In which your narrator
uses a urinal trough.
IN JULY 1993, MICHAEL JORDAN, WHO HAD JUST WON HIS THIRD NBA championship with the Chicago Bulls and had solidified himself as the most famous athlete on the planet, had a conversation with Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf. They were at a White Sox game, and Reinsdorf, who also owned the Sox, was surprised by a request from His Airness: Jordan wanted to know if he could play a few minor-league games for the team’s Kannapolis, North Carolina, affiliate, a Class A team.
Now, you see this every so often, celebrities who have excelled in other fields deciding that the one thing they really wanted to buy with their fame, the one thing they truly wanted to do as a kid but just weren’t allowed to do, was to play professional baseball. Garth Brooks has an annual midlife crisis and shows up to take some swings at the spring training of whatever team might need some positive publicity. Billy Crystal—whose obsession with the late fifties/early sixties New York Yankees provided him with boomer cred he probably wouldn’t have earned otherwise—actually batted against Pittsburgh’s Paul Maholm in spring training a couple of years ago, and, all told, it was kind of impressive that he hit a foul ball. If I had a billion dollars and worldwide fame, I’d do the same thing.
But this was different. This was Michael Jordan, Air Jordan, the most exciting, most amazing, most marketable athlete of his generation, asking his team’s owner if he could take a few swings with a minor-league team, just for fun. It was just a casual conversation; Reinsdorf told Jordan he’d find out what he could do for him, and everyone went along his respective way. Except, in Reinsdorf’s telling, the conversation later took on an awful subtext: At that moment in July 1993, as they spoke, Jordan’s father, James Jordan, was being murdered by two carjackers in Lumberton, North Carolina. Michael would learn about his father’s death that evening. Three months later, he would retire from basketball, and seven months later, he announced he was going to be a baseball player, signing up with the Birmingham Barons, the White Sox’s AA affiliate. It would be Jordan, future Red Sox manager Terry Francona, and twenty-four twentysomethings, whose net worth neared what Jordan would drop on one hole of golf, riding around the country in a bus. “This is something my father always wanted me to do,” he told a jaw-dropped gaggle of reporters. “He actually advised me to try it two years ago.”
It’s worth noting that the Reinsdorf story is highly suspect. The central fact doesn’t check out: Reinsdorf, who gave that anecdote in an interview with MLB.com on the fifteenth anniversary of Jordan’s brief foray into baseball, clearly isn’t remembering everything correctly. The Kannapolis Intimidators didn’t actually exist until 2001; the franchise itself wasn’t founded until 1995, when they were the Piedmont Boll Weevils and an affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies. (The White Sox made them their farm team, and changed their name and location, before the 2001 season.) But that’s beside the point: In Jordan’s mind, basketball was something he was uniquely gifted at and preternaturally intelligent about dominating. But it was a job. His heart was always in baseball. Because that’s where his dad’s was.
The beauty of this, and the reason Jordan’s quest was as admirable and perfect as it was quixotic, is that Jordan was horrible. Here, it’s worth noting that “horrible” is relative. Jordan hit three homers, stole 30 bases, drove in 51 runs and struck out 114 times in 127 games. His batting average was a nasty .202, and one of his teammates, a jerk who hopefully never made the big leagues himself, snarked that Jordan couldn’t have hit a curveball with an “ironing board.” And obviously a world that was used to seeing Jordan dominating everything in sight wasn’t ready to see him flailing at sliders in the dirt—he faced the first real criticism of his career. (Sports Illustrated put Jordan on its cover with the line “Bag It, Michael,” inspiring a grudge from Jordan that lasts to this day. The reporter of the piece, who didn’t write the cover line, was Steve Wulf, who once told me that after he left the magazine, the SI brass called Jordan’s representatives and pleaded for him to reconsider, “now that Wulf was gone.” No dice.) But again: It’s relative. I’d like to see Garth Brooks or Billy Crystal steal thirty bases.
Jordan plugged ahead, and if the baseball strike hadn’t have been looming the next season—Jordan, who had been a union representative in the NBA, promised he’d honor any strike by the baseball union, though he certainly would have helped goose attendance as a replacement player—he might have kept going, following through on his dream. I remember being a little disappointed that he gave up; it was kind of an honor that one of the world’s most famous people was secretly obsessed with the same sport I was. (It was like learning that you and the President share the same favorite film.) There would have been something lasting, epic, about the world’s greatest basketball player walking away from the game he ruled to ride around the country, hearing the crack of the bat, still trying to solve the breaking ball. That sounds like a happy life to me.
That’s not what happened, of course. Jordan came back to basketball, won three more titles, and retired again. (Let’s all be generous and ignore what happened in Washington.) It all worked out fine. But history has pronounced Jordan’s baseball sojourn as a failure, an embarrassment. This is a shame. I think Jordan’s baseball career is the most recognizable, profound trait in a guy who, in the end, was so consumed by megalomania and feigned immortality that he was more a brand name than a recognizable human being. Baseball was the sport that reminded him of his father. It was the sport they both cared about the most. In this context, it’s almost cruel that he could dunk better than he could hit a curveball. I bet he would have been happier if he had been playing baseball. I know his dad would have been.
I REMEMBER the first time my father looked old to me. I mean, he always looked “old”; he was my father, I was a kid, and as far as I knew he had been on Earth forever, like Richard Alpert in Lost, forever roaming the Earth and absorbing wisdom, gathering different strategies and techniques to inform me I was doing something wrong. I was eleven years old, and we were walking from the old Clarion Hotel—the one with the revolving restaurant that made me feel like I was in outer space—to the old Busch Stadium before a Cardinals game.
I was just growing old enough to start realizing my own limitations, which is the first step toward dying, I think. I was telling my father that I wanted to be a baseball broadcaster, like my hero Jack Buck. My dad laughed at me.
“Most kids want to be professional baseball players. You want to talk about people playing baseball?”
As a youth league baseball player, I was an above average catcher but too small to bat higher than eighth in the order, and my arm was too weak to throw out any base runner able to avoid falling down. If I were to become the quality of baseball player able to make it to the big leagues, I’d certainly need to be the best player in Mattoon, Illinois, and I was a far cry from that. This seemed obvious to me, and I was surprised it didn’t seem obvious to my dad.
“Dad, let’s face it,” I said, trying to sound knowing and world-wise, like the adults talked when they were in the other room drinking margaritas while we kids were playing Nintendo and pretending we couldn’t hear them. “I’m never going to be a major leaguer. It’s just realistic.”
Dad had been an above average baseball player as a kid and had even played for some of the same coaches who were currently coaching me. He was better in his day than I was, but not by a lot. Every dad thinks his kid is going pro, because he didn’t.
After my “realistic” soliloquy, my father, then just 37 years old, a little older than I am now, looked a lot like Grandpa right then: tired, slower, a little vacant.
We didn’t say anything else until we reached the stadium, and now that I think about it, it seems like we played a lot less catch after that, a lot less than we used to.
ACROSS THE STREET from Wrigley Field, at a bar called Vine’s on Clark (“Magnificent! One word describes every sensation you will feel upon entering our restaurant! Magnificent!” the establishment’s Web site begrudgingly admits), my father, Mike, and I are discussing the inherent inferiority of the Chicago Cubs to the St. Louis Cardinals. Actually, my father and I are discussing it, while Mike limply attempts to debate it.
The word I’ve always used to describe Cubs fans is cute. I do this in the most dismissive, mean way possible, equating Cubs fans’ optimism that their team will finally win that World Series with a three-year-old child who believes his teddy bear really does listen to him, and understands. Aw, that’s cute. You really think you have a chance. Adorable.
Circumstances would imply that this would have become increasingly difficult in recent years; the Cubs have transmogrified from the reliable doormats of the National League into a powerhouse with whom all must reckon. There’s a reason, after all, we’re sitting outside Wrigley Field waiting to see if they can clinch the division rather than us. Worse, they’ve actually done it while remaining somewhat likable. Manager Lou Piniella is alternately one of baseball’s vivid originals and a staple straight from the Saturday Evening Post, the irascible, sardonic ancient mariner who’s seen it all, kid. Derrek Lee is a stoic, likable veteran; Ryan Theriot is the metaphorical collector of scrap every team needs; and starter Ryan Dempster is the kind of wacked-out goofball that baseball consistently provides. (He once claimed his late-career resurgence was because he was a ninja. “You have to [learn] how to throw a throwing star and nunchucks and all those kinds of things. Obviously you’ve got to do martial arts and learn how to be really quiet, which is a tough task for me because I talk a lot. It’s pretty cool. I wear the outfit around the house and try to sneak up on people.”)
Truth be told, though, it’s no more difficult to make fun of Cubs fans this year than any other year, because they are, and shall eternally be, the Cubs. The notion of the Cubs actually winning the World Series—which might be the only achievement in sports that would earn instant nonstop front-page coverage across the globe, from Time to the Taipei Times, assuming magazines and newspapers will still exist when that happens—is beyond normal human (and presumably Vulcan) capacity for logical thought. A world in which the Cubs are world champions is a world that cannot be understood. It is a world that can never exist.
You see, most people probably think of the Cubs as lovable losers who just can’t ever push the rock up the hill. But to us Cardinals fans, their ineptitude is a sign that the universe remains in its natural order. The Cubs reaching the World Series would be the equivalent of the mountains crumbling and the earth opening up and swallowing us whole: It would be obvious that the end was nigh.
There was a time where our galaxy was in peril. It wasn’t that long ago. It is my favorite Cubs memory.
October 2003. I was at my apartment in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan, listening to Game Six of the National League Championship Series between the Cubs and the Florida Marlins on the radio, because I was an idiot for moving to New York and didn’t have cable. The Cubs were up 3–0. Bottom of the seventh. Six outs away from the End of Days. My phone rang. It was my father. I knew what he wanted.
“Jesus, it looks like they’re really going to do this.”
“I know.”
“I don’t really know what to do with myself now. I don’t know if I’m ready to live in a world where the Cubs have made the World Series.”
“I know.”
There was real, palpable terror. We sat silent, my father’s breath hanging there. I thought of noble deaths, the storied warrior finding one last moment of grace and honor in his last moments on earth. How could I go? What would be fitting? How could I be William Wallace?
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been listening to the game on the radio. But you know what? I think I should go to the bar downstairs and watch the end. I mean, I’ve hated them for so long, I feel like their history is kind of my history. In a weird way, I feel like I owe it to them. I should watch them do this. They’ve earned it, I think.”
Dad’s breath continued. Was that disappointment? Resignation? Respect? Wait . . . He is still breathing, right?
“You go ahead. I’m going to bed.”
I put on some pants and went to the bar downstairs. The top of the eighth began. I ordered a cool, icy Budweiser, brewed in St. Louis, Missouri, and settled in, resigned to my fate: Salute the enemy, pray Earth does not careen off its axis. I wasn’t ready; I hadn’t accepted what was happening.
Then Steve Bartman happened. We’ll talk more about him later. But that’s my favorite Cubs fan memory. I will never doubt the fates again.
It is to Mike’s credit that he takes all this in stride; he pretty much always has, because I am louder than he is and more obnoxious. He is mild-mannered, sober-minded, a Serious Journalist who has patience that I do not. He has the patience and serenity of someone who has cared deeply about the Chicago Cubs his entire life: He’s hopeful but knows better, has learned that once it all goes down, no matter what, they’re still playing baseball out there, and watching that is better than doing just about anything else. And hey, if the Cubs somehow pull it off one year and blow up Earth . . . he can say he earned it. And smile for about a hundred years.
“More places to drink here than outside Busch, right, Mr. Leitch?” Mike will never stop referring to my father as if he is his science teacher.
He’s right about this, of course; the preponderance of bars outside Wrigley Field has helped contribute to Cubs fans’ reputation as people who are there more for the beer than the baseball. (As if the two are mutually exclusive.) Outside Busch Stadium, there is a big hole in the ground that was supposed to feature countless local business, hankering to suckle from the St. Louis’ Company Town Team’s teat: It remains, four years after the stadium opened, a hole in the ground. There are a few bars in the area, but they’re not places you’d ever dare step foot in any time of the year other than the few hours before and after a game. Busch may have a superior franchise with a winning history and (insert official Saint Louis Cardinals Baseball Corporation trademark here!) The Best Fans In Baseball. But it isn’t in the middle of rows of upwardly mobile white people. Wrigley is.
“Bah,” my dad says, sucking down his third Bud Light in about an hour. “The Bud always tastes better in St. Louis. They brew it there. I think they brew it in the outfield. That’s why we don’t have any of that weird ivy shit on our walls. The beer kills it. Thank God.”
The main topic of our conversation was the one hundredth year of Chicago Cubs baseball since they last won the World Series. They beat the Detroit Tigers in five games back in 1908, in a Series best known for something called Merkle’s Boner, the name given to the play in which a poor soul named Fred Merkle cost his New York Giants the pennant (which the Cubs won) by not touching second base after a single that brought in the winning run. Historians have attempted to vindicate Merkle for years, to little avail, mostly because “Boner” is a much funnier word today than it was a hundred years ago.
The Cubs, led by player/manager Frank Chance, walked off Bennett Field in Detroit on October 14, 1908, world champions. 1908 is an absurd number of years ago. It was the last time that would ever happen. Until this year. This was clearly supposed to be the year.
It has felt like the Cubs’ year since Spring Training. The rest of the National League Central was clearly inferior: The Reds and the Pirates were toast by May; the Astros’ late run was falling short; the Brewers’ acquisition of CC Sabathia was only bringing them close enough to fight for the wild card with the Mets; and our beloved Cardinals, after some inspiring early season ball, were running out of steam. The Cubs, however, just motored through everybody, en route to the second-best record in baseball. They would end up winning ninety-seven games, their most since 1945, when they last reached the World Series. This was their year. It was in the air. It was everywhere you looked.
What was strange about this was that the sense of doom I would have expected was nowhere to be found. Cubs fans are not like Red Sox fans were before 2004, seeing tragedy around every corner, hiding under the bed until the boogeyman goes away, unable to truly invest in the communal joy a winning baseball team can provide. Cubs fans are unique in their ability to expect the worst but embrace possibility. This is almost inhuman. Eventually, after a hundred years of repeatedly slamming his genitals in a car door, a normal person will zip up and take the bus.
This year was unique in that not only were Cubs fans optimistic, they were serene, calm, Zen-like, as if they were watching a film of which they already knew the ending. This was the one hundredth year since the last World Series win, the Cubs had one of the best teams in their history, they had Old Salt in the dugout. The stars were aligning. Obviously this was happening. It was merely a matter of absorbing everything going on around you while you watched it. Mike explains it as “simply being a witness to history,” and I think he’s fucking insane.
“You are asking to be smote down by the gods,” I tell him, puffing on a cigarette and settling up our bill. “You are sitting there telling me that you just know your team is going to win the World Series. That it’s your ‘time.’ The Cubs! You are begging to be kicked in the face. And you will deserve it!”
Mike smiles and takes a drag from my cigarette, something his wife is going to be angry to read right here. “Sometimes you just know,” he says, coughing. “Every single person here knows it. Look at everybody. It just feels right. We knew it had to happen sometime. Of course it would happen this year, the one hundredth year. How could it not?”
Mike does not say this smugly, or tauntingly, or even with much gusto. He says it like Biff came back from the future and gave him the Sports Almanac from 2015. He does not look cocky. He looks relieved. It’s unnerving. It makes me fear he’s right.
Dad has no such fear. “You’ve gotta be shitting me.” He looks at me. “He’s gotta be shitting us, right?”
He has to be. Of course, the team that’s playing in there today to clinch the division isn’t us. It’s them. And it’s time for us to go watch it.
NO ONE remembers this—and why would they—but Wrigley Field was not built for the Cubs. A man named Charles Weeghman owned the Chicago Whales (known, in the hip parlance of the time, as the Chi-Feds) of the Federal League, which Weeghman had helped found. The team won the final Federal League title in 1915, behind manager Joe Tinker, and then, after an antitrust suit filed by the Federal League against the American and National Leagues failed, the league folded. Weeghman bought the Cubs—“serving to partly complete the conditions of the treaty of peace signed here,” breathlessly wrote the New York Times the next day—and named the stadium “Weeghman Field.” William Wrigley took the place over in 1919 and called it Cubs Park until 1926, when he pulled a Weegham and named it after himself.
The great Bill Veeck planted the ivy on the walls and, amusingly, once tried to plant elm trees in the bleachers. The building felt as old as it really was until 1988, when they installed lights, the last major-league park to do so. One of the main reasons? Major League Baseball, because of their postseason television contracts, threatened to make the Cubs move potential playoff games to Busch Stadium if they didn’t install the lights. This would have been something to see.
Wrigley Field is, quite a coincidence, in the middle of the Wrigleyville area of Chicago, which, as this alum of the University of Illinois can tell you, is where recent college grads in the Land of Lincoln move right after they graduate, so that they may drink beer and have a series of initially thrilling sexual experiences that provide diminishing returns but are still worth the trouble.
This to me has always been one of Wrigley’s charms: Like no other stadium, it’s in the middle of a thriving, vibrant neighborhood. (Or at least a neighborhood full of affluent, spoiled young white people, which is what “thriving, vibrant” is often secret code for.) It, like other stadiums of its time, was built around, and with respect for, where people live and eat and sleep and shit and dream and die every day. Its builders didn’t raze the place, creating empty lots next door and a parking garage where the old Johnson chop shop used to be. The stadium, like everything else, had to fit in. It worked around us. Instead of the other way around. That’s why Wrigley and Fenway Park look so different than every other stadium. Not just because they’re old, but because they were built during a time when a baseball team and its stadium were just another part of the latticework . . . not the whole damn town. The charm of Wrigley’s nooks and crannies is what lay outside their walls, why they had to exist in the first place. Not much in our country exists from a time when we were all in this together, when we all thought one way and figured that was the only way to be. I’m glad it’s not like that anymore. But I’m glad Wrigley is around to prove it actually once was.
This is what I’m thinking, anyway, while urinating about fifteen feet from my father, who, lemme tell you, is absolutely fascinated by Wrigley’s bathroom troughs. It’s difficult to find a place in America that hasn’t switched over to the modern convenience of personalized toilets, so, hey, thanks, Wrigley. As I wash my hands—and my dad breezily coasts straight from the trough to the exit—my father calls out behind him, “I ain’t seen that many peckers since Langley.”
My father is not wide-eyed at finally visiting one of America’s historic landmarks. He’s got a ball game to watch.
Because one person can only buy two beers at a time at Wrigley, we stagger our way to our seats, in Section 131, about thirty rows behind the Cardinals dugout. I bought the tickets through StubHub months earlier, thinking the Cardinals and Cubs might be battling it out for a playoff spot. I should have waited a few months for the world’s economy to collapse: They cost me about $250 apiece. Had I known, I probably could have bought them for canned goods, gold teeth, and automatic weapons. Alas.
Mike, who has been going to Wrigley since he was his son’s age, comments that these are probably the best seats he’s ever had, which says something about the problems with procuring great seats at Wrigley, even during the lean years.
He also decides it’s time to tell me a story that will “make you appreciate how special this is for the Cubs.”
“They’ve invited Leo. Finally.” Leo is Leo Hildebrand, and he is 104 years old, which makes him one of the few human beings unfortunate enough to have lived so long that he saw the Cubs’ last World Series title. He is a lifelong Cubs fan and was ecstatic to watch this 2008 Cubs team, which, if Mike’s Stepford Wife–like confidence is to be believed, every damned Cubs fan is convinced is The One. The Chicago Sun-Times ran a story on Hildebrand’s family’s attempts to talk the Cubs into letting him throw out the first pitch before one of the key September games. As his sixty-nine-year-old daughter put it: “He can’t wait much longer.” I don’t want to be out of bounds here, but I hope that’s not something my daughter someday says about me. I want Future Daughter to say, “Dad’s indestructible. I fully expect him to live another one hundred and forty-eight years.”
The Cubs were initially hesitant—a tone-deaf Cubs spokesperson told the paper, “Due to the large number of requests and suggestions, and given the limited opportunities, it’s difficult to accommodate everyone”—but once the story hit the paper, they could fight public opinion no longer. Thus: Trotting out to the pitcher’s mound, as the team attempts to clinch its second consecutive National League Central title, wearing a Cubs jersey with “104” on the back, is Leo Hildebrand.
“That’s him,” Mike says.
“Oh, really?” I say. “I could have sworn that was Derrek Lee.”
Mike is beaming. “This is what Cubs baseball is all about,” he says. “Understanding that fans are what’s important. It’s why the whole Cubs Lovable Loser thing is just an outsider’s thing. Here we appreciate our fans.” Dad’s belch is perfectly timed.
Leo “throws” his pitch, to a Cubs batboy standing about five feet away from him, and exits the field to a smattering of oddly limp applause. The crowd goes silent as the public address announcer cranks up. Wrigley Field does not feel particularly quaint or ancient when decibels are attacking your hair.
“Now, Cubs fans, if you’ll direct your attention to the Cubs dugout . . . a hometown boy from Lake Forest, he’s become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars thanks to films like Swingers, Wedding Crashers, and The Break-Up . . . and he’s one of the biggest Cubs fans around! Here to throw out today’s first pitch and sing Harry’s song at the seventh inning stretch . . . Mr.! Vince! Vaughn!”
The crowd explodes. I look at Mike and don’t say a word.
VINCE’S THROW goes farther than Leo’s did but, honestly, not by much.
YOUR LINEUPS TODAY:
WE STAND FOR the national anthem. I’m sure they also play the national anthem before basketball, football, and hockey games, but I don’t remember a single version. I always remember the national anthem before baseball games. Maybe it’s the whole national pastime thing, maybe it’s all the moments in baseball lore that seem inextricably linked to key points in our nation’s history, maybe it’s just that you’re supposed to take off your cap. It somehow means more in baseball.
Someone named Rocco DeLuca has the singing honors, and though everyone agrees it’s one of the worst versions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” we’ve ever heard—this man sings like someone is chasing him—everyone applauds anyway, because that’s what you do at the end of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as long as Roseanne isn’t grabbing her crotch and spitting at you.
The Cubs sprint onto the field, and they’re being chased by women in their mid-fifties. Each player takes his position as each woman stands next to him, looking proud and nervous and pleasantly bewildered to be there. None of us can figure what all this is about.
The public address announcer chimes in again. “Today, the Cubs are proud to welcome the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation. Before the game, the Cubs presented a check to the Susan G. Komen Foundation and their efforts to defeat breast cancer. At each position with each of your Chicago Cubs is a breast cancer survivor, and we salute these women and will continue to fight for a cure.”
Five years ago, my mother, my father’s wife, was diagnosed with breast cancer. It devastated our family. Breast cancer threatened the soul of everything we knew and cared about. My mother underwent grueling chemotherapy, lost all her hair, and cried every night for about a year. Just thinking about it makes me want to run down the street smashing car windows with a crowbar. We still haven’t recovered. Even though she’s OK now, the cancer is in remission now, she’s as healthy and as in-shape as she has ever been in her life now . . . we’ll never be the same as a family again. Everything’s a little more focused now, more real, brighter and dimmer, more vital and more scary. It’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened to any of us. Cancer is the death shit, evil parasitic little nuggets of monster. Nobody takes breast cancer more seriously than the Leitches.
My dad leans over to me. “Doesn’t it seem like the Cubs should be for breast cancer?” he says between sips of oversized Old Style. “I bet they’re secretly rooting for breast cancer. I mean, they’re the Cubs.”
“Without a goddamned doubt,” I say, and next thing you know, Ted Lilly’s ready to throw the first pitch.
KNOWLEDGE YOU NOW HAVE