Well, we started the day with some fun Chicago Cubs news and my semi-feigned disappointment that Nick “Ron Swanson” Offerman is a lifelong Cubs fan, so why not pile on with some more North Side news? Because this one might sting a little.

Sony released a new commercial for MLB 12: The Show today, and while the theme is admittedly clever and surprisingly beautiful, I just can’t help but think that it’s like pushing a burn victim into a sand pit. The video – that you can view after the jump in case you’re impatient and don’t feel like reading one of my patented build-ups – sets the scene of the Cubs winning a World Series for the first time in a bazillion, jillion, zillion 104 years, and I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t make this Cardinals fan a little misty just thinking about what could be.

Then I felt warm so I tapped Alfonso Soriano on the shoulder and he started swinging his bat to cool me off. Hooray for baseball season!

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Sorry, but Ron Swanson would be a Cardinals fan.

As a St. Louis Cardinals fan, I’m generally regarded as one of the more intelligent, classy and mustachioed fans in baseball, so when it comes to celebrities and their team allegiances, I’m a bit of a savant. However, color me depressed this morning as I discovered the above photo of Parks and Rec star Nick Offerman and The Office’s Craig Robinson (who Tweeted the above photo) representing their favorite baseball teams, the Chicago Cubs and White Sox, respectively.

I mean, I always knew that the Cardinals had the two greatest celebrity fans in me and Jon Hamm, but now I’m a little bummed that the Cubs have such a heavy hitter to help fend off the stereotype of North Side fandom perpetuated by superfan Jeremy Piven. But hey, maybe this is just a gimmick. After all the picture is from the set of a New Era commercial.

Offerman, who Robinson said has a Twitter account launching soon, grew up in the Chicago suburb of Minooka—like all Cubs fans, right?—and attended University of Illinois. He was involved in the Chicago theater scene at Steppenwolf, Goodman and Wisdom Bridge. (Via Red Eye Chicago)

On one hand, it’s pretty awesome that Offerman is finally getting on Twitter, but on the other hand… NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! NOT THE CUBS, NICK!!! ANYONE BUT THE CUBS!!! So help me Jeebus if I find out Paul Rudd is a Kansas City Royals fan.

Oh well, guess it’s just me and you, Jon.

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I guess if you’re a Chicago Cubs fan, you’ll look for any reason to be excited about the team’s 103rd rebuilding effort in the last 104 years, so it comes as little surprise that one North Sider is pretty proud of himself after pulling one over on the Boston Red Sox. Cubs fan Eric Engelman (above) is getting some love on the webs this week for a moral victory of sorts after he purchased the web domain JetBluePark.com for $8.

Jet Blue Park is the new $80 million home of the Boston Red Sox Spring Training in Florida, and on a whim, Engelman looked up the aforementioned domain last year and was quite surprised that it was available. So he purchased it and, according to his personal website, what happened next was just pure LULZ…

So, Last year, I purchased my first web domain. The Boston Red Sox are building a new stadium here in Fort Myers, FL and when they announced that JetBlue was getting naming rights to the building I looked online and saw the name was available. The best part? Check out where I have it forwarded to! I don’t even like the American League (see that picture above?), so I just think it’s funny.

And he linked it to the New York Yankees website.

People are making a big deal out of this – some sites are even calling him a cyber prankster and a genius troll – but I’m a little underwhelmed, to be honest. Granted, one of my other 6 jobs is in web real estate, so I see stuff like this all the time and it’s just business as usual for me. But linking it to the New York Yankees’ home page? Big deal.

Give me something I can really laugh at, like linking it to this GIF…

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For the first time since 2000, the St. Louis Cardinals’ roster on the team’s official website is missing the name Albert Pujols. And while that’s simply routine procedure, it is certainly cause for panic and dismay in Baseball City, USA, with free agency well under way. Pujols is arguably the top free agent available, unless you see Prince Fielder’s youth as an advantage to Pujols’ upcoming “32nd” birthday or Jose Reyes’ value as a shortstop more appealing. And I hope that you do, as I also hope most general managers see it that way as well so it becomes that much easier for the Cardinals to re-sign Pujols and let him finish his career where he started.

Alas, with the free agency period beginning, the rumor mill cranks into full gear as well. My favorite rumor of the day is one that most people surely saw coming – Tony LaRussa and Albert Pujols joining Theo Epstein and the Chicago Cubs.

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The St. Louis Cardinals won Game 7 of the World Series on Friday to secure the franchise’s 11th title (11 in ’11 is not ironic, despite what Shane Victorino thinks) and they had a whopping 48 hours or so to enjoy it before the entire world crumbled around them. Yesterday morning, Tony LaRussa announced his retirement after 33 years of managing and three World Series wins (16 and 2 with the Cardinals, respectively). Instead of celebrating an incredibly improbable championship run, Cardinals players and fans now wonder, “Who will be the next manager and will it affect whether or not Albert Pujols stays?”

Only one man – St. Louis GM John Mozeliak – knows the answer to that first question, and only one man – Albert Pujols – knows the answer to the second question. Granted, his agent, wife and kids probably know, but he’s the only man who matters for right now. That doesn’t mean, though, that every sports writer, blogger and Internet commenter on Earth won’t make predictions, some of them accurate and most of them way off base. First up, former Cardinal and the grittiest shortstop ever, David Eckstein.

“Albert would stay if (Jose) Oquendo got the job.”

“My initial reaction (after learning of La Russa’s retirement) was, ‘It needs to be Jose Oquendo,’” Eckstein said. “When you played for Tony, you didn’t want to disappoint him. When I was playing infield for Jose, I didn’t want to disappoint him. I know how much he has put into this. When you can get a player to play outside of himself, for someone else, that’s when you get the best out of a player.”

(Via Fox Sports)

LaRussa has long lobbied for Oquendo to get his shot at managing a big league ballclub, and he certainly has a nice foundation and situation in St. Louis. He makes sense as a replacement, as the fans and players love him. But that really doesn’t mean much of anything.

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Well, it’s official. After two months of speculation and rumors that were amplified by one of the greatest regular season chokes in Major League Baseball history, Boston Red Sox General Manager Theo Epstein has been offered and accepted a job with the Chicago Cubs. According to ESPN, the two sides have come to terms on a 5-year deal worth $20 million for Epstein to work for the Cubs in a greater capacity than GM. And thus the city of Chicago just had the world’s largest collective orgasm.

Epstein had a year left on his contract with Boston, which meant that some sort of compensation would have to be provided by the Cubs. Twenty bucks says they first offered up Carlos Zambrano.

According to sources, Major League Baseball expressed great concern over the compensation package because they do not want this deal to affect how other teams compete in the market for front-office personnel.

A source with knowledge of the talks told ESPN’s Karl Ravech Tuesday that the compensation would involve prospects and/or cash, but no major league players would be part of the deal, following traditional precedent.

Of course there has also been a great deal of chatter about whether or not newly-unemployed Terry Francona would be Epstein’s choice as manager in Chicago. That must be super awkward for current manager Mike Quade, seeing as he’s still employed. But as a St. Louis Cardinals fan, I am often regarded as more intelligent and effectively managerial than most baseball fans so I thought I’d offer up a little advice for Epstein on how to fix the Cubbies.

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