An old essay by me. On loss, a road trip west and Shoeless Joe.
Hard to believe they’ve been gone almost two years already. I miss ‘em.
I came across the name of a Cubs minor leaguer in a newspaper article last week, and I’d never heard of him. Not even in a fuzzy, didn’t-he-get-drafted-like-three-years-ago kind of way. A totally foreign figure. That hasn’t happened to me in years.
I haven’t followed the Cubs closely for a while now. I still read the stories and monitor the standings, but gone is the rabidity of my middle- and high-school years, when I’d inhale a dozen Cubs blogs a day and stay up way too late composing entries of my own. The Cubs were my life.
But I got burned out, I think. Maybe being so invested emotionally in the team in the 2000s did it. The club was so good for a few of those years (best record in the NL in 2008, several division titles, and then there was 2003…) that believing in a World Series run was actually rational for a change. So each time the team degenerated into a collection of spine- and brainless amoebas when it mattered most, a part of my soul blackened and withered. I don’t read any Cubs blogs now, much less write one. I can’t muster that old enthusiasm anymore.
If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve surely noticed that I often tweet about the Chicago Bulls these days, with the Cubs making only occasional appearances. It’s a kind of reversion to the pre-1998 me, when the Cubs were abysmal and the Bulls were, well, the Bulls of the ’90s. You can guess which team I, along with every other young kid in Chicagoland, gave my attention to. It was only after M.J. retired and Sammy Sosa made the Cubs relevant again that I really started following pro baseball.
Predictably, my attention has swung back the other way more than a decade later. The Cubs are in a fallow period, and suddenly, after years of floundering, the Bulls are championship contenders again. Derrick Rose — who entered the NBA as the Cubs began their downward swing and with whom I’ve always felt that weird we’re-the-same-age kinship — is an MVP candidate, leading the Bulls to (as I write this) the best record in the East. Plus there’s the nostalgia overload that was last Saturday’s ‘90-91 title anniversary event. I’ve been sucked all the way back in.
So when I hadn’t heard of that minor-league Cub, it startled me for a second, but no longer. I can name every Bull, something I can only mostly do for the Cubs, and that’s fine by me. So it is with interest and passion, beyond just sports teams. And who knows? Ten years from now I might be a whacked-out Bears fan or something.
I’ll always hate the Sox, though, no matter how bad the rest of Chicago’s teams. You’ve got to have some standards, you know.
Witness the crush of people in front of the 10-foot-wide window into Wrigley Field. Where they congregated before 2006, when the knothole in the outfield wall was carved, I do not know. But they are together now.
A friend and I went to the Cubs’ home opener a few years ago. We had no tickets and no plan, just too much time on a cool, spring afternoon and a desire to be there. We jogged to the Purple Line and got to Wrigley soon after the first pitch. The oscillating hum of 40,000 hopeful fans flooded our ears. We circled the ballpark, past the Waveland ballhawks perched on their folding chairs, and, in the distance on Sheffield, there they were.
I counted a dozen as we took our place behind them. Like us, they were ticketless and wanted only to catch a glimpse of their heroes, their fleet-footed gods, through the chain-link fence. They crowded around the knothole, peering into right field with faces pressed close, and chattered about the game and their lives. Most were probably homeless. A tall, thin man sporting Cubs hat and unkempt beard alternated between bites of a McDonald’s burger and swigs of something pungent from a bottle swaddled in a paper bag. An older woman, silver-streaked hair in disarray, held a small battery-powered radio to her ear, listening intently to WGN’s Ron Santo and Pat Hughes. Another, a rotund man with twinkling eyes, crooned softly in his hoarse baritone, the songs absurdist and surely of his own devising. No one seemed to mind.
When a Cub swatted a hit, fanned a batter or did something similarly momentous, the onlookers traded celebratory high-fives and exclamations, even with us. We edged closer every inning, sucked in by their charm. When a Brewer drove a ball into the corner and against our gate, we all spasmed in excitement as Kosuke Fukudome, the Cubs’ rightfielder, ran toward us to retrieve the ball. We could hear the thunder of his feet on the warning track dirt, the grunt that escaped his lips as he threw the ball toward the infield with an audible whoosh of the arm. We were captivated; we were one.
Fukudome, a Japanese import playing his first game at Wrigley, stepped to the plate in the last of the ninth with two runners on and the Cubs down by three. The crowd roared and we rattled our fence, tingling from the electricity in the air. A home run was too much to ask for, we knew. Just get on base somehow, we prayed. Don’t let this end. The pitch hurtled toward home. Fukudome swung and the ball leapt from his bat, climbing high and toward the part of the outfield our little window would not allow us to see. It flew out of sight.
Then the crowd erupted. He had tied it! As Fukudome trotted around the bases, my friend and I celebrated with these eccentric strangers-turned-comrades, several of them dancing odd jigs, united by a brief but fantastic moment in time. One young man insisted on sharing a chest bump with everyone.
The game went into extra innings, but we had to leave before the conclusion. I had an evening lab and, the quarter having just started, I couldn’t miss the first class. We waved goodbye and walked to the El, still buzzing. The Cubs would lose a heartbreaker as I rode back to school, and the ballpark was surely filled with pained wails and moans. But for a few moments that day at the knothole, the Cubs brought us all pure, collective joy—and nary a bit of fatigue.
I’ve got the heat blasting as I try to warm myself. Before the sun set, the day was crisp but not too cold; afterward, I shivered often. Or maybe it was shuddering. I could have used a stiff drink, and not just to keep warm.
Illinois soundly beat Northwestern today behind a mind-boggling 519 rushing yards, including 330 (!) from Mikel LeShoure alone. NU could not stop the run, from the very start, and the Illini never stopped running—they threw 14 times for just 40 yards. Everyone knew what was coming, but it made no difference. Pathetic.
Dan Persa, out for the season, was sorely missed. His replacement, redshirt freshman Evan Watkins, played about as well as I’d hoped. He made the inevitable miscues, and his nerves got to him at times, but it could have been worse. The defense cost the ‘Cats the game, not Watkins.
I had seen the pictures of the Wrigley Field makeover, but only when you see the field in person do you really feel the weirdness. Wrigley hadn’t hosted football in 40 years, and seeing a big white rectangle wedged inside the diamond felt so very wrong. In my bleacher seat behind the east end zone, I sat stunned for a while. The goal post jutting out of the wall twenty feet to my left and the ushers dressed in Cubs garb made my brain misfire even more.
The setup grows on you, though. Wrigley’s still Wrigley. A couple of obnoxious girls seated behind me complained about the lack of a video screen—“How am I supposed to see what’s happening?” they said while the players stood so close they’d respond if you called their names—but Wrigley doesn’t need one. It demands your attention like few other parks; give it, and you won’t miss a thing. It’s a shame that many people choose to experience the world through screens when the magnificence of the real is right in front of them.
A few miscellaneous notes:
The ushers, apparently under orders from the university, tried to enforce assigned seating in the student section. In the bleachers. You can guess how that went.
I understand the safety concerns, but I still selfishly wish the east end zone had been used. We students spent the game watching the ball move away from us, except on Brian Peters’ interception return TD. That play electrified the bleacherites, and I wish we could have experienced that more than once.
The scene outside the park was wild. The giant fan tent, live music, ESPN College GameDay… there were a lot of people in the streets. And a bunch of them had already had too much to drink by 1 p.m. Typical Wrigley.
The Home Depot hardhat giveaway was a terrible idea. They do know that no self-respecting NU student would ever wear orange during a game against Illinois, right?
I was 17 and playing basketball thousands of miles from home with kids whose halting English still made a mockery of my infantile Mandarin. But it didn’t matter; it never does.
It’s a hackneyed thread, about sports as a global language and cross-cultural connective tissue. It’s true, though.
What did they think of us? Two American teenagers, dribbling a basketball on an empty court outside a school in Beijing. Heads popped out of dormitory windows, from floors high and low, as if the students had been waiting for something to shatter the monotony of a languid mid-week afternoon. “What the hell?” they must have said, before rushing downstairs to play.
I most remember their faces, so exuberant and curious. We were just kids playing ball. Nothing else mattered.
Distant music flitted on the air as the sun set in China.
Several times each week, my legs grow agitated, as I suspect any anthropomorphic body part would if it too spent hours each day stored under a desk while important tasks are carried out above. “Preposterous!” my legs exclaim. “You know full well just how relative of a term ‘important’ is. Just think of all the ‘important’ things I can do!” I try to explain the valid reasoning and necessity of sitting at my desk, forcefully adding, “This is not a democracy.” But legs chafe at such tyranny, it seems, and before I can muster the militia to quell the treasonous revolutionaries, I am unwillingly out of my seat, walking out of the building and into the great unknown.
I try to console myself, choosing in my mind some plausible destination that I will, in truth, never reach. I instead wander aimlessly, led by legs that weave from street to street on naught but a whim. But frightened I am not. Perhaps I was once, but the legs always grow tired or bored after a time, and order is restored once more.
I’ve come to cherish such walks, in a way, when my feet carry me unimpeded over the always-growing mountain of tasks to be completed and down into the deep, fertile valley of boundless thought. My mind wanders in such times of quiet solitude.
Some of my most inspired thoughts and ideas come to me as I walk, and in similar situations that leave the mind free while the body performs some thoughtless, rote act. These thoughts may meander toward the Cubs, but they just as likely will not. I have spent the last several days searching for words to fill the void in my head where the 2008 Cubs ought to be, and inspiration eludes me. But tonight, my legs stirred once again.
As I walk, Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues” plays in my head. It’d been lodged there, in my head, for a few weeks, but yesterday it suddenly broke free. Where before it was a soft buzz that occasionally floated through my mental chaff and into consciousness, “Blues” now plays endlessly, only dropping into the background, as if on some mental audio ducker setting, when I am distracted from it by thought or stimulation.
I’ll learn to work the saxophone
I’ll play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whisky all night long
And die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues
I walk, and I think. Why have I struggled so mightily to find words for the winningest team of my lifetime? I ask myself. It was pointed out to me last week that, largely, I only write posts of substance following a poor showing. That is, I thrive on the Cubs’ setbacks and, in turn, my own misery. I’m not sure that’s completely true, but it lands close to the heart of the matter. Have I become such a cynic that I cannot motivate myself to write anything positive, for fear that something dastardly is close behind to negate my enthusiasm, my hope, my carefully crafted words? Do I even have the capacity for optimism anymore?
The lake comes into sight. Perhaps my character has become irreparably flawed, I think, returning to my thoughts. Consider: Among Cub regulars, only Ryan Theriot (95) and Kosuke Fukudome (92) have OPS+ numbers under 100. Swap Mike Fontenot for Mark DeRosa at second, DeRosa for Fukudome, and put Jim Edmonds in center over Reed Johnson, and only Theriot has an OPS+ under 111. And that every starter in the Cubs’ playoff rotation recorded an ERA+ of at least 110. And that the bullpen, though a bit shaky at the lower rungs, is, among those due to throw the bulk of the innings, outstanding.
And I can muster nothing.
I’ve taken to appending “if they get there” to the end of all my statements regarding the Cubs and later playoff rounds, and it’s entirely indicative of the shell that surrounds me, deflecting unbridled passion and keeping me safe from its potential harm. Then something clicks. But is that shell, I ask silently, protecting or depriving?
Removing the scar tissue may leave me vulnerable, and may result in great emotional pain, but does not the chance at boundless ecstasy outweigh any cost? A life steeled against potential harm is steeled against both good and bad. What kind of life is worth living in anticipation of failure?
Maybe, I think, I can change. Maybe I can open myself to the world as never before, and leave both parties better for it.
You call me a fool
You say it’s a crazy scheme
This one’s for real
I already bought the dream
My feet slow to a stop. They’ve been carrying me along the lake. The sun has since set, but it is hardly dark. I look ahead, my gaze running parallel to the shore. Chicago, lit up in all its glory, dominates the view, and fireworks fly from Navy Pier into the night sky. I stand, and I watch. Minutes pass, and even as I turn toward home, I cannot tear my eyes away. Yes. Warmth fills me, despite the cold, and I smile.
This is the night
Of the expanding man
I take one last drag
As I approach the stand
I cried when I wrote this song
Sue me if I play too long
This brother is free
I’ll be what I want to be
I have a condition. If it has a medical name, I don’t know it, nor do I particularly care to. If gets the best of me sometimes, despite my honest attempts to ward it off.
It’s a malignant disease, really, spreading through mind and body a little bit more each year. Though it has been frequently beaten into remission, it always comes back stronger and faster than before.
I call it the fanatically abject syndrome, or fan’s disease for short.
Fan’s disease is a terrible affliction, and anyone who has been let down year after arduous year is at great risk. Whether from home, work, or play, disappointment is the leading cause, and few have not felt the disease’s wrath.
The disease strikes early, usually before the age of 10, when the harsh realities of the world first become evident and crush impossible hopes and dreams. The result is devastation, and fan’s disease firmly grabs hold.
But even after hope and faith are lost, the disease can still be beaten. Good fortune helps stave off the effects, if only for a short time. Joyous events like marriage and the birth of a child beat it into the deepest crevices of the mind, alongside things like birthdays, anniversaries and the collective works of James Joyce.
But fan’s disease can never truly be beaten, even by the greatest of accomplishments; it will always slowly creep back to drain the hope from your soul.
In late 2003, the disease within me was greatly diminished—maybe even close to final subversion, which remains ever elusive.
Despair took hold. After so many years, to be so close, but turned away a mere arm’s reach from glory. 2004 rattled the ailment, but by season’s end it was back and unfazed.
It’s still something I struggle with today. I don’t aspire to be negative, but years of disappointment have left me jaded. Some of you took exception to my comments about Mark Prior, and thinking about them now, I wish I hadn’t written them. I’m a fan first and analyst second, and sometimes that fact, when amplified by cynicism, becomes terribly clear. I’ve grown frustrated with Prior, but now thinking with a far clearer and less reactionary mind, I’m not ready to give up hope.
So thanks for keeping my head held high where it belongs, not down in the muck that is fan’s disease.
After all, without a dream to chase, what’s the point of living?