I had no idea who Loren Tate was for a long time, but I realized that I’d grown up listening to him whine about University of Illinois sports, so when I turned to “B-1″ to read the rest of the article, I was surprised by his misplaced optimism.

I know there are a lot of Cubs fans out there who will take hope in Loren’s conjecture, and they are certainly some of the most loyal and hopeful in Major League Baseball, but there are still 95 games left in the Cubs’ regular season.  As of today the Cubs are 3.5 games back from first; who knows what is going to happen?  Not Loren.  There is no telling who will go on a winning streak, who will suffer from injuries, or who will be the Central Division Champs.

Loren’s main “rationale” for his prediction is that the Cubs have “the best [starters] in the division,” but until the Cubs can do something on offense, the best pitching will only take them into extra innings.  Loren condescendingly refers to Cardinals as, “a small market operation with one super-star;” in contrast to the Cubs, who can buy a fifth starter.  One can hardly blame him for such erroneous thinking as nearly all Cub fans intentionally forget about the post-season, but Loren apparently forgot that the winners of AL pennant last year, the Tampa Bay Rays, were hardly forking over a lot of cash for their players, who beat the high payrolling Red Sox.

So because I think Loren is shooting in the dark with his prediction of the Chicago Cubs winning the Central Division (if he randomly picked a team he’d still have a 1 in 6 chance of being right), I’m willing to make a wager with him.  If the Cubs do win the Division, I’ll take my picture in front of the “Honorary Loren Tate Way” street sign (an honor bought by the News Gazette), and admit that Loren was right and I was wrong.  May the best team win.