room schoolhouse in Stoughton, Wisconsin, and Galena, among other places.

He recorded or shared stages with performers including John Prine, Steve Goodman, Bonnie Koloc, Ed Holstein and Fred Holstein, Michael Smith, Bob Gibson, Anne Hills, Bill Quateman, Steve Wade and Ginni Clemmens. He opened for Cream and hung out with Janis Joplin and Jerry Garcia.

Friends say he also spoke of having had a brief meeting while in California with Charles Manson, when Manson was trying to break into music.

He regularly performed at venues including the Earl of Old Town, the Old Town School of Folk Music, Harry Hope’s in Cary and Amazingrace in Evanston, where, in 1978, he closed the place, playing the club’s final show alongside Goodman, Tom Dundee and Corky Siegel, the harmonica and piano-playing leader of Corky Siegel’s Chamber Blues.

Onstage, Siegel said, “He was a wildman. He was my favorite. I think he was just the greatest in the Chicago folk scene.”

“He was a consummate performer,” Ed Holstein said. “His energy was boundless.”

“He always performed with great enthusiasm and hit high notes few others could go for,” Koloc said. “Jim gave many people a lot of enjoyment over a long career.”

And he could riff about a piece of furniture onstage and make it “jaw-droppingly funny,” Sabien said.

Young Jim grew up on a farm in Harris County, Texas, about 20 miles outside Houston amid “piney woods and blackberry thickets,” he once said. Though his father had just a third-grade education, Mr. Post wrote about how the elder James Post would beguile the future singer’s mother with extemporaneous poetry:

“Driving down the road . . . with his family with his elbow out the window — drifting through his thoughts — he would start talking to mama. This is when he would be struck by the god of poetry and send my mother’s heart fluttering like a teenage girl. ‘Oh James,’ she would say, ‘You talk like a poet.’ And he would reply, ‘Ollie, don’t make fun of me,’ and she would slide across the beltless seat and whisper in his ear and lean her head on his shoulder. He loved her so that he let her tell him when he could go dancing with whiskey.”

Even when he was little, Jim Post’s talent was apparent.

“I was born with a range of 3 1/2 octaves,” he said in a 1972 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. “I was a rather successful evangelistic singer, playing over 500 churches around the country until I was 22.”

In another Sun-Times interview, he said: “I learned to sing by bein’ a Southern Baptist. My mother was a singer — just around the house but with a voice just as big as Mahalia Jackson’s. She’d sing doin’ the housework, with tears in her eyes, listenin’ to some fool preacher on the radio. And me milkin’ cows ’bout 1200 yards down he line, singin’ harmony.”

By first grade, he’d won an all-school talent contest and scored a performance on the radio.

“The adoration he received from his fellow schoolmates upon his return to school shaped his life,” according to a biography for one of his plays.

For about 40 years, he lived in Galena, which inspired him to write his first one-man play, “Galena Rose: How Whiskey Won the West.” After a spell at the Civic Theatre at the Lyric Opera House, he walked into the Organic Theater Company and landed a booking there. It was so successful it moved to the main stage, Friedman said.

Proclaimed songwriter-laureate of Galena, Mr. Post reinvented himself in the later years of his career by portraying Twain onstage. He married his original songs with the humorist’s own words in two one-man musicals he wrote and performed: “Mark Twain and the Laughing River” and “Mark Twain’s Adventures Out West.”

He performed the plays thousands of times at venues including the Smithsonian Institution, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and Vienna’s English Theatre in Austria.

His song “Mighty Big River,” from “Mark Twain and the Laughing River.” was featured in the 2002 Ken Burns film, “Mark Twain.”

Mr. Post was always at home onstage. Once, spotting a friend from Chicago in the audience while performing in Jackson, Wyoming, he did a double-take but never broke character as Twain.

“I know you,” he said. “You’re a silver miner from Virginia City!”

At Chicago’s Organic Theater Company, Mr. Post also did a popular show for children, the “Cookie Crumb Club,” with songs like “Frog in the Kitchen Sink” and “Jellyfish Jamboree.”

“Performing for kids,” he said in 1990, “is like performing for happy drunks.”

He also performed an original play, “The Heart of Christmas,” at the Lakeshore Theater, now the Laugh Factory at 3175 N. Broadway.

In addition to “Reach Out of the Darkness” still being heard in the occasional TV commercial, he appeared in one himself, in the late 1980s, for Wendy’s hamburgers.

He had great memories of the legendary Chicago folk music scene. In 2013, after the death of Earl Pionke, owner of the storied Earl of Old Town, Mr. Post told the Sun-Times: “If I could step back in time, there is nowhere I would rather be than walking through the front door of the Earl of Old Town and hear Earl yell out ‘Post!’ and hug me so hard that I thought he was going to break my ribs.”

“He was married four times,” Postel said, “and I was his best man for three” weddings. “That was a standing joke. He’d say, ‘Bob’s always my best man.’ “

A celebration of Mr. Post’s life will be held from noon to 7 p.m. Oct. 10 at Galena’s Turner Hall, according to his friend Lori Rische, with potluck food, BYOB and music. At 3 p.m. that day, a pastor is to do a tribute, and friends will tell stories, Rische said.

Friedman said he also hopes to organize a musical celebration in Chicago.

In his final moments, the singer was listening to “Three Soft Touches,” a song he’d written about the courtship of his grandparents Jeff and Louella Post and about Jeff Post’s death. He called it the “most sensitive song I ever wrote in my life.” It goes:

Grandpa’s last thoughts came straight from his heart

No words were heard in the quiet room

A worn-out old hand on a soft cotton dress

She cradled the hand like a rose bloom

Now that’s when the feeble fingers flickered

As if testing the heatof a warm open fire

A familiar touch for so many years

To touch one last time, to touch and go higher

To a city of light

A peaceful warm planet

A place where he had never been

With three soft touches on her leg he said ‘I love you’

Then my grandpa was lifted by the cold dark wind

Years ago while they were still courting

Three soft touches of a warm youthful hand

Their own private way to say that ‘I love you’

To bring them together in love’s gentle land

And Grandma didn’t move she sat by him quietly

Clear dark eyes, not one shining tear

Early the next morning, with the family at breakfast

A story of love she felt we should hear

She said “Oh how I loved our first ten years together

Your daddy, the girls, laughter and cheer

But I loved him no better

Than our last years together

I tell you I know why they’re called golden years

And your grandpa’s last thoughts came straight from his heart

I know you didn’t hear a word in the room

But the three soft touches on my leg

He said ‘I love you’

Then your grandpa took off like a hawk to the moon.”

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The White Sox desperately needed a sweep this week.

Instead, it was the Cleveland Guardians who showed their superiority and got one.

With a 4-2 loss Thursday at Guaranteed Rate Field, the Sox (76-74) lost for the third night in a row against the American League Central leading Guardians (83-67) to fall seven games out of first place. The Guardians lowered their magic number to clinch to five, leaving the Sox to contemplate one of their most disappointing seasons in memory with 12 games to go.

“We knew what we had to do this series and we weren’t able to do it,” right fielder Gavin Sheets said. “It’s frustrating, it’s disappointing, but it’s not just this series. We had to play better all season.”

The Sox got an RBI single from Eloy Jimenez in the first and Sheets’ 14th homer in the eighth but six zeros in between against Shane Bieber (12-8, 2.81 ERA). The Guardians, swift and aggressive on the bases, used two infield singles and one to the outfield to score a run against Johnny Cueto (7-9, 3.15) in the first, and got two sacrifice flies from Jose Ramirez for his 116th and 117th RBI.

Cueto allowed eight hits and a walk and struck out three. One of the runs was unearned because of his error on a pickoff attempt.

“That is a very young team,” Cueto said. “They run, and they hustle. They play hard. And they put the ball in play. That’s all they do.”

Cueto, who questioned the Sox’ “fire” on Aug. 10, said “that improved” since then.

“What can I say? I’m just going to speak for myself,” Cueto said. “I was giving my best every single time. And I think I did on the field. I left my best there and to me that’s the only thing I can control.”

The Guardians, who won for the 15th time in their last 18 games, won the season series 12-7 with the Sox, which gives them a tiebreaker they all but certainly won’t need.

The Sox hadn’t lost two straight under acting manager Miguel Cairo until this series.

“Since Aug. 31 [Cairo’s first win], they decide to play, they decide to battle,” Cairo said. “They went and did everything and I’m proud. Just because we lost this series, if you look back from Aug. 31 we won, what [five] series, and they fought. They give everything. We just fell short to a really good team.”

Anderson “feeling fine”

The closer the White Sox get to official elimination from the postseason, the less likely Michael Kopech (shoulder) will return when he’s eligible to come off the IL.

Cairo said he expects Tim Anderson (finger) to return, however. Anderson faced 10 pitches of live batting practice from Davis Martin Thursday.

No Robert

Luis Robert missed his second straight start due to a sore left wrist that has hampered him since a head-first slide into second base on Aug. 12 against the Tigers.

“He’s still a little sore but he wants to play,” Cairo said. “I say, ‘Let’s see how it feels tomorrow and we will figure it out.’ ”

Starters fine

Sox starters own a 2.65 ERA over the last 21 games and rank among American League leaders since Aug. 31 in ERA (first), opponents average (second), WHIP (third) and strikeouts (fourth).

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Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th) likely said it best as she watched her colleagues approve a multi-million dollar training center for the Chicago Fire soccer team on West Side land originally set aside for public housing:

“The [Chicago Housing Authority’s] Plan for Transformation has failed,” she said.

Is there any other way to look at it?

The City Council voted 36 to 11 Wednesday to allow the privately-owned soccer team to build an $80 million training center on 26 acres of CHA-owned land bounded by Roosevelt Road, Ashland Avenue, 14th Street and Loomis Street.

The vote adds insult to a very old injury. The CHA’s Plan for Transformation, launched in 2000, has fallen years — if not decades — behind on its promise to build new mixed-income communities that would include public housing residents.

As a result of this backlog, the CHA sits on acres of undeveloped land where new housing is supposed to be built. At least 30,000 people are on its waitlist for a place to live.

The Chicago Fire soccer facility will be good for the community, its aldermanic supporters said during the City Council meeting.

Perhaps. The potential is there. But honoring the promise to build housing there would have been far better.

CHA giving up on providing housing for ‘most vulnerable’?

The bright spot here is that the land, part of the old ABLA Homes site that was demolished in 2007, won’t be just given away to build the soccer facility.

The Chicago Fire will pay the CHA $8 million up front, then nearly $800,000 a year in rent under a 40-year lease that has two 10-year renewal options.

The site’s alderperson, Jason Ervin (28th), said the plan has the support of those living nearby.

And although the facility is just a portion of the former ABLA’s undeveloped acreage, it can’t be lost that the land was set aside for housing and already should have been used for that.

According to the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, the CHA and developer Related Midwest have built only 245 of the 775 housing units pledged for the ABLA site, which has been rebranded Roosevelt Square.

“We have an agency, the Chicago Housing Authority, that is supposed to provide housing for the most vulnerable, and instead of building housing they want to give that land to a soccer team,” Rod Wilson, executive director of the Lugenia Burns Hope Center, an affordable housing advocate, told WTTW and ProPublica last June.

“It seems that the CHA wants to get out of the business of providing quality housing for families,” Wilson said.

Next stop: Washington D.C.

The Chicago Fire “deserves to have a high-quality training facility,” Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in a statement after the City Council vote.

She’s right. The team, which plays its home games in Soldier Field, is an asset to Chicago.

But those who are eligible for public housing are equally deserving of the residences that were promised them two decades ago in what was supposed to signal a new day for the CHA.

It’s unfair that potential residents face decades-long waitlists for housing, while a sports team gets ushered behind the velvet rope onto public housing land.

At a time when affordable and low-income housing that’s close to transit and jobs is becoming increasingly scarce, the city should be trying harder to clear up the Plan for Transformation’s backlog, rather than stumping for a soccer facility on CHA land.

The City Council doesn’t have final word on the issue, fortunately. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development must approve the Fire’s land lease with the CHA.

It’s up to the feds to ask serious questions about how the soccer facility will fit with the CHA’s stated mission of building better housing and neighborhoods for those most in need.

The Sun-Times welcomes letters to the editor and op-eds. See our guidelines.

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The White Sox played the Cleveland Guardians Thursday in a game that didn’t matter. You could feel it in the clubhouse, on the field and in the crisp autumn air that re-introduced itself to Guaranteed Rate Field.

While not mathematically eliminated from the postseason, the Sox were essentially dumped from contention when they lost the first game of the series in 11 innings Tuesday. The body bags on a disastrous season were zipped shut Wednesday by a lackluster 8-2 loss.

For some fans, there was a sense of relief, like losing an aging loved one who had suffered too long. In this case, fans were put out of their misery, having watched what many say is the most disappointing Sox season in memory.

World Series expectations, trumpeted by the front office itself, are at the root of it. The owner hired a manager who was supposed to bring his rebuilt franchise to baseball’s upper tier, but the manager did nothing to elevate the assembled talent.

There were injuries, as acting manager Miguel Cairo lamented Thursday. A plethora of them. But every team had injuries, and when healthy the 2022 Sox didn’t play well enough to win perhaps the weakest division in baseball. They were lucky to be in contention as long as they were and openly admitted it.

As Lance Lynn succinctly put it Wednesday, “Nothing surprises me, especially when you play like [crap] all year.”

They left the good playing to the youngest team in the major leagues, the Guardians, who showed them up with 11 wins in the first 18 games between them, out-hustling and out-performing them for six months of the season.

So now what?

It’s hard to imagine under any scenario, for the good of the players, the franchise or the manager himself at age 78 and with heart issues that Tony La Russa will return in 2023. Moving to an advisory role upstairs in some capacity for the final year of his contract seems to make sense. Whether general manager Rick Hahn returns would be open to more serious debate if not for the loyalty of chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, that renown loyalty which prompted him to hire La Russa again two years ago.

Look no further than Kansas City where the Royals, who won back to back American League titles and a World Series in 2015, dismissed general manager Dayton Moore Wednesday. Hahn and executive vice president Ken Williams should be held to equally high standards for fans who waited patiently through a rebuild and have enjoyed all of three playoff game victories since the 2005 World Series championship.

Williams, as GM, and Hahn, as assistant GM, remain in charge, watching Reinsdorf’s store.

While Hahn and Williams added Elvis Andrus on Aug. 19, the lone addition of lefty reliever Jake Diekman at the trade deadline wasn’t enough to make a difference, especially for a roster scoffing at the notion that defense matters, and one that often left its baseball smarts on the bus. Perhaps Reinsdorf, already shelling out for his highest payroll ever, reached his limit.

Discussions have already begun internally about what to do next. When payroll is seventh in baseball and the 27th team in payroll beats you going away, when La Russa is hired and it all fails, change is inevitable.

Players, management, ownership, they’re all responsible.

Meanwhile, Miguel Cairo managed again in La Russa’s place, carrying a 13-8 record into Thursday. Perhaps he’s a candidate to be a full-time manager. It’s one of many topics of conversation going on upstairs at 35th and Shields.

“Some other teams after the All-Star break, they got better, they made some trades,” Cairo said. “We made the playoffs last year, we came up short against Houston. And this year, all the injuries that we’ve been having, it’s been tough.”

Cairo’s focus then shifted to a game that didn’t mean much, if anything.

“You’re a professional baseball player, playing in the big leagues, you’ve got to be ready to come and work and play hard,” Cairo said. “This is not over.”

It sure doesn’t feel that way.

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PITTSBURGH – With an immaculate inning on the line, Cubs rookie Hayden Wesneski went back to his slider down and away. Pirates catcher Jason Delay swung over it, securing Wesneski’s place in the club’s record books.

In just his fourth major-league outing, he threw the fifth immaculate inning on record from a Cubs pitcher. It was the first since LaTroy Hawkins’ in 2004 against the Marlins. Lynn McGlothen (1979), Bruce Sutter (1977 and Milt Pappas (1971) are the only other Cubs pitchers known to have thrown an immaculate inning, according to team historian Ed Hartig.

In the Cubs’ 3-2 win against the Pirates Thursday, Wesneski achieved the feat by striking out Jack Suwinski, Zack Collins and Delay in the fifth inning, on nine straight strikes.

The pitch that dealt the final blow was also one Wesneski worked to refine last week.

“That’s what makes me excited about him is it’s not just the pitcher that we’re getting,” assistant pitching coach Daniel Moskos said in a conversation with the Sun-Times before Wesneski held the Pirates to two runs in 6 1/3 innings. “It’s the pitcher that we could potentially have in the future. Because when he’s not good at something, he wants to work on it, he wants to find the problem, what didn’t lead to success or what led to success. Let’s continue to do that, or let’s work on the adjustment. He’s just got a good head on his shoulders.”

Moskos had worked closely with Wesneski when they overlapped in the Yankees organization. But the rookie has made a strong early impression since the Cubs acquired him the day before the trade deadline for reliever Scott Effross.

Wesneski threw five shutout innings out of the bullpen in his major-league debut against the Reds early this month. But in his second outing, he kept leaving his slider over the plate, and the Giants got ahold of it for a pair of home runs.

“That’s an issue he’s run into at times previously in his career,” Moskos said.” And you see just how impactful the difference is. He had a good strike slider, but he didn’t have the put-away slider, he just wasn’t able to get it to his glove side.”

Wesneski has made the adjustment by his outing, in his first major-league start. He made sure his early misses with the slider were comfortably off the plate, and then he worked in from there. He generated five whiffs with his slider, on his way to seven innings of one-run ball against the Rockies.

In a conversation with the Sun-Times this week, Wesneski shrugged off the quick adjustment as something he’d done before, with an array of pitches.

“It’s one of those things that you keep tally of in your head,” he said. “Like, ‘Hey, this pitch is going here a lot. Look, I’m tired of it going there. Let’s move it.’ Right? Eventually you’ve just got to stop being so stubborn and say, ‘I’m not throwing it here. I don’t care if it goes to the backstop, I don’t care if it goes 40 feet; it’s not going where it’s been going.'”

The slider, in all of its forms, played a big role in Wesneski’s immaculate inning. He struck out Suwinski, a left-handed hitter, on a backdoor slider that hooked into the zone for a called third strike.

Facing Collins, another lefty, Wesneski followed a first-pitch changeup and two sliders down and in. After watching the changeup, Collins whiffed on the first slider. He let the second go for a called third strike.

Against Delay, a right-handed hitter, Wesneski threw a 0-1 slider that ended over the heart of the plate. Delay froze. Then, it was time for Wesneski’s put-away slider.

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Amundsen is on the rise. That’s the consensus around the city. The North Side school was overshadowed academically and athletically by several rivals over the past couple of decades but that is changing.

The Vikings’ football team has mirrored the school’s overall progress. Coach Nick Olson’s program has qualified for the Illinois High School Association state playoffs for the past three seasons.

Amundsen was 5-5 in 2018-19, then 7-2 in 2019-20 and 8-2 last season. The Vikings haven’t managed to win a state playoff game yet, but every program has to start somewhere. Those three state appearances, the first in school history, have changed the team’s focus.

“We need to get better as a team and we need to get in the weight room,” Olson said. “The kids did that the last six months. The got right to work to get bigger and stronger and faster. That’s what separated us from Crystal Lake Central in that playoff game last year.”

Amundsen dominated Sullivan 42-0 on Thursday at Winnemac Park. The Vikings (3-2, 3-0 Red-North Central) have a star in wide receiver Adam Muench.

The 6-2, 200-pound senior had five receptions for 124 yards and four touchdowns. The second touchdown was the most spectacular. Muench made a leaping one-handed grab and then ran past or through nearly every player on Sullivan’s defense for a 55-yard TD.

“The kid catches everything,” Olson said. “I’m baffled that he doesn’t have offers pouring in. He’s super coachable and I think he leads the state with 18 or 19 receiving touchdowns. [Quarterback Chris Clark] trusts him and knows that he will make a play every time we need it.”

Muench also caught touchdown passes from Clark of six, 38 and 18 yards. Clark was 9-for-16 passing for 196 yards with four touchdowns and no interceptions.

“We are playing on a whole different level this season,” Muench said. “We have some young dogs on the line and a new quarterback has made a big difference.”

Clark missed all of last year with an injury. He’s forged a solid connection with Muench this season.

“[Muench] is obviously very talented and athletic,” Clark said. “He’s also a very smart dude and that makes things easier.”

Clark has enjoyed watching and taking part in Amundsen’s recent rise.

“Every year I’ve seen the spirit grow and change in the school,” Clark said. “Everybody wants to be here and come to games. It’s a fun and safe environment and I love it. I’m glad I chose Amundsen.”

The Vikings’ defense, led by linebacker Jaime Garfias, held Sullivan (2-3, 2-1) to just 23 rushing yards.

“We just had to play physical and fill the gaps,” Garfias said. “As long as we do that and don’t make mistakes we will have a good day.”

The Tigers advanced to the state playoffs in Class 4A last season, but find themselves facing much larger schools in the regular season. Sullivan has fewer than 700 students.

“It’s kind of crazy but I’m all about no excuses,” Sullivan coach Calvin Clark said. “We are going up against schools double, triple and quadruple our size but at the end of the day we have to play ball. It’s an honor to be the only Class 4A school on this side of the town. We’ve been to the state playoffs four years in a row.”

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Could this be the end of Mitch Trubisky’s career as a starter?

Former Chicago Bears quarterback Mitch Trubisky is starting his third game for the Pittsburgh Steelers Thursday night. Trubisky will lead the Steelers’ offense against the Cleveland Browns on the road. Trubisky, who has struggled in his first two games with the Steelers, might have a quarterback controversy in Pittsburgh sooner than he’d like.

Per Ian Rapoport of the NFL Network, the Steelers coaches are paying close attention to tonight’s Week 3 performance by Trubisky as they decide what course to take the team for the rest of the season. The Steelers expect Trubisky to take chances throwing down the field to save his starting job.

Mitch Trubisky’s performance in the Steelers’ first two weeks has fans agitating for rookie Kenny Pickett to replace him. (They were already doing that in early training camp.) It would be a sweet sort of irony if Pickett were to relieve Trubisky following Thursday Night Football. Trubisky took the job away from Mike Glennon following Glennon’s awful performance in TNF against the Packers in Week 4 of the 2017 regular season.

We’ll see what passes Trubisky makes on prime-time streaming Thursday night. If he’s unable to chuck the ball downfield against the Browns, we can anticipate seeing Pickett shortly for the Steelers. According to Rapoport, the Steelers have determined that Pickett will be the future of the team in the future. But Trubisky has an opportunity to put up good tape this season for another starting job.

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PITTSBURGH – Cubs shortstop Nico Hoerner fielded the ground ball and, for the first time since straining his right triceps a week and a half ago, threw across the diamond to first base.

“It was solid,” he said before the Cubs series opener against the Pirates on Thursday. “I feel like I wasn’t changing my throwing motion or anything and felt healthy doing it.”

The Cubs classified the strain as “mild to moderate,” and have not put Hoerner on the injured list. Hoerner confirmed Thursday that he still expects to return before the end of the season.

“I’m not going to do it if it doesn’t make sense physically,” he said. “But if I’m in a place where I’m healthy and there’s a good chunk of games left – if it’s 30 or 40 at bats left to have, I think that’s valuable time, and it’s fun, and just a chance to finish the year on the field and take that in the offseason.

“It’s not a need to check this or that box statistically or anything like that. It’s just, you really only get to play for so long. So, when you do have the chance and you’re healthy, I do want to be out there.”

Hoerner has already played a career-high 125 games this season. His previous season high came in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, when he played 48 games. Last year, he was limited by a series of injuries, including a strained left hamstring and a strained right oblique.

“Those are core baseball muscles, you hear those words all the time, and those are ones that you want to be on top of and know how to take care of yourself,” Hoerner said.”So, it’s too bad that I had to miss time to learn that process. But I’m really proud of how I played throughout [this] year physically, being able to play every single day, going through the long stretch we had in August pretty much playing every game and feeling good physically. I mean, honestly, the best I felt physically [all season] was in early September.”

South Bend champions

The Single-A South Bend Cubs claimed the Midwest League title in a 7-4 win against Lake County on Wednesday.

“Putting your organization and your players in the championship environment, in the playoff environment, is extremely helpful,” Cubs manager David Ross said. “Because there’s a development process that you go through in the minor leagues and things that you do throughout a season that may not be all about just winning that day.

“And once you get to that winning environment, you get to learn those little details about what it takes to do that. And the more we get guys in that space, the better off we’ll be.”

Three Cubs minor-league affiliates made their respective playoffs this year. The Low-A Myrtle Beach Pelicans fell in their division series. The Double-A Tennessee Smokies played Game 2 of their division series on Thursday.

Suzuki not expected in Pittsburgh

Rightfielder Seiya Suzuki is not expected back during a four-game series. As of Thursday afternoon, he and his wife were still awaiting the birth of their child. The Cubs put Suzuki on the paternity list last Saturday, and when he reached the three-day maximum, they transferred him to the restricted list as a procedural move.

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Fresh off scoring just 10 points in a loss to the Packers, Bears offensive coordinator Luke Getsy defended a game plan that resulted in the least productive passing game of the young NFL season.

Regardless of the opponent, regardless of having a young quarterback in Justin Fields and regardless of Getsy being just two games into his coordinating career, this is a time for adjustments rather than stubbornness.

Fields threw 11 passes against the Packers, including only one on the opening drive of the fourth quarter when the Bears still had a chance, and completed seven for 70 yards. He is the only NFL starter to throw fewer than 20 passes in a game this season and has done so twice.

Fields said he doesn’t care how many passes he throws as long as the Bears win, but there was neither prolific passing nor victory in Green Bay. The Bears ran for 203 yards, but all it gained them was a 24-7 deficit at halftime and a thudding loss to their archrival.

Getsy said he called 19 or 20 pass plays — three were lost to sacks, one was negated when Fields crossed the line of scrimmage before throwing and the rest morphed into scrambles — out of the Bears’ meager 41 snaps on offense.

“I know that it’s the NFL [and] everyone’s throwing it 30 or 40 times a game, but we only had 41 snaps,” Getsy said Thursday. “And when you run the ball the way that we did … That’s part of it.

“What gives us the best chance to succeed? Were our matchups favorable to us? Last week we felt like there were parts of the run game that we felt like we had a pretty good matchup, and we were able to get seven [gains of 10-plus yards]. That’s a lot of explosives in the run game.”

Sure, but again, where did it get the Bears? And where will that type of game plan get them going forward? Playing that way probably won’t beat even the lowly Texans on Sunday.

The reason “everyone’s throwing it 30 or 40 times a game” is because that’s how to win in the modern NFL. Over the past decade, teams that threw for fewer than 100 yards went 41-91-1.

Fields needs a legitimate opportunity to show he can drive the Bears’ offense, as opposed to letting defenses dictate that. The best quarterbacks can overcome any scheme, and the most important thing for the Bears this season is determining whether Fields has that capacity.

And getting only 41 plays isn’t some misfortune that inexplicably befell Getsy and the Bears. It’s directly tied to how bad their offense was. There’s no one else to blame for that.

That was the fewest offensive plays by any team this season and the fifth-fewest over the last five. They went three-and-out on four consecutive possessions beginning in the second quarter.

Despite their many missteps offensively, the Bears opened the fourth quarter with an opportunity to get back in the game, down 24-10. They drove 89 yards, powered mostly by running back David Montgomery, before facing fourth-and-goal from about a foot and a half out.

Getsy calleda run for Fields out of the shotgun, and he was stopped short by no more than a couple inches. He said he’d call it again if given a do-over.

“Yeah, we love that play,” Getsy said.

“That was our plan. We talked about it all week… That was exactly what we wanted; we just didn’t execute it well enough. We’ve got to get them coached up a little bit better so that they don’t make that mistake.”

Ultimately, even a touchdown would’ve left the Bears trailing by seven. After the Packers’ ensuing field-goal drive, they would’ve gotten the ball back down 10 with 2:28 left.

Too much went wrong and the outcome was too dismal to be this certain about that game plan.

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