Old Boss/New Boss: Cubs vs. Brewers

Meaningless hype. Boring games. Inane off-field shenanigans. With every meeting, it looks more and more like the Red Sox-Yankee rivalry has jumped the shark. Old Boss/New Boss is FanHouse's look at some baseball rivalry alternatives.

Old Boss: Cubs/Cardinals
New Boss: Cubs/Brewers

The Cardinals-Cubs rivalry is an old one, but it's no secret why it's stood up so well over time. It's all geography: The Cardinals own downstate Illinois, the Cubs pipe their Superstation all over the country, and the results form a weird fulcrum in the middle of the state where no one can really get along. Peoria loves its Cubbies! Springfield loves its Cardinals! You get the point.

Still, geographic clashes aside, Cubs-Cardinals, at least in 2008, is a rivalry only in name. The Cardinals are so bad this year -- and if their cranky monster of a first basemen shuts it down, likely to get worse -- that it's hard to feel any sort of tension in the air. Both teams' fans go about their business, hateful as ever, but if the games don't mean anything, the rivalry feels lessened. Besides, when one team has a bevy of World Series to its name and the other is just wrapping up its first winless century, there's too much power on one side of the table.
Oh, let's just be honest here -- Cubs-Cardinals, at least this year, is boring. I'm sorry, but it's true.

In the meantime, Cubs-Brewers is turning into a genuine circle of death. Both teams are good and, barring catastrophic Wrigley Field-debris-related injury, should continue to be so in the immediate future. The present construction of both organizations is almost analogous to that of baseball at large -- the team with more money spends and buys while the team with limited resources out-develops and out-thinks. Thanks to their superiority in the latter, the Brewers have a roster chock full of exciting young talent. Just to the south, the Cubs are a well-rounded, if overpriced, veteran team looking to contend immediately.

Geographically, Milwaukee is far closer to Chicago than St. Louis, and it's much easier to drive north from Chicago and find a rival fan than it is to drive south. (At some point, it's hard to figure out where Chicago's north suburbs end and where Milwaukee's begin.) Mass media plays its part, too. Sports talk radio stations overlap, for example, and Milwaukee gets treated to a lot more infuriating Chicago programming than St. Louis could ever dream of. In the meantime, the allure of dueling Cardinals-Cubs fanbases -- we're more devoted! no we are! -- gets an update in Brewers' fans, who use random Saturday baseball games as excuses to tailgate like they're in The Grove.

Cardinals-Cubs can still bring it, but Brewers-Cubs is the real new hotness. It comes down to this: Cubs fans hate Cardinals fans because they're supposed to. Cubs fans hate Brewers fans because they want to. That's a rivalry.