All of my teams are bad. The Chicago Cubs, Syracuse Men’s basketball, Paris Saint Germain, Barcelona, the Las Vegas Raiders and the Utah Jazz. Such a weird hodgepodge. Well perhaps they aren’t all bad, but none of them have much of a chance of allowing their fans to bask in the sweet warm sunshine of a legitimate and worthy championship any time soon. I must allow the caveats of legitimate and worthy because Paris is in the French league and, well, you know.
This motley list is the product of having moved around some and been in particular places when I started following a new sport for the first time and, for reasons that only the most sage psychologist could even try to explain, landed on a particular team at the time and sticking with the team forever thereafter. I am pretty sure that I am about to add the Las Vegas A’s which will only bring my sports affinities from bad to downright shameful.
I strongly suspect that the Chicago Cubs are at the root of the problem. I was raised by my mom and a great aunt. This aunt, great aunt Lou, was almost 100 when she died in the late-middle 1970’s when I was 17 and she had been a Chicago Cubs fan for a very long time. From the beginning, I am almost certain. She was the type of Chicago Cubs fan that would never consider for even a moment the slightest interest in another team or another sport. She was raised on the Iowa frontier in the 1880’s and 90’s and had quite a life: a school teacher in a Stegner era Idaho mining camp, a nurse-assistant in France during WWI, one of the first-ever women to graduate from the University of Chicago, a fierce anglophile and a north-shore high-falutin high school teacher of Shakespeare and such.
She was, despite her advanced age, that touch of new magic in a dusty world, to borrow a phrase. Above all else. She was a Cubs fan.
I often spent large chunks of summers with my Father’s family in northwestern Montana when I was young. But those parts of the summer when I was in Chicago as a boy were saturated with the presence of the Cubs in a way that is hard to imagine today. It wasn’t just my aunt. The Cubs were everywhere in the afternoons, long before they had lights in Wrigley. They were on transistor radios on half of the clustered towels at all of the beaches and on picnic tables next to the barbecue grills in every north-side park. They were on television sets on many porches. They were on radios resting on the counters of diners and the small neighborhood stores that they now call bodegas. The rhythmic cadence of the announcers, of America’s team playing America’s game, wafted out of taxi windows and from the back-of-the-bus seats where the elderly sat. They were in the discourse. The persistent discourse of hope and, ultimately, disappointment as the Summers proceeded, year after year, from beginning to end.
The White Sox, on the other hand. They were on channel 32, uhf, requiring fiddling with rabbit ears and aluminum foil. An after-thought. An impossibility.
Since the 1940’s when the Cubs had last been very good, the problem was that they were not good enough to go all the way, but good enough to appear as if they could. The weather was very important in all of this. The winds of Wrigley. At the height of Summer, it was “hit it high and watch it fly”. The dictum of Billy Williams. Home run season. In the Spring and during that fatal transition to Autumn it was an entirely different game. The Cubs were built for one and not for the other. And they would appear to soar until that boundary between Summer and Fall and then they would flail.
I would love to see a study of the north-side of Chicago youth of my generation and how they were affected by baseball. I’m guessing that an ingrained tolerance for disappointment and the persistence of both hope and faith in the face of cruel circumstance have led to longer marriages and fewer suicides, and an awareness that things could and likely will go south at any time. But there is always next year.
Now in this age of billionaire baseball owners, the Cubs do have their billionaire. And he did, in recent memory, bring us to the promised land. But a middle-western billionaire is not the kind of billionaire who will toss fistfuls of dollars out of the window simply to watch it float away. That would take one of those coastal billionaires. And on a fundamental down-to-earth Chicago level, I’m glad that our billionaire is not one of those. So we must show patience, hope and faith once again. It is one of those seasons where it is better to just consult the day-after box-scores rather than listen to every game.
The discourse is now sadly present in the form of the baseball bloggers and those of them who follow the Cubs appear to care more for the draining of the pockets of our billionaire with a slice passing into the hands of the player’s agents than for the actual improvement of the team. It seems as though if there is an argument to be made for the spending of more money they will come upon it and share it with their readers everywhere and all at once.
My favorite of late was a fellow who wished to make the point that the Cubs are doing quite well and have a good chance to make the playoffs and their fans should now “demand” that our billionaire spend more money with great haste. What was most interesting to me was the conclusion that the Cubs are doing so very well was based not on their actual record but on the quantity of their Pathagorean wins. These are, to the best of my conjecture, wins that were actually losses but probably sorta should have been wins. Since that was published I think the Cubs have lost eight of their last nine games or something like that and have fallen to fourth place in their lackluster division. I surely doubt that even Pythagoras could help them now unless he is a closer with good control over a hundred-plus-mile-per-hour fastball.
The bloggers latest “demands”, they actually call them “demands” now, coming into the season, were to replace a shortstop who didn’t need replacing because four expensive shortstops were available and it would be a crime to let that money go unspent or spent in another way. Also, to say goodbye to a catcher who is a very good hitter, unusual for a catcher, on the firm belief that his absence would improve the pitching and, along those same lines, to assume that the pitching will solve itself given the absence of a catcher who can actually hit. It isn’t the first time this same catcher has been held accountable for the Cub’s pitching situation and replaced with another who is lacking in offensive skills. The last time he was moved aside, the pitching grew far worse quickly. The team brought him back with alacrity. So then the bloggers waited a while, long enough to forget I guess, and demanded that the team get rid of him for the same reasons again. This time with permanence and, with a touch of a twist, to be replaced by not one but two offensively-challenged catchers. It appears never to have occurred to them that the problem with the pitching may have something to do with some of the pitchers.
The bloggers show a deep passion for a few practices which I’m just not crazy about: the trading of prospects that will need to be replaced by much more senior and therefore expensive players by free agency or other trades later on, picking up the high-priced contracts of well-seasoned players allowing their prior teams to increase their spending on new free-agents, going after the most expensive free agents on the market, and extending existing players to almost decade-long highly-costly and therefore risky contracts. They tend to appear a little disappointed whenever reasonable extensions of contracts with high quality existing players are announced, as happened twice with the Cubs at the beginning of this season, in one of those cases with the former shortstop.
And so it goes. I am a Cubs fan. It still is only May. I do like the new shortstop. There is always next year.