The Chicago Cubs are preparing for a decisive offseason as the direction of the team will be explicitly identified in regard to whether the endgame is for the team to be contending in 2025 or if the team will be contenting as early as next season.

After finishing 2021 in fourth place in the National League Central Division, the Cubs appear destined to finish the 2022 season in third place. This will mark the second consecutive season where the team has missed the postseason and the team is no longer afforded the same benefit of the doubt that they had during their initial rebuild from 2011-2015.

To the Cubs’ credit, they have flooded the minor league system with talented prospects with the likes of outfielder Pete Crow-Armstrong, outfielder Alexander Canario, starting pitcher Hayden Wesneski, and starting pitcher Caleb Killian added to the farm system over the course of the past year.

It is clear that the Cubs have the peripheral pieces to a team that can be contenders within the next year or two with the likelihood that Crow-Armstrong emerges as a true superstar. But, the Cubs will need to make significant additions to the Major League team. Spending in free agency is something that fans have been calling for the Cubs to do again since 2018.

As the offseason nears, there have been indications that the Cubs plan on being active this winter. Chicago Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts told ESPN in August that spending in free agency is a part of the plan for the next contending Cubs team. Cubs’ president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer also confessed to reporters in August that he plans on being active this offseason.

Hoyer and Rickets have said these things before. There were glimpses of spending returning last offseason when the team signed outfielder Seiya Suzuki and starting pitcher Marcus Stroman to lucrative free-agent deals but then closed the wallet with the exception of minor signings of outfielder Jackson Frazier and veteran backup catcher Yan Gomes.

Suzuki figures to factor into the long-term plans of the Cubs whereas the future of Stroman is not so certain as he has an option for 2024. The signings were mixed signals for the Cubs as they indicated that the team was unclear on their direction.

The Cubs may look to remove that uncertainty this offseason. In his “REKAP” of the Cubs’ 4-1 victory over the New York Mets on Tuesday, NBC Sports Chicago insider David Kaplan reported that he has heard definitively that the Cubs are going to spend this offseason and that two of their targets are shortstop Trea Turner and starting pitcher Carlos Rodon. Furthermore, Kaplan reported that Turner and Rodon, both free agents this winter, are interested in the Cubs.

The Chicago Cubs plan on returning to contention next season with the goal of spending this offseason on top free agents.

At this point, it would appear to be shocking, if, at the end of the offseason, the Cubs do not have one of the four top free agent shortstops a part of their team. Report after report has surfaced over the past couple of months of how the Cubs will indeed land one of the top free agent shortstops this winter. Of the four-Turner, Carlos Correa, Xander Bogaerts, and Dansby Swanson-Correa and Bogaerts figured to be the two most likely with Turner falling in just behind them.

This is where we once again need to clarify that the Cubs adding a free agent shortstop is not any indicator of how the team feels about current starting shortstop Nico Hoerner. Hoerner is a long-term member of the future Cubs’ core and his infield flexibility allows for the Cubs to target one of these shortstops with the goal of improving their overall offense.

In regard to Rodon, there is no question that he fits the exact mold of the type of starting pitcher that the Cubs need to target this winter. What the Cubs appear to lack in regard to their future starting rotation is a true power pitcher that can sit at the top of the rotation. Rodon could certainly be that starting pitcher.

It is worth noting that both Turner and Rodon will likely have qualifying offers attached to them and there are reasons, as pointed out by Brett Taylor of Bleacher Nation, that it may be worth it for the Cubs to sign two players attached to a qualifying offer instead of one.

(Of course, if the Cubs *DID* look at these two, specifically, it would be slightly beneficial to get both, since they will both be Qualifying Offer guys, and stacking those signings in a single offseason reduces the draft pick cost associated with the signings. For example, the first one would cost the Cubs their second highest draft pick (and $500,000 in IFA bonus pool money), but the second such signing would cost only their third highest draft pick (and another $500,000 in IFA money). So it’s a little more “cost” effective to sign two such players in a single offseason if you’re looking to do it anyway.)

Looking beyond the names involved, the most encouraging piece in all of this is that Kaplan is not directly involved with the Cubs. Kaplan is certainly connected in regards to the Cubs and when he offers tidbits such as the one he did on Tuesday, there is definitely a reason to listen. The only direction for the Cubs this offseason is to spend on free agency and that is how they can return to contention in 2023.

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Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. 

Chicago Reader podcasts are recorded on Shure microphones. Learn more at Shure.com.

Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.

Read More

Right before the pandemic shutdown in 2020, TimeLine Theatre presented James Ijames’s sorrowful and powerful Kill Move Paradise, in which a group of Black men murdered by the police gather in a purgatorial afterlife, where a fax machine spits out an ever-growing list of more Black people killed by the state. At the same time that Kill Move Paradise was in production, Steppenwolf was preparing to open Ijames’s The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, starring Nora Dunn as the first First Lady facing her own hallucinatory hellscape on her deathbed.

The difference, of course, is that Martha Washington deserves the mental damnation she’s caught up in. She owned other human beings, after all. Sure, it’s possible to parse the historical record to find the loopholes that tell us that gosh, she just didn’t have the legal right to manumit the people she inherited from her first husband’s estate. And Queen Elizabeth II couldn’t single-handedly grant independence to countries colonized by the empire, but that doesn’t stop those oppressed in her name from celebrating her demise. (See Black Twitter, Irish Twitter, etc., etc.) The Black people in Martha’s household are ready to party when she goes. But first, they’re determined to hold their “mistress” accountable through a series of visitations and interrogations.

The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha WashingtonThrough 10/9: Tue-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; Wed 9/28, 2:30 PM only, Steppenwolf  Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $20-$96

Ijames’s play, now finally making its long-postponed Steppenwolf premiere, isn’t about making nice with White Woman Tears. When Cindy Gold’s Martha resorts to that tactic at one point in the show, it feels like watching any of numerous Karens-Caught-on-Camera videos on social media of nasty racist women pleading white innocence. His 90-minute piece draws on pop culture, from game shows to The People’s Court, where Martha tries to plead her case, to tease out the historical record. Director Whitney White’s superb ensemble leans into the anachronistic anarchy and hilarity of these interludes without losing sight of the characters’ underlying rage. 

What’s really on trial here (and this was also a theme in Kill Move Paradise, where our function as spectators to injustice was interrogated by the characters) is white complicity. Martha could free the slaves that George left her (and that he instructed in his will would be freed upon Martha’s death) at any time. All her hemming and hawing and poor-poor-pitiful-me posturing doesn’t cover up one simple fact: she doesn’t want to do it. She enjoys having other people in her power. 

More outrageously, she wants to continue the fiction that they actually love and care about her. Even as her deathbed nightmares (which at times evoke the visit of Ethel Rosenberg to Roy Cohn in Angels in America) convince her that the people she owns are plotting to kill her, she won’t do the obvious thing to fix that problem. As the chorus of slaves tells her near the end, “FREE us. Damn!”

It’s monstrous. It’s America. And Ijames’s play is about laughing bitterly in the face of the comforting myths constructed around the Founding Fathers and Mothers. That might seem like a bit of an easy target, but given how much of a price we’re still paying for coddling those who would rather have white supremacy than democracy . . . well.

The great strength of Ijames’s script is that it’s not merely a jeremiad about the evils of slavery. It’s about how the foundational ideals we claim as a nation have all been tainted by that original sin. Including the notion of “family.” Victor Musoni’s William visits Martha’s dream early on, reminding her that he is both her nephew and her grandson; his mother, Ann Dandridge (Nikki Crawford) is Martha’s half-sister, and his father was Martha’s stepson. Rape was one of the bedrocks of slavery; denial of family bonds came easy for those who profited by it. 

Gold’s Martha is a marvel of fluttery toxicity, playing up her self-imposed victimhood like a bird pretending to have a broken wing. Crawford’s Ann provides the moral center as a woman forced into the role of Martha’s boon companion. The pain of that grotesque relationship comes through clearly in quieter moments amid the madcap satirical narrative. Donovan Session and Carl Clemons-Hopkins as Sucky Boy and Davy, two of Martha’s slaves, deconstruct old minstrel tropes in their comic interactions. (Clemons-Hopkins is familiar to fans of Hacks as Marcus, the assistant to Jean Smart’s demanding comic diva; they also make a hilarious cameo as George, telling Gold’s Martha “That booty is checked and balanced!”) Sydney Charles and Celeste M. Cooper work in similar tandem as Priscilla and Doll, two of Martha’s slaves, and also as Abigail Adams and Betsy Ross (Izumi Inaba’s costumes provide their own running comedic commentary throughout). 

It’s crucial to understand that Ijames (who won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for his play Fat Ham) has framed this story as a dream/nightmare. But underneath the scattershot historical tidbits, righteous anger, and harsh laughter is a larger question: how much are we collectively responsible for each other and for the dream of the nation we share? And how long will it be till we do the right thing?

Read More

Never miss a copy! Paid print subscriptions are available for 12 issues, 26 issues, and for 52 issues from the Reader Store.

Chicago Reader 2022 print issue dates

The Chicago Reader is published in print every other week. Issues are dated Thursday. Distribution usually happens Wednesday morning through Thursday night of the issue date. Upcoming print issue dates through December 2022 are:

9/15/20229/29/202210/13/202210/27/202211/10/202211/24/202212/8/202212/22/2022

Download the full 2022 editorial calendar is here (PDF).

See our information page for advertising opportunities.

2023 print issue dates

The first print issue in 2023 will be published three weeks after the 12/22/2022 issue, the final issue of 2022. The print issue dates through March 2023 are:

1/12/20231/26/20232/9/20232/23/20233/9/20233/23/2023

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On Friday, September 16, Chicago singer, songwriter, and cartoonist Annie Fish will drop Weird Like Me, an album so steeped in classic alt-rock you’ll half believe Fish recorded it with Flood in 1993. Weird Like Me is a concept record about Fish’s childhood rock dreams, which she says she abandoned after seeing how the “powers that be” treated Billy Corgan and Courtney Love. She’s presenting it as the reissue of a long-lost album, for which she’s constructed an elaborate mythology, even posting an oral history about her fictional 90s alt-rock fame. Fortunately, you don’t need time travel to hear these songs live: on Saturday, September 17, Fish celebrates the album’s release at Cole’s Bar.

In the fictional 90s, Annie Fish were a band, but in real life, Fish recorded every instrument herself.

Gossip Wolf knows Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi of multi-media studio Sonnenzimmer mostly for their top-notch concert posters and their clever releases of their own music (Butcher’s 2020 album Saccadic consists of two cassettes—one filled with music, the other with concrete). In 2020, Butcher and Nakanishi began working with local composer Ryan Norris, aka Coupler, on Cat Pose, which they call a “tone poem” or “audio-imaging exploration.” Its graphic score is based on 33 “slices” through an image of Norris’s late cat Jericho, which created loops analogous to audio loops. Through spoken word and drifting electronics, Cat Pose embodies a curious feline climbing and frolicking in an empty apartment. On Saturday, September 17, Butcher, Nakanishi, and Norris perform the piece twice at Sonnenzimmer’s studio (4045 N. Rockwell), at 11 AM and 4 PM. Pianist Mabel Kwan opens both shows. They’re free, but you must RSVP.

Making Cat Pose involved mapping audio loops onto ellipses created by imaginary cross sections of a cat.

Last week, Monobody bassist Steve Marek self-released the self-titled debut album by Holy Western Parallels, which fuses gentle electronics, arty prog, and hip-hop. Holy Western Parallels features contributions from his Monobody bandmates as well as V.V. Lightbody, Udababy members Davis and Joshua Virtue, and more!

Holy Western Parallels is Steve Marek’s project, but it involves a dozen musicians.

Read More

Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. 

Chicago Reader podcasts are recorded on Shure microphones. Learn more at Shure.com.

Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.

Read More

Right before the pandemic shutdown in 2020, TimeLine Theatre presented James Ijames’s sorrowful and powerful Kill Move Paradise, in which a group of Black men murdered by the police gather in a purgatorial afterlife, where a fax machine spits out an ever-growing list of more Black people killed by the state. At the same time that Kill Move Paradise was in production, Steppenwolf was preparing to open Ijames’s The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, starring Nora Dunn as the first First Lady facing her own hallucinatory hellscape on her deathbed.

The difference, of course, is that Martha Washington deserves the mental damnation she’s caught up in. She owned other human beings, after all. Sure, it’s possible to parse the historical record to find the loopholes that tell us that gosh, she just didn’t have the legal right to manumit the people she inherited from her first husband’s estate. And Queen Elizabeth II couldn’t single-handedly grant independence to countries colonized by the empire, but that doesn’t stop those oppressed in her name from celebrating her demise. (See Black Twitter, Irish Twitter, etc., etc.) The Black people in Martha’s household are ready to party when she goes. But first, they’re determined to hold their “mistress” accountable through a series of visitations and interrogations.

The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha WashingtonThrough 10/9: Tue-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; Wed 9/28, 2:30 PM only, Steppenwolf  Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $20-$96

Ijames’s play, now finally making its long-postponed Steppenwolf premiere, isn’t about making nice with White Woman Tears. When Cindy Gold’s Martha resorts to that tactic at one point in the show, it feels like watching any of numerous Karens-Caught-on-Camera videos on social media of nasty racist women pleading white innocence. His 90-minute piece draws on pop culture, from game shows to The People’s Court, where Martha tries to plead her case, to tease out the historical record. Director Whitney White’s superb ensemble leans into the anachronistic anarchy and hilarity of these interludes without losing sight of the characters’ underlying rage. 

What’s really on trial here (and this was also a theme in Kill Move Paradise, where our function as spectators to injustice was interrogated by the characters) is white complicity. Martha could free the slaves that George left her (and that he instructed in his will would be freed upon Martha’s death) at any time. All her hemming and hawing and poor-poor-pitiful-me posturing doesn’t cover up one simple fact: she doesn’t want to do it. She enjoys having other people in her power. 

More outrageously, she wants to continue the fiction that they actually love and care about her. Even as her deathbed nightmares (which at times evoke the visit of Ethel Rosenberg to Roy Cohn in Angels in America) convince her that the people she owns are plotting to kill her, she won’t do the obvious thing to fix that problem. As the chorus of slaves tells her near the end, “FREE us. Damn!”

It’s monstrous. It’s America. And Ijames’s play is about laughing bitterly in the face of the comforting myths constructed around the Founding Fathers and Mothers. That might seem like a bit of an easy target, but given how much of a price we’re still paying for coddling those who would rather have white supremacy than democracy . . . well.

The great strength of Ijames’s script is that it’s not merely a jeremiad about the evils of slavery. It’s about how the foundational ideals we claim as a nation have all been tainted by that original sin. Including the notion of “family.” Victor Musoni’s William visits Martha’s dream early on, reminding her that he is both her nephew and her grandson; his mother, Ann Dandridge (Nikki Crawford) is Martha’s half-sister, and his father was Martha’s stepson. Rape was one of the bedrocks of slavery; denial of family bonds came easy for those who profited by it. 

Gold’s Martha is a marvel of fluttery toxicity, playing up her self-imposed victimhood like a bird pretending to have a broken wing. Crawford’s Ann provides the moral center as a woman forced into the role of Martha’s boon companion. The pain of that grotesque relationship comes through clearly in quieter moments amid the madcap satirical narrative. Donovan Session and Carl Clemons-Hopkins as Sucky Boy and Davy, two of Martha’s slaves, deconstruct old minstrel tropes in their comic interactions. (Clemons-Hopkins is familiar to fans of Hacks as Marcus, the assistant to Jean Smart’s demanding comic diva; they also make a hilarious cameo as George, telling Gold’s Martha “That booty is checked and balanced!”) Sydney Charles and Celeste M. Cooper work in similar tandem as Priscilla and Doll, two of Martha’s slaves, and also as Abigail Adams and Betsy Ross (Izumi Inaba’s costumes provide their own running comedic commentary throughout). 

It’s crucial to understand that Ijames (who won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for his play Fat Ham) has framed this story as a dream/nightmare. But underneath the scattershot historical tidbits, righteous anger, and harsh laughter is a larger question: how much are we collectively responsible for each other and for the dream of the nation we share? And how long will it be till we do the right thing?

Read More

Never miss a copy! Paid print subscriptions are available for 12 issues, 26 issues, and for 52 issues from the Reader Store.

Chicago Reader 2022 print issue dates

The Chicago Reader is published in print every other week. Issues are dated Thursday. Distribution usually happens Wednesday morning through Thursday night of the issue date. Upcoming print issue dates through December 2022 are:

9/15/20229/29/202210/13/202210/27/202211/10/202211/24/202212/8/202212/22/2022

Download the full 2022 editorial calendar is here (PDF).

See our information page for advertising opportunities.

2023 print issue dates

The first print issue in 2023 will be published three weeks after the 12/22/2022 issue, the final issue of 2022. The print issue dates through March 2023 are:

1/12/20231/26/20232/9/20232/23/20233/9/20233/23/2023

Read More

On Friday, September 16, Chicago singer, songwriter, and cartoonist Annie Fish will drop Weird Like Me, an album so steeped in classic alt-rock you’ll half believe Fish recorded it with Flood in 1993. Weird Like Me is a concept record about Fish’s childhood rock dreams, which she says she abandoned after seeing how the “powers that be” treated Billy Corgan and Courtney Love. She’s presenting it as the reissue of a long-lost album, for which she’s constructed an elaborate mythology, even posting an oral history about her fictional 90s alt-rock fame. Fortunately, you don’t need time travel to hear these songs live: on Saturday, September 17, Fish celebrates the album’s release at Cole’s Bar.

In the fictional 90s, Annie Fish were a band, but in real life, Fish recorded every instrument herself.

Gossip Wolf knows Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi of multi-media studio Sonnenzimmer mostly for their top-notch concert posters and their clever releases of their own music (Butcher’s 2020 album Saccadic consists of two cassettes—one filled with music, the other with concrete). In 2020, Butcher and Nakanishi began working with local composer Ryan Norris, aka Coupler, on Cat Pose, which they call a “tone poem” or “audio-imaging exploration.” Its graphic score is based on 33 “slices” through an image of Norris’s late cat Jericho, which created loops analogous to audio loops. Through spoken word and drifting electronics, Cat Pose embodies a curious feline climbing and frolicking in an empty apartment. On Saturday, September 17, Butcher, Nakanishi, and Norris perform the piece twice at Sonnenzimmer’s studio (4045 N. Rockwell), at 11 AM and 4 PM. Pianist Mabel Kwan opens both shows. They’re free, but you must RSVP.

Making Cat Pose involved mapping audio loops onto ellipses created by imaginary cross sections of a cat.

Last week, Monobody bassist Steve Marek self-released the self-titled debut album by Holy Western Parallels, which fuses gentle electronics, arty prog, and hip-hop. Holy Western Parallels features contributions from his Monobody bandmates as well as V.V. Lightbody, Udababy members Davis and Joshua Virtue, and more!

Holy Western Parallels is Steve Marek’s project, but it involves a dozen musicians.

Read More