Ross named Ian Happ as the Cubs’ lead-off hitter, but the rest of the lineup is still a work in progress

MESA, Ariz. – Most of the names in the lineup are going to be the same, but the Cubs are hoping this season will bring different results. 2020 wasn’t kind to the Cubs’ offense and with several players suffering down seasons, it put added pressure on the team’s pitching staff to help make up the difference.

A common theme during Cubs camp has been position players getting back to being who they are and by doing that, getting back to the things that made them a successful offensive team. One of the things the Cubs did at their best was drive the ball out of the ballpark.

Left fielder Joc Pederson and first baseman Anthony Rizzo, who both homered in Wednesday’s 8-8 tie with the Mariners, are going to be a big part of that offense and their power surge gives a glimpse into the depth the Cubs’ lineup could have at full strength.

“It’s pretty special,” Pedersen said. “A lot of hard hit balls. It’s really anyone one through nine can click you at any second. I think it puts the pitchers under a little bit more stress. [Anthony] Rizzo hit two missiles today.

“One day it could be J-Hey, one day it could be Javy, me, Kris, Contreras, you know. One through nine, it’s special.”

Manager David Ross has used the Cubs’ spring training games to tinker with his lineup. The Cubs’ skipper has already named center fielder Ian Happ his everyday lead-off hitter following Happ’s success in the spot last season.

However, the rest of the lineup remains in flux with Ross using a variety of lineups to find the best mix. Ross will have a lot of options with names like Rizzo, Pederson, Kris Bryant, Willson Contreras, Jason Heyward and Javy Baez to plug into the middle of the order.

“We got people here to trust me,” Baez said. “We got the talent, we got the pitching, we got the hitting, we got everything.”

“I think we I think we have the pieces here to have a really good offense,” president Jed Hoyer said. “Now we need to put it together.”

Ross went with the traditional left-right-left variation when coming up with lineups last season, but with a year of lineups under his belt and a better idea of what he wants to do strategically, don’t be surprised if there’s some new wrinkles this season.

“I definitely learned a lot about that last year and such being my first year managing,” Ross said. “There were some on the fly learning experiences that happened. You definitely want to stay away from just setting the other team up to have an easy inning, especially late having a dominant reliever.

“That’s why I tried a lot of the time to keep it right, left, right or vice versa. And split those guys up. But I don’t know that I’ll still follow that formula moving forward. I think there is some power in splitting that up. There’s also some strategy that I learned about last year that I feel can help me moving forward.”

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ABC7 is working on a separation agreement with the longtime sports anchor after he jokingly referred to news anchor Cheryl Burton as “ditzy” on a newscast Jan. 28, according to sources.

ABC7 is working on a separation agreement with longtime sports anchor Mark Giangreco after he jokingly referred to news anchor Cheryl Burton as “ditzy” on a newscast Jan. 28, according to sources. Burton complained to station management, which has kept Giangreco off the air and prevented him from making his regular appearances on ESPN 1000. Giangreco isn’t expected to return to either outlet.

At the end of his last sports segment, Giangreco, 68, showed a video of a hockey player on roller blades sanding drywall with the butt end of a hockey stick and shooting a puck into a garbage can with the blade end. Said Giangreco: “Gotta get him a show on DIY Network. We’ll call it ‘House Fix with Sticks,’ and Cheryl can play the ditzy, combative interior decorator. I got it all worked out.”

Giangreco has been the most prominent sportscaster in Chicago for decades. He arrived at NBC5 in 1982 and moved to ABC7 in ’94. He always has shown a quick wit and sarcastic sense of humor on the air, and it endeared him to many viewers. But there has been tension between Giangreco and Burton for years, according to sources, and this appears to have been her breaking point.

Others who have worked with Giangreco have brushed off similar remarks as playful. Considering Burton complained to management, it’s fair to question whether management would have done anything had she not, knowing Giangreco’s persona.

That isn’t to defend him for the remark, especially in a time when many media types have paid the price for their words on the air or on social media. Sensitivities have been heightened everywhere. But if the station allowed issues to fester between the two, even the slightest derision could have been received in the worst way.

Plus, Giangreco and Burton have become so big at the station that perhaps both have felt invincible. But times have changed dramatically since the heyday of local news. The money, ratings and star power aren’t what they used to be, and Giangreco’s expected ouster will send shockwaves through the local industry and serve as a warning: If Giangreco can be let go, anyone can.

If some of Giangreco’s previous transgressions occurred today, he wouldn’t have survived them. His most notable one came in 1999, when he said former Bears running back Walter Payton looked like Gandhi, not knowing Payton had a liver disease that would kill him that year. Giangreco apologized profusely for the mistake, and Payton called to forgive him.

In 2004, after the Pistons won the NBA title, he aired a black-and-white video of fires and joked that it was “a typical night in Detroit.” The station suspended him for week. Most recently, in 2017, Giangreco reportedly was suspended for multiple weeks without pay for calling former President Donald Trump a “cartoon lunatic” and the United States a “country full if simpletons” in a tweet.

ABC7 president and general manager John Idler and Giangreco’s agent, Joel Weisman, did not respond to requests for comment.

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Schools chief Janice Jackson said this week she “definitely won’t be satisfied” if high schools don’t reopen this spring.

Chicago Teachers Union President Jesse Sharkey said Wednesday that he’s confident an agreement can be reached with Chicago Public Schools officials to reopen the city’s high schools.

The union leader warned of more complexities with older grades that could take time to sort out, and he stressed high schools won’t look nearly the same as pre-pandemic times. But he sees a path to a deal in bargaining that started Wednesday.

“I am confident that we can be delivering in-person education for folks in high school,” Sharkey said in an interview. “I do not know exactly what that will look like. I know that we have to keep safety in mind.

“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t look like what high school looked like before the pandemic,” he said. “There’s a bunch of things about high school that make it more challenging than elementary schools. Which is a reason why across the country so few high schools have actually reopened. Even places that ran school all fall, like New York, haven’t reopened high schools.”

For one, high schools typically have hundreds more students than elementary schools and higher classroom-to-classroom mobility with different subjects in separate classrooms — both factors making it harder to develop hybrid schedules and the 15-student pods used in the K-8 plan. Older students also are used to a greater level of independence.

“You’re three-quarters of the way through a school year, and so it’s very hard to then reprogram a school,” he said. “You’ve already gotten three-quarters of a class under your belt, you’ve got to keep your same schedule.”

Asked if there’s enough time to sort out all those issues with only three months left in the school year, Sharkey said, “I don’t know. That’s a good question.”

“I think we’ve got time to make a pretty good stab at some of it, a bunch of it,” he said.

“Am I confident we can do something? Yes. Am I confident that it’s going to be perfect, or that it’s going to look exactly like school did before the pandemic? No, in fact I’m pretty sure that it won’t.”

Schools chief Janice Jackson said at a news conference on the first day of K-5 reopening Monday she “definitely won’t be satisfied” if high schools don’t reopen this spring. She said both CPS and CTU “learned a lot” in their hostile negotiations the past few months, and the conversation has moved past whether schools should reopen.

“Now it really is about what does it take in order to have in-person instruction in high schools, which is more complicated than an elementary school,” Jackson said. “Our goal is to see our kids back this year, and that’s how we’re going to start the conversation with CTU this week.”

Responding to criticism that parent and student voices weren’t heard in the last round of negotiations, Jackson vowed more engagement in high school talks. She said principals and teachers will be at the table, and CPS will send a survey to parents and students to hear their suggestions and concerns.

Sharkey said he’s been saddened to see high school students miss out on activities and rights of passage like prom, graduation and sports, but he’s not sure if big in-person events will be possible this spring. As far as schooling goes, “we need to … make plans that are going to do right by some of those students,” he said.

“I think we’d like to figure out a way to provide services to people in high school, especially to the students who are being most poorly served by the way we’re doing it now,” Sharkey said.

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March tends to be a wild card when it comes to weather in Chicago－ you can bet it’s not going to be warm, but will it at least be bearable? This year, there’s a sense of growing optimism as both the temperature and vaccination rate rises. We’re not out of the woods yet, but now that the sun is shining and COVID positivity rates are down, Chicagoans are more than ready to get out of the house. Here are five things to do in Chicago in March. 

Garfield Park Conservatory is now accepting visitors to its impressive and varied indoor gardens. The conservatory is creating a safer environment by requiring reservations in advance, mask-wearing, physical distancing, and other precautionary measures. The reopening includes the Spring Flower Show: Saturation exhibit.

The home of Wellington and his tuxedoed friends is welcoming back aquatic animal enthusiasts, and is implementing a timed-ticket reservation system for individuals that are looking for things to do in Chicago this March. People are committed to viewing their water-dwelling friends at Shedd Aquarium. Don’t forget to also say hello to Nickel, the green sea turtle and “star of the Caribbean Reef habitat.”

Reserve a ticket at the Art Institute of Chicago ahead of time to check out all of the amazing works on display right now. The current events and exhibitions available in March include Monet and Chicago, Bisa Butler: Portraits, and Jo Ractliffe: DRIVES.

Andersonville usually celebrates its restaurants for only a week, but this year the neighborhood is turning the event into a month-long celebration of food! During each week of March, diners can order prix-fixe meals-to-go from a different group of restaurants in Chicago.

Lakefront Hangouts

The Lakefront Trail has been open to exercising Chicagoans for several months, but recently the city announced that it would be reopening more of the lakefront－ including playgrounds and other “nature play spaces.” It may be a little brisk right now, but has that ever really stopped Chicagoans that are looking for things to do in the springtime?

Chicago March Featured Image Credit: Shedd Aquarium on Facebook

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All the scores from Wednesday, March 3, 2021

Please send scores and corrections to [email protected]

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

BIG NORTHERN

Byron at Rockford Lutheran, 7:00

Dixon at Oregon, 7:00

North Boone at Mendota, 7:15

Rock Falls at Rockford Christian, 7:00

Winnebago at Stillman Valley, 7:00

CATHOLIC – BLUE

Brother Rice at Loyola, 7:00

Leo at Fenwick, 7:00

Mount Carmel at DePaul, 7:00

St. Laurence at St. Rita, 7:00

CATHOLIC – WHITE

Montini at De La Salle, 7:00

Providence-St. Mel at Providence, 7:30

St. Ignatius at Marmion, 7:15

CENTRAL SUBURBAN – SOUTH

Evanston at Maine South, 8:00

CHICAGO PREP

Holy Trinity at Rochelle Zell, 7:00

Hope Academy at Christ the King, 6:30

DU KANE

Geneva at Wheaton-Warr. South, 7:00

Glenbard North at St. Charles East, 7:00

Lake Park at Batavia, 7:00

Wheaton North at St. Charles North, 7:00

DU PAGE VALLEY

Metea Valley at DeKalb, 7:00

FOX VALLEY

Crystal Lake Central at Cary-Grove, 7:00

Dundee-Crown at Hampshire, 7:00

Huntley at Prairie Ridge, 7:00

Jacobs at Crystal Lake South, 7:00

McHenry at Burlington Central, 7:00

ILLINOIS CENTRAL EIGHT

Wilmington at Streator, 6:45

INTERSTATE EIGHT

Kaneland at Rochelle, 6:00

LaSalle-Peru at Sycamore, 6:00

Morris at Sandwich, 6:00

Ottawa at Plano, 6:00

LITTLE TEN

Earlville at Indian Creek, 6:45

Hiawatha at Hinckley-Big Rock, 5:30

Leland at LaMoille-Ohio, 7:00

Newark at Somonauk, 7:00

Serena at DePue, 5:30

MID-SUBURBAN – EAST

Elk Grove at Rolling Meadows, 7:30

NOBLE LEAGUE – BLUE

Noble Street vs. Bulls, at Rowe-Clark, 5:00

Rauner vs. Muchin at Rowe-Clark, 7:00

NOBLE LEAGUE – GOLD

Comer vs. Johnson at Hales Fran, 5:30

Hansberry at Butler, 5:00

NORTH SUBURBAN

Stevenson at Libertyville, 8:00

PUBLIC LEAGUE RED WEST-NORTH

Lane at Clark, 7:00

Marshall at Farragut, 5:00

North Lawndale at Lincoln Park, 5:00

Orr at Schurz, 5:00

Young at Westinghouse, 7:00

PUBLIC LEAGUE WHITE-NORTH

Mather at Lake View, 6:30

Northside at Sullivan, 5:00

Prosser at Foreman, 5:00

Uplift at Senn, 5:00

Von Steuben at Taft, 7:00

PUBLIC LEAGUE WHITE-WEST

Austin at Payton, 7:00

Collins at Clemente, 7:00

Jones at Wells, 5:00

Raby at Perspectives-MSA, 5:00

PUBLIC LEAGUE BLUE-NORTH

Marine at DuSable, 5:00

North Grand at Chicago Academy, 5:00

Steinmetz at Amundsen, 5:00

PUBLIC LEAGUE BLUE-WEST

Chicago Tech at Chicago Collegiate, 5:00

Little Village at Douglass, 5:00

Manley at Kelvyn Park, 5:00

Ogden at Juarez, 5:00

Spry at Phoenix, 5:00

SOUTH SUBURBAN – BLUE

Bremen at Thornton Fr. North, 6:00

SOUTH SUBURBAN – RED

Shepard at Argo, 6:00

SOUTH SUBURBAN – CROSSOVER

Eisenhower at Oak Forest, 5:30

Hillcrest at Reavis, 7:30

Oak Lawn at Lemont, 7:30

Richards at Tinley Park, 5:00

Thornton Fr. South at Evergreen Park, 7:30

SOUTHLAND

Thornridge at Kankakee, 7:00

SOUTHWEST PRAIRIE – CROSSOVER

Oswego East at Romeoville, 7:00

SOUTHWEST SUBURBAN – BLUE

Lockport at Sandburg, 6:15

SOUTHWEST SUBURBAN – RED

Stagg at Andrew, 6:30

TRI-COUNTY

Henry-Senachwine at Seneca, 7:00

Marquette at Putnam County, 7:00

Midland at Lowpoint-Washburn, 7:00

Woodland at Roanoke-Benson, 7:00

NON CONFERENCE

Donovan at Momence, PPD

Dwight at Flanagan-Cornell, 7:00

Iroquois West at Herscher

Nazareth at Northridge, 7:00

Palatine at Lake Zurich, 7:30

Richmond-Burton at Westlake Christian, 7:30

Timothy Christian at Naperville North, 7:00

West Aurora at Yorkville Christian, 7:00

Westmont at Walther Christian, 6:30

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The charismatic supporting player takes center stage in Hulu’s entertaining time loop thriller.

It feels as if we’re stuck in a time loop watching Time Loop Movies and Time Loop Series, with variations on “Groundhog Day” in the campy-fun horror film “Happy Death Day” and its sequel, the rom-com “Palm Springs” and the comedy/drama “Russian Doll,” and it feels as if we’re stuck in a time loop watching Time Loop Movies and Time Loop Series, with variations on “Groundhog Day” in …

Sorry. Got tangled up in a Time Loop Review cycle.

The latest entry is Hulu’s hardcore sci-fi action thriller “Boss Level,” which has a great one-two punch in the badass director Joe Carnahan (“Narc,” “Smokin’ Aces”) and the recently ubiquitous Frank Grillo (“Billions,” “No Man’s Land,” “Body Brokers”), who did great work in a supporting role in Carnahan’s man v. wolves B-movie classic “The Grey” and takes center stage here in a role that makes great use of his screen-commanding physical prowess and his streetwise, self-deprecating sense of humor.

“Boss Level” takes the “Palm Springs” route in that, like Andy Samberg’s Nyles, Grillo’s Roy Pulver is already good and well mired in a never-ending time loop at the start of the film — but whereas Nyles kept waking up on the day of a wedding, Roy greets the day by rolling out of bed (which he’s sharing with a gorgeous and mysterious woman) and getting attacked by a menacing assassin in his apartment, followed by a gunman in a helicopter hovering just outside — and then a series of assassins of various shapes, sizes and gender who keep trying to take him out until somebody succeeds. (Fun fact: Footballer Rob Gronkowski plays the gunman in the helicopter.) Even though Roy is a former special agent with a very particular set of skills, he has accepted that no matter what he does, he WILL be killed at precisely 12:47 p.m. every day — and then he’ll wake up in bed and have to do it all over again.

What a waking nightmare.

Director Carnahan provides his usual stylish, saturated-colors, quick-cut visuals as we see Roy taking it this way and that, most notably at the hands of the sword-wielding assassin Guan Yin (Selina Lo), who says the same thing every time she decapitates Roy: “I am Guan Yin, and Guan Yin has done this.” (One imagines Tarantino cackling with appreciative envy over Guan Yin and her catchphrase.) Carnahan and his co-writers Chris Borey and Eddie Borey also infuse the script with dark humor, e.g., Roy telling us in voice-over, “I can run for a while and I can hide for a while, but the day always ends bad in a hail of bullets. So I figure, if I’m going to get f—ed up, I should probably get f—ed up,” at which point Roy walks in to the Noodles Café, where Ken Jeong’s Jake is behind the bar, always happy to see Roy and always surprised to see him looking like hell.

But WHY do so many people want Roy dead, and HOW did he get caught in this time loop? The clues begin to add up after Roy happens to see his estranged young son Joe (played by Grillo’s real-life son Rio), who’s on his way to a 1980s arcade game tournament, and oh, so THAT’S why “Boss Level” has those ’80s video game graphics and even some of the look and pacing of old-timey action games. Without giving too much away, let’s just say Roy is a pawn of some sort of sci-fi experiment involving his ex-wife, Dr. Jemma Wells (Naomi Watts), who is working on a high-level, top-secret techno-project under the paranoid watch of her supervisor, the wild-eyed Col. Clive Ventor (Mel Gibson, and call it typecasting if you must), and suddenly we’re in Time Loop Movie territory similar to “Edge of Tomorrow” and “Source Code.”

Hulu

As is always the case with these types of films, even the obligatory exposition scenes still leave much unexplained, and either you go with it or you don’t. Watts is underused and Gibson isn’t as maniacally entertaining as you’d expect him to be, but we get fine work from supporting players Jeong as the aforementioned barkeep, Michelle Yeoh (as a martial arts legend who teaches Roy the art of sword combat) and Will Sasso as Col. Ventor’s bloodthirsty security chief. Mostly, though, this is Grillo’s film to carry, and he pulls it off with a combination of brute force and light charm.

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A woman in her 60s was found dead in an apartment building fire Wednesday in West Ridge on the North Side.

Firefighters responded to the fire about 10:50 a.m. in the 5600 block of North Washtenaw Avenue, the Chicago Fire Department said on social media.

The woman was found dead while firefighters searched the building, the department said. The cause of the fire hasn’t been determined.

A Chicago Fire spokesman was unable to provide additional information.

The Cook County medical examiner’s office hasn’t released details on the death.

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The Barbershop: Dennis Byrne, Proprietor

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A year of our lives ruined by dead wrong COVID-19 experts, pols and media

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By Dennis Byrne,
today at 2:52 pm

The lockdowns have wrecked a generation of children, impoverished families, shut down businesses and downed America in an ocean of depression, anger and fear

They’ve engineered a first-of-its-kind assault on our liberties. Never in American history has the entire population been treated like criminals under house arrest. Freedom of association has disappeared. Whom we can visit, where and when we can travel? When can we again make those every-day decisions that flow from our God-given freedoms? They’ve been axed by autocrats–the high-bound politicians who have blindly followed the often-wrong demands of epidemiologists. And by an historically compliant media.

By now, their trail of misery, despair and insolvency is so well trod that it needs no repeating here. Millions of Americans have suffered, some fatally, because of the monstrous lockdowns. And because of “experts'” shifting, erroneous and outrageous demands. Many Americans will never recover from the lost year, or, God forbid, years.

They’ve been wrong, at the outset, about the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic. Once its deadliness became apparent, they grossly overreacted with sledgehammer blows instead of targeted action.

Just how wrong is detailed David Catron‘s The American Spectator article: “Lockdowns: Which ‘Experts’ Were Right? A year later it’s clear that most media and government experts were dead wrong.”

Start with the data. He quotes Dr. John P. A. Ioannidis of the Stanford University School of Medicine:

The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing to date, some deaths and probably the vast majority of infections due to SARS-CoV-2 are being missed.… In the absence of data, prepare-for-the-worst reasoning leads to extreme measures of social distancing and lockdowns. Unfortunately, we do not know if these measures work.… [w]e don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health.

They’ve been wrong about when the vaccine would become available, grossly missing the fact that we’d have it at the end of last year. Their predictions about the number of deaths have been outlandish and constantly changing, typically hanging too high.

The evidence of their failures are seen in the schools that have been long open and in states like Florida that quickly ended the lockdowns. Despite the ridicule from distant (shutdown) platforms, as Carton notes:

Specifically, Florida’s COVID-19 death rate of 144 per 100,000 residents is lower than New York’s 243 per 100,000residents. Likewise, Georgia has a larger population than New Jersey, yet its COVID-19 death rate of 159 per 100,000 residents is lower than New Jersey’s 262 per 100,000 residents.

No, I’m not advocating complete abandonment of safety protocols. Nor am I trying to downplay the pandemic’s seriousness or the tragic loss of loved ones.

But that does not require that we step pleading for a more targeted, reasonable approach. Instead of what seems like educated guesswork. Start by opening all the schools, now.

Sadly, the epidemiologists have damaged the credibility of science. It will be a long time before the public again takes the experts’ warning words as dogma.

Americans have become captives of a culture of fear. As an American trait, taking risks has been somewhat erased. Too many people who, in this Republic, are entrusted with caring for the common good, have handed over their responsibilities to non-elected people whose guidance sometimes seem to be hunches.

A long time ago, America as we have known and loved it, must be restored.

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Cartoonist Johnny Sampson finally got his dream job at MAD magazine. Now he’s one of the only artists keeping the legendary publication going.

Johnny Sampson does not draw superheroes, but he does have an origin. His origin story, self-published in a beautifully designed, humorous, autobiographical mini-comic, tells the tale of how he became a cartoonist—and came to paint the MAD magazine Fold-In.…Read More

The U.S. could’ve had live music back already, but at least Bandcamp is still helping the artists making do without.

If you’re a fan of an independent musician who’s been trying to cobble together a living without touring or gig income, or if you’re just generally concerned with artists’ well-being during the pandemic, you probably already know about Bandcamp Fridays.…Read More