I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but most Chicago sports columnists strike me as exceptionally bitter. Maybe it's because no Chicago baseball team has won a World Series since 1917 (heck, a Chicago baseball team hasn't played in a World Series in 43 years), the Bulls went from champions to awful in the space of a few months, the Bears haven't won a Super Bowl in awhile, and the Blackhawks have been mediocre for a long, long time. The columnists expect the worst, and revel in it. Barry Rozner of The Daily Herald and Don Pierson of the Tribune are among the worst, but standing head and shoulders above the rest of the Gloom Patrol is The Chicago Tribune's Rick Morrissey, who today writes of how much he wishes there had been a strike. A long one, maybe a year or more. Morrissey manages to completely read what happened wrong, as much as he did last year when confidentally predicting the Bears would go 2-14 (he did write a mea culpa column after they won their ninth game). No one expected the game to solve its problems instantly, but the owners and players took a solid step with this agreement. This is a dandy season; one in which we could see the Minnesota Twins or the Oakland Athletics in the World Series. (By the way, how great are the A's playing? 18 in a row! Unbelievable.) A lengthy strike would have ruined the season, destroyed some teams (including a few who had just built new stadiums, such as Pittsburgh and Milwaukee), and crippled the game for anywhere between 5 and 25 years.

Mike Lupica, by contrast, understood this. His column yesterday points out the owners gave a little, the players gave a little more, both sides understood the public would not countenance a strike this time, and they got it done. Lupica understands this. Morrissey doesn't, and will no doubt continue to miss the point for years to come.

This is one reason why we stopped subscribing to the Chicago newspapers. God, I miss The New York Times.

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Bought four baseball books this weekend, all at bargain prices. I'll list the stores where I got these if you're so inclined.

- Where They Ain't, by Burt Solomon. A book on the original Baltimore Orioles, the team that collapsed after the 1902 season. (Side note: I had no idea the New York Highlanders' (later the Yankees) and the American League offices were in the Flatiron Building, where I worked for 13 years! You learn something new every day.) Looks like a good book. Signed copy. 6" x 9", 352 pages and 16 pages of photos, hardcover. $4.98 at Barnes & Noble, dust jacket a little torn.

- The Subway Series Reader, edited by Pete Hamill. Articles from the 2000 season and World Series between the Mets and the Yankees. I still feel awful that I moved out of town three months before the Mets made the Series (although I do understand, as I think I did then, it was kind of a fluke that they got there). I've been to one World Series game; it was Game 1 of the 1998 Series between the Yankees and the Padres. I will go to a Mets World Series game someday. 5" x 7", 192 pages, hardcover. $4.98 at Barnes & Noble.

- Baseball Prospectus, 2001 Edition. Predictions on the performances of virtually every player in the system for all 30 teams, along with team analysis. Remarkably prescient on the Mets' future: "While the Mets are getting older and more expensive, the rest of the teams in the division are either young and improving or better bets to sustain their levels. It's not hard to envision a scenario in which the Expos and Marlins chase the Mets into the bottom part of the NL East. The Expos and Marlins are good baseball teams with upside. If the Mets focus solely on 90 wins and the 2001 wild card, they're going to find themselves lapped by teams that are building to win 100 games and world championships -- for a decade... Short-term planning only works for a short time, and teams built this way eventually take hard falls. The Orioles of the mid-1990s are a great comp for the current Mets, from the aging roster to the spiraling payroll to the unproductive player-development system. If the Mets don't win in 2001 -- and they're at best the sixth- or seventh-best team in the league -- the whole thing could come crashing down the way it did around Peter Angelos in 1998." 8-1/2" x 11", 560 pages, paperback. $5.98 at Barnes & Noble.

- We Played the Game, edited by Danny Peary. Oral history from dozens of players who played between 1947 and 1964, sorted out by season. These are fascinating seasons, filled with stories about some of the game's best players. 8" x 10", 672 pages, hardcover. $15.98 at Borders; Amazon has it at the same price.

I made a major statement yesterday -- I bought a Chicago Bears replica jersey. Granted it was Bobby Engram (who hasn't played for the Bears since 2000; the jersey cost me less than $10 as a result), but it's saying 1) I'm slowly becoming a Bears fanatic, and 2) we may be here awhile. Neither of which are bad things.

Sprung the money today for some premium channels on digital cable -- the HBO/Cinemax package, with the Starz/Encore channels thrown in for good measure. Apparently this will only cost an extra two or three bucks a month until January, then it will be more like 10 or 12. Karen loves this, but it may be dangerous to have her watching more movies than she already does. (On the other hand, she was talking about a subscription to NetFlix, and since she already forgets to return DVDs to Blockbuster and books to the library, I figured this would be cheaper.)

It's starting to look more and more like strike time in MLB, and everybody's hunkering down. Union head Donald Fehr, as quoted by AP, is calling the new proposals an attack on the salary structure, while San Diego Padre owner John Moores, as quoted in The New York Times (and reprinted in the AP article), says owners will be willing to stick it out for a year rather than signing a bad deal. I said yesterday I thought these guys would be nuts to try to do this again, but here they are -- doing it again. I'm about ready to write up another angry web page, pledging that for every game lost to a strike, I'll stay away from the game and its sponsors for 10 games. (In other words, if they shut it down for a year, see you in 2013.) And I'd then send the page to sports columnists and radio/television hosts, as I did with the Save Regis and Millionaire page. Of course, the risk is it may not work this time (not that it worked so well the last time), and Karen properly worries I may become the 21st-century patron saint of lost causes. But I feel as though I have to do something. ("This situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture on somebody's part." "And we're just the guys to do it!")