It’s the end of another week here at BCB After Dark: the hippest hangout for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. Come on in and sit with us. It’s warm and dry in here. There is no cover charge. We have a few tables still available. There’s a two-drink minimum, but bring your own beverage.
BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
Last night, I asked you about your choice between three free agent starting pitchers. While admitted that Tarik Skubal would probably be everyone’s first choice (depending on his contract), 48 percent of you picked Michael King as your first choice of the three I let you pick from. Freddy Peralta was second with 35 percent of the vote.
Here’s the part with the jazz and the movies. We’d love it if you stick around for that. But it’s not required. We’re here to serve you.
Tonight we’re featuring Chicago’s own pianist Patricia Barber, playing a Fleetwood Mac (yes) song, “Black Magic Woman.” The song is best known in the US from the cover by Santana, but it was written by Peter Green and first appeared as a single released by Fleetwood Mac in 1968.
This performance is from 1999.
I’m going to do something a little different tonight and give you three short essays on three different films that I watched this week. I don’t have a ton to say about any of them other than one was good and the other two were bad.
My wife is a big mountaineering fan. Not that she personally has ever climbed anything higher than a steep hill with a trail, but she loves reading about mountain climbing expeditions and watching films and documentaries about it. So there was no chance that were were not going to watch Tenzing, directed by Australian filmmaker Jennifer Peedom and starring Genden Phuntsok, Tom Hiddleston and Willem Dafoe. This film was released just last week on Apple TV.
Tenzing is an old-fashioned bio/adventure film, and I mean that in the best sense of the term. It’s about Tenzing and his spiritual connection to the mountain he called Chomolungma and what we call Mount Everest. Of course, Tenzing and Edmund Hillary (Hiddleston) were the first two people to summit the earth’s highest peak, but this telling is all from Tenzing’s point of view and his life story. The film does cast Tenzing and Hillary as kind of kindred spirits, both of whom were cast as outsiders in the mission because neither one was English. Tenzing definitely experienced more discrimination than the “Kiwi” Hillary, however.
Anyway, there’s not a lot of ambiguity or moral dilemmas in Tenzing. But there are a whole lot of great scenery and a fun story of a man, or two men, overcoming great odds. From what I can tell, the film doesn’t deviate too much from the actual events of the expedition. Tenzing’s life story is a little harder to pin down because he kept telling different stories, but they seem to have gone with the story that Tenzing’s son said he told him.
Anyway, if you are at all interested in mountaineering or a good old-fashioned adventure story told with gorgeously-shot scenery, then you’ll want to watch Tenzing.
Race with the Devil is a 1975 film that attempted to cash in on two big trends in low-budget movies of the seventies: Satanism and car chases. Directed by Jack Starrett, the film was designed to be part of a double-feature for drive-in movies. I guess as something that goes on in the background while kids are doing other things, it’s fine, but as a movie, it falls flat with weak characterization and poor world building. Even the car chases aren’t great except for the big finale in the final 10-15 minutes. That one was great. The rest of the film was very “meh.”
I watched Race with the Devil because of the cast. The film stars Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Loretta Swit and Lara Parker, which is the kind of cast you’d come up with playing Tentpole. They are two married couples in a camper, traveling to Utah or somewhere to go skiing. While camping at the side of the road, they accidentally come across a Satanic cult performing a human sacrifice. When the cult notices that they saw the ritual, they spend the rest of the film trying to eliminate the witnesses.
Honestly, there’s no depth to this film whatsoever. We have no idea who these Satanists are or what they believe. They also seem to look more like hillbillies than Satanists. Swit and Parker find a note with runes on it. They go to a library to decipher it, can’t, and then the note is never mentioned again.
I’d say the one thing I liked about Race with the Devil is the final car chase, where the four are speeding along the highway in their camper while cars and trucks chase after them in hot pursuit, looking to kill them. Putting a big Winnebago-style camper in a car chase is fun. It’s no “whaling harpoon in an old West gunfight,” but it’s a kind of insanity that this plot needed. Unfortunately, you have to sit through the first hour of the film to get there.
Finally, there’s Macabre (1958), directed by William Castle, which is a pretty bad fifties horror film with a twist at the end that isn’t supported by the rest of the movie. Macabre is mostly known for the (successful) marketing campaign that surrounded it. The film claimed to have taken out a $1000 life insurance policy on anyone who might die of fright. They stationed “nurses” (I’m not sure if they were real nurses or not) at screenings for people who fainted or otherwise had bad reactions to the screening. The film has a warning at the beginning of the film that everyone who is faint of heart should leave now. Obviously these tricks had young people lining up to see it.
To be fair, Macabre is pretty gory for a fifties movie, but it’s not really all that scary. The plot surrounds a doctor (William Prince) whose daughter has been buried alive by someone seeking revenge against him. He doesn’t know where or who buried his daughter. His late-wife’s sister, who just died in what was apparently a botched abortion (they keep that vague), is being buried at midnight and they figure that they’re trying to bury his daughter with him. So there’s a lot of running around a graveyard and digging up bodies.
Yes, there are some gruesome corpses for a fifties film, but it’s not likely to gross out anyone today. But basically, this is a marketing gimmick in search of a film. I do give credit to the film for casting Jim Backus as the town sheriff. Any film with a cast member of Gilligan’s Island gets at least a half a star from me. But I can’t see watching the film without the showmanship of the marketing campaign that surrounded it.
Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.
The Cubs had a good offense last season, thanks in large part to Pete Crow-Armstrong, Alex Bregman and Seiya Suzuki. But there were two hitters last year, second baseman Nico Hoerner and first baseman Michael Busch, whose bats suffered in 2025.
In this piece by Patrick Mooney and Sahadev Sharma in The Athletic(sub. req.). they look af four players whom the Cubs need to bounce back in 2027. Two of them are pitchers, and we’re going to pass over them for tonight. But two of them are Hoerner and Busch.
Hoerner signed a big contract extension before the start of the season with the hope that he would be one of the top second baseman in the league for years to come. To be sure, he continued to excel on defense and was a net positive for the Cubs. But after a strong start where he had four home runs in April, he only had four more the rest of the season.
It’s hard to see what went wrong for Hoerner in 2026. As Mooney and Sharma note, his underlying metrics were pretty similar to his 2025 season. His hard-hit rate actually increased slightly. The only major difference is that he was going to the opposite field more, but you wouldn’t think that would cause the huge drop in batting average on balls-in-play, which went from .313 in 2025 to .275 in 2026.
The one positive sign for Hoerner is that his batting average jumped from .233 in the first half to .307 in the second half. But it did drop back down to .261 in September.
With Michael Busch, the problem becomes easier to diagnose. His bat speed was down slightly, but his hard-hit rate and pull rates were way down. All of that led to a big drop off in power. Busch hit 34 home runs and posted a .523 slugging percentage in 2025. Those numbers dropped down to 20 and .393 in 2026.
Mooney and Sharma quoted both hitting coach Dustin Kelly and Busch about what went wrong last year. Kelly believes that Busch was just getting too passive. Yes, Busch’s walk totals increased, with the BB% going from 9.5 precent to 13. But Kelly thinks that Busch was just letting too many hittable pitches go by. If Busch can find the aggressiveness that led him to being one of the Cubs best hitters in 2025 again in 2027, it seems like he should bounce back.
The one big positive with Busch last year is that he played against most left-handed pitchers and he found success. In fact, Busch was actually better against southpaws this past year than he was against right-handers. It was the drop in production against right-handed pitching that was Busch’s problem.
So which hitter do you think is most likely to bounce back in 2027?
Thanks for stopping by tonight and all week. We always say the more the merrier. OK, we never say that because it’s a hokey cliché, but we think it. Please don’t forget any personal items. Get home safely. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again next week for more BCB After Dark.