I have this dream. It’s the seventh game of the World Series, bottom of the ninth inning, Cubs against the Yankees, and the bases are loaded. The score is 2–1, Cubs, but the Yanks are threatening. (The Yankees haven’t been a great team for years, but they’re still satisfying to beat in dreams.) Wrigley Field boils and churns with cheers, claps, and fans on their feet waving “W” flags.
The green field glows. The ivy on the walls gleams under the bright white light and rustles in the crisp lake wind.
The Cubs are an out away from winning a World Series, against all odds. But they’ve run out of pitchers. Fergie Jenkins, Kerry Wood, Jon Lester, Kyle Hendricks, Greg Maddux, and Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown (an improbable all-era roster of Cubs All-Stars) have all thrown brilliantly. But the bullpen is almost bare. The manager (a gray-haired, knob-nosed fusion of Joe Maddon, Charlie Grimm, and Joe McCarthy) is downcast and flummoxed. Then a light goes on in his eyes.
“It’s a crazy idea, I know,” he tells his coaches. “But I got a feeling . . .”
I hear my name crackle over the old tin speakers and echo over the slatted green seats and scuffed concrete stairs. Astonishment rolls through the crowd. The announcers (who sound like Joe Buck and Bob Costas) are stupefied, if not quite speechless. “A move no one could have predicted . . .” I take slow, deliberate strides over the electrified green grass and look down to see my arms in white sleeves with Cubby blue stripes.
I reach the mound. Some of the astounded hubbub dies. The catcher (all grit and spit, a grizzled combination of Randy Hundley, Gabby Hartnett, and David Ross) hands me the ball. “No need to go over signs,” he says through a chaw and a grin. He knows I have just one pitch: a fat, slow dodo of a throw that catches the wind like a candy wrapper, darts, floats, curves, and is preposterously difficult to hit.
My catcher returns to crouch behind home plate. In the broadcast booth, Joe and Bob sputter to explain this stunning turn. “He’s a fan. But he knows a lot about the franchise, and he’s been practicing his pitch at the gym. And the Cubs must have seen something they liked, because here he is . . .”
The Yankee batter glowers and spits. He’s not Derek, Gehrig, or the Mick, but some malevolent, swearing, gob-spitting, steel-bearded, pinstriped brute. In fact, let’s call him the Brute. He tells our catcher, “Look what the cat dragged to the mound.” Then the Brute glares at me: “Time for batting practice, rook.”
I take a deep breath. The seats at Wrigley roil with 43,000 Cubs fans who take a sudden deep breath at the same time and fall silent. I look to my right to see the All-Star Cubs spirits of Kris Bryant and Ron Santo dance on their toes at third, and Addison Russell, Ernie Banks, and Joe Tinker at short. I glance to my right: Javy Báez and Ryno Sandberg are on patrol at second base, while Anthony Rizzo and Mark Grace spit and pound the pockets of their gloves at first.
I look in to my catcher. I draw back my arms. I twist slightly to put my power into the psoas muscle (as my yoga trainer has taught me) and bring my right arm through above my shoulder, snapping off the throw with my right hand.
All action seems to slow. I see the ball hang in the night air, snag the lake wind, then float and weave, its red seams whirling. The Brute spits, then swings mightily. But the fat of his bat misses by six inches, and I hear—43,000 fans hear—his swing whiff the air like a tree cracking and falling.
“Stee-rike!”
The Brute steps back to spit and swear. He wipes his huge, grimy hands across his pinstripes and yells out to the mound, “Try that again, meat. I got your number now.”
My wife, Caroline, our daughters, Elise and Paulina, our dog, and my late mother sit together in grandstand seats along the third base line. All but our dog, Daisy, have their heads lowered in anticipated embarrassment. (Daisy believes.) My mother tells all nearby, “Well, you know, darlings, all that writing stuff came later. Pitching for the Cubs is really what he’s always wanted to do. I just hope . . .”
I shake off my catcher’s sign, but it’s an act; I’ll throw the same pitch, and hope he won’t see it coming. I rear back, thrust forward, and let the ball go from the tips of my fingers. It bobs and weaves as capriciously as the flight of a firefly. The Brute holds back for an instant, addled and confused, then tries to punch the ball with his bat.
The gesture looks desperate and pathetic. The Brute misses by a foot. The roar of the crowd is so loud I can only read the lips of the ump as he bellows, “Stee-rike two!”
Up in the booth, Bob and Joe agree as one. “Nothing quite like this has ever been seen in baseball history. The Chicago Cubs—historically one of the most beloved, but easily the most cursed, hexed, and jinxed franchise in sports history—are a strike away from winning the World Series and have bet it all on a longtime fan with a freakishly effective pitch. How amazing! How utterly . . . Cub-like!”
Ernie Banks trots in from short to hold up a single, slim finger. “Just one more, Scooter, one more!” Ron Santo and Kris Bryant pound their gloves at third, while Javy and Ryno draw their toes around second base. I shake off a first sign. Then a second, then a third. My catcher, who knows this plan, gives his plump brown glove a last thump and holds it over the heart of the plate. I rear back and rock my psoas. But this time, I don’t snap off a last floater of a pitch—what the Brute, the NSA, the KGB, MI5, and thousands in the stands and sixty million people tuned in at home expect. Instead, I bring my right arm through with the power of a rocket burst. The seams on the ball whizz and whirr into a blinding blur.
The crowd inhales. The Brute rocks back on his heels, too astonished even to lift his bat from his shoulders.
The radar gun flickers before it glows with three numerals: 101 mph. My fastball smacks the catcher’s mitt like a crack of lightning. The Brute thumps his hitless bat on the ground in defeat and frustration, where it leaves an angry gash the size of a canal. The ump cries, “Strike three!” Joe and Bob sputter, “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! Against all odds, and after more than a century . . .” as Ernie, Ron, Ryno, Kris, Javy, Gabby, David, Fergie, Kyle, Jon, and Kerry pile all over me on the mound and a sea of Cubby blue fills the Friendly Confines of the greatest and greenest old brick ballpark, with her ivy-covered walls.
• • •
I am a Cubs fan. A husband and father, an American, a Chicagoan, and a Cubs fan. My politics, religion, and personal tastes change with whatever I learn from life. But being a Cubs fan is my nature, my heritage, and probably somewhere in my chromosomes.
If you prick me, I’m quite sure I’ll bleed Cubby blue.
I am in the news business, and try to keep myself apprised of the timeliest information about unrest, wars, finance, and affairs of state. But in the morning, I usually check the scores of Cubs games the moment my feet hit the floor.
I’ve been blessed to see the Rose City of Petra, the Pink City of Jaipur, and the gracefully gushing fountains in the Place de la Concorde. But I still can’t imagine a more beautiful place on earth than Wrigley Field, an ivied spot in a city setting of red brick against lakefront towers, especially on a soft August afternoon or crisp autumn night.
In the poetic opening words of The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow defines the churning urban forces that have shaped his title character. I’ve made a few adjustments:
I am an American, north side Chicago born—Chicago, that City of Big Shoulders—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, and historically often dead last in the National League. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, or as Moe Drabowsky, the Cubs pitcher, once put it, “We came out of the dugout for opening day and saw a fan holding up a sign: ‘Wait ’Til Next Year.’”
To be devoted to the Chicago Cubs is to carry a torch of love that defies comparison. If rooting for the New York Yankees has been like rooting for Wal-Mart or Microsoft, what has it been like to root for the Cubs?
No metaphor for doom has ever improved on “rooting for the Chicago Cubs.”
People used to use compare the Cubs to the Hindenburg and the Titanic. But lives were actually lost in those failures; and besides, they sank just once. The Cubs couldn’t win a World Series for 108 years.
During those decades, scientists split the atom in Chicago. Chicagoans built towers that scraped the sky. They improvised a new kind of comedy and transformed drama. Chicago writers pumped blood and muscle into literature. A Chicagoan walked on the moon. Chicagoans won Nobel Prizes in every category and invented Twinkies, Playboy magazine, and open-heart surgery. A Chicago man was elected president of the United States. (And actually, I’m glad it was a White Sox fan. A Cubs fan with nuclear weapons? I imagine a mushroom cloud over Milwaukee. “Oh, jeez, I thought that was to call for a pizza . . .”)
But the Chicago Cubs still couldn’t win the World Series. The Cubs have been the passion that confirms the triumph of hope over experience.
During the holiday season that followed the Cubs 2016 World Series win, a department store Santa Claus caught my eye with a white-gloved wave. He told his elves to let me approach his gilded chair. Santa reached below his throne, doffed his signature red stocking cap, and pulled on a Cubs hat.
“I was a marine,” Santa said. “Went to ’Nam in sixty-nine. By August, Cubs were nine games up in the National League race,” he continued, “when they sent me out into the shit.” Santa swore like a sailor, or anyhow like a marine. “No Twitter-twat or e-mail in those days. We couldn’t listen to that Good Morning, Vietnam guy either, or Charlie would find us. It was just us, Charlie, and the shit. By the time I got out of the jungle, it was December. I grabbed hold of the first guy I saw in the clear and shook him to pieces. ‘Who the hell won the World Series?’ I asked. ‘Who won?’ ‘Oh, New York,’ he told me, and I said, ‘Fucking Yankees, again, hey? Well, at least the Cubs finally got our chance.’ And this kid says, ‘No sir. It was the New York Mets what won.’ And I shouted at him, ‘The Mets? Fucking Mets, not even the Yanks? The goddamn Cubs had a nine-game lead! Did the team bus run off a cliff? Goddamn mother-loving ass-licking . . .” Santa Cub grew exhaustively vulgar. “‘I survived the shit just to hear that the Cubs blew it again?’”
“But this year . . .” I told him, and Santa Cub jiggled his post-marine belly like a bowlful of jelly.
“We earned the World Series 108 times over, hey? Our daddies and mammies and grandparents. Me and you.”
A few more families had lined up to see him, and Santa switched back to his home-field red headgear. He adjusted his belly like an umpire’s chest protector.
“C’mon, kids,” he called over to the families. “Step on over and say hello. Just chatting with this nice man. Santa and this man already got our present, didn’t we, pallie? One we’ve waited for a long time.”
Santa really does have a twinkle in his eye.
• • •
Cubs games were in the air on the north side of Chicago. My grade school was just a block north and five blocks east of Wrigley Field, my high school twenty blocks north, and from mid-April to the end of school, and then again in September until the nip in the air began to bite, sounds from Cubs games would float in through the open windows of our classrooms, like gusts from the lake. Our social studies teacher would scratch something like bicameral legislature in white letters across the green board (the colors of the scoreboard at Wrigley Field), and now and then we could hear a faint chorus of gasps or, even more occasionally, cheers.
“Homer?” someone in the back would ask in a whisper.
My last name begins with S; I was lucky to usually have a seat in a rear row. Speculative commentary about the game we couldn’t see could proceed without interruption.
“Double, maybe.”
“Who they playing?”
“Cards. Gibson.”
“Damn.”
The Cubs played only day games then, which usually began at 1:15 in the afternoon. School would get out at 3:15. By the time our El train had passed Thorndale, Bryn Mawr, Berwyn, Argyle, Lawrence, Wilson, and the S curve of Sheridan to pull into the Addison Street platform, we could lift ourselves from our seats to look out the windows to see if they had raised a flag yet (as, of course, they still do) above Wrigley’s green and white-lettered scoreboard: “W” for a win, “L” for a loss. We saw a lot of “Ls.”
“Damn.”
“I told you—they suck.”
The word was a little sharper then. It had sexual implications. It rhymed with, and was companion to, the F word. You wouldn’t say it in class, or to a parent, without consequences. It was a word you kept all day in your pocket for the ride home on the El to show your pals you knew it—in all its implications. We each took a turn.
“Yeah, suck the big one.”
“They suck, but they’re getting better.”
“Better at sucking.”
“Maybe they won’t suck tomorrow.”
(When word got out in 2016 that Joe Maddon, the Cubs manager, had told his team as the season began, “Just try not to suck,” I knew the Cubs had finally found the right man to steer them to a championship.)
We’d ride south, past Belmont, Wellington, Diversey, Fullerton, and Armitage, where the El trains threaded down into the subway tunnels, toward Clark and Division. I’d try to take looks into the open windows of the second floors of the north side territory, where the Cubs were the local favorites. I didn’t know of any ten-minute ride on earth that might give you more glimpses of life: flowered curtains flapping in pink and blue bedrooms, ironing boards on struts in yellow-walled kitchens, gray-haired women in printed blouses and children in gray sweatshirts resting their heads on their folded hands along windowsills, men in stained, stiff blue coveralls working over engines, red Chinese characters flickering in lighted signs, white-capped mugs of beer with cool blue mottos, FROM THE LAND OF SKY BLUE WATERS, BREWED IN GOD’S COUNTRY, Greek Orthodox crosses, Stars of David, crucifixes, red, orange, and silver-white neon letters blaring RED-HOTS, WIRE TRANSFERS, PODIATRIST, PALM READER, TACOS, 24-HOUR, TEAMSTERS, OPTOMETRIST, PIZZA-PIZZA-PIZZA, WARD COMMITTEEMAN, CHARRED POLISH, HAPPY HOUR, CHECKS CASHED, BAGELS, BAR-B-Q, LOTTERY TICKETS, DHOSAS, BARBACOA, WASH-DRY-FOLD, ALWAYS OPEN, and CHRIST DIED FOR OUR SINS.
At a time when so many teams were moving into nameless new exurbs and abandoned downtown lots, the Cubs were still the hometown team of a neighborhood that, as far as we could see, held the whole world in a few city blocks. There were better baseball teams for sure. But no better team to root for, in no better place, than the Cubs.
• • •
Many afternoons after class in grade school, my friends and I would become mini-Cubs, playing whatever kind of baseball game we could manage in the parking lot of our school. Often, we wouldn’t play a two-sided game, but would put as many friends as we could muster onto the field and let each boy take a turn at bat until it was dark. The play, not the score, was important; we were Cubs fans.
Avi, Billy, Bruce, Danny (a White Sox fan), Lewie, Stu, and I would stand up to the plate and waggle our bats and butts in imitation of our favorite players. We’d stand square up, like Ron Santo, to hold the bat almost parallel to our shoulders. Or we’d clench the bat as upright as a light pole, hoping to swing with the elegant lefty fluency of Billy Williams. And all of us tried to tuck the bat just behind our hips, dip into a slight crouch, and drum our fingers on the barrel—deliberately, not impatiently—as we waited for the pitch so we could turn on the ball with our wrists like the spring of a trap, hoping to emulate the swing of Ernie Banks.
I often pitched, and when I did, I’d try to embody the easy, unfussy pitching motion of Ferguson Jenkins. Fergie had grown up in Chatham, Ontario. He told me once that he sharpened his pitching finesse by trying to throw lumps of coal from a nearby rail yard between the gaps of passing boxcars. (I used to try to throw acorns between the slats of green wooden benches in front of bus stops, which is not nearly as interesting.)
Ferguson Jenkins would win twenty games in six consecutive seasons for the Cubs. But he needed a couple of innings to find a rhythm and settle into a game. Fergie often gave up solo home runs in those early innings, and glitches seemed to give him an edge to slice through the rest of the game (and Fergie would lead both leagues in complete games, in four seasons total). So if Billy or Bruce hit a pitch that soared over our heads and rolled under the Broadway bus, I’d play a voice in my head: “The big right-hander needs a few batters to find his rhythm. Then he’ll be untouchable . . .”
We performed each at-bat with imagined play-by-play: “Bases loaded . . . He gets the sign . . . Digs in . . . Runner on second takes a lead . . . Outside, ball one . . . Hamm’s, the Beer Refreshing . . . Twenty-mile-an-hour wind coming off the lake . . . Shakes off another . . . Just misses, ball two . . . Gonnella Bread—it’s delicious. Have a Gonnella, it’s swella, fella! . . . Ernie on deck . . . Billy swings. That’s hit! . . . way back . . . back, back, back . . . Hey-hey! All the way onto Waveland Avenue! . . . Everybody up on their feet! They’re going crazy, they’re going crazy! . . .”
After I grew up, and started making friends with Yankees and Dodgers fans, they’d often ask, “This Cubs . . . thing. I mean, how can you stand to lose, day after day, year after year?” I’d think, no, we always won the World Series on the last play every afternoon, and walked home under the streetlights.
• • •
Among my many blessings in life was that I could feel a couple of personal family links to the Cubs.
Charlie Grimm, the old Cubs manager and former first baseman, was married to one of my mother’s best friends, my Auntie Marian. So I got to call the man who managed the Cubs the last time they were in the World Series in 1945 “Uncle Charlie.”
He had met Marian when she was the lounge singer at the Club Alabam on Rush Street, and Charlie a devoted customer who could be persuaded to come to the small stage and play his left-handed banjo. He also often played for fans at Wrigley before the game. Charlie Grimm’s hands were enormous and looked swollen from the thousands of pegs he’d speared at first base from the likes of Stan Hack and Billy Jurges. They were arresting to see, and Charlie seemed to know it.
“These hands were never meant to hold a briefcase,” he’d say, raising them for appraisal. “Just a bat, a glove, a ball, and a banjo.” (And, to be sure, an Old Fashioned glass.)