In which your narrator
natters on about college.
My dad, Jack, played minor-league ball in the Phillies’ organization. He often encouraged me to play softball as a child, and that failed horribly: I was one of those rail-thin, arty type girls with no interest in hit-ball-with-bat. Regardless, years later I was spending a very dull summer at home from college with my then-boyfriend, and we had taken to hitting-ball-with-bat to pass time. My dad came out to join us one day to pitch. I tried to talk my dad out of it, insisting I would probably hit him in the face. Well: He pitched the ball, and I hit him in the face.
— ANDREA HANGST, Chicago, Illinois
ON A 2–0 PITCH TO LEAD OFF’JOEL PINEIRO IS NOT THE TYPE of pitcher who can afford to fall behind to anyone—Jim Edmonds smashes a deep fly ball to left field. Brian Barton, calculating the torque of the parabolas, sprints to the ivy, but the ball hits the top of the wall and skitters past him. I miss most of this. I’m still watching Edmonds.
When Edmonds hits a ball solidly to the opposite field, particularly one he thinks will leave the park, he does this little hop, a not-so-muted oh, look at what I just did before the obligatory celebration around the base paths. When Edmonds was a Cardinal, this was an alpha male assertion of dominance: Jim Edmonds was informing the unfortunate pitcher that his penis was considerably larger than the pitcher’s own. The hop was Edmonds’s signature: It showed up the pitcher without showing up the pitcher. The definitive Edmonds hop came after his home run off the Houston Astros’ Dan Miceli to win Game 6 of the 2004 National League Championship Series. The hop was a subtle admiration by Jim Edmonds’s of his own awesomeness. When Jim Edmonds played in St. Louis, I loved the hop. Now that he’s just done the hop after hitting a 2–0 meatball from Joel Pineiro, I want to dig out his trachea with a pencil. It’s minor solace that the thirty-eight-year-old Edmonds of September 20, 2008, can’t quite push the ball over the wall.
As everyone leaps to their feet around us, Mike knows well enough to stay quiet. I notice him tap his foot a little bit, do an understated hop of his own, and look vacantly onto the field. This makes me feel bad. This is a special moment for Mike, the opportunity to watch his blighted Cubs clinch a division title, from the best seats at Wrigley Field he’s ever had, and he’s too polite to make a show of himself around two Cardinals fans who bought him the tickets and asked him to come along. Mike should savor this. Mike should be going crazy. Mike shouldn’t hold anything back.
Then again, he’s a Cubs fan, so he should sit down.
MIKE’S TOP FOUR CUBS MEMORIES, NO. 4, BY MIKE
1987: The Cubs signed Andre Dawson during Spring Training after he presented the team with a blank contract and told then-GM Dallas Green to fill in the blanks. This guy wanted to play for the Cubs so badly, he would have played for nothing. Even as a twelve-year-old I understood the value and lure of money. This gesture made me think the Cubs and this man were something special to follow. I immediately ended my allegiance to the White Sox.
I’m not sure how it works in today’s world of Twitter, Facebook, and every bong party photographed and loaded to the Web within seconds, but in the mid-nineties, working at a college newspaper was a bizarre confluence of the trivial and the temporarily substantial. My first day at the University of Illinois, I trekked to the offices of the Daily Illini and put my name on a signup sheet for freshmen who wanted to join the staff. I wanted to be a film critic, like fellow Central Illinoisian Roger Ebert, and just because I thought there was a chance I could sneak into Illini games free, I mentioned I’d be up for writing sports stories as well. A week later, I’d “covered” an intramural Greek basketball game and “reviewed” Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, and I stayed up all night waiting for the paper to be delivered to my dorm. I paced the lobby of the Florida Avenue Residence Halls, watching every drunk coed stumble in, thinking this was the one . . . no, this one . . . no, this one . . . no, this one. By the time the paper finally arrived, and I tore it apart looking for my byline, I was hooked. I skipped most of my classes, earning the old Gentleman’s C, and spent every waking hour at the newspaper, hanging out with the same people, drinking at the same bars, my own little version of a Princeton eating club. It was like the Skull and Bones Society, but with a few heterosexuals.
It was at the Daily Illini that I met Mike. We started at the paper at the same time and did the delicate dance of burgeoning friendship that every male knows intimately: We drank a lot of beer and played a lot of Sega hockey without learning a whit about each other, and not thinking to ask. As the years went on, a few biographical details lazily emerged. Mike was the only child of a suburban Chicago family, he had wanted to work for a newspaper since he was a toddler, he had a reporter’s eye for arcania and thirst for dull detail, and he was a Cubs fan. College boys being college boys, the contrast of our baseball teams provided our only real attempts at meaningful conversation, disguised as jocular conflict. My father knew him as “your long-haired Cubs fan friend” up until . . . well, as far as I know, up until today.
College newspapers are the perfect place to pretend you’re a grown-up without having to face any of the real adult concerns we’re all now stuck with. One of the peculiarities of the Daily Illini was that, because of the Champaign News-Gazette’s anachronistic decision to publish in the afternoons—you know, when Dad comes home from work to slug a martini and fire up his pipe—we were the only morning newspaper for the entire Champaign-Urbana area, which had a population of about 210,275 cheery souls. This meant that we covered city politics in a way most college papers don’t, sitting through council meetings, rifling through the county sheriff’s police reports, filing intricate four-part series on arcane zoning issues. Also, because Champaign was only an hour-and-a-half from the state capital of Springfield, we covered state politics too; our senior year, Mike wrote a story on page A14 about an unknown state senator named Barack Hussein Obama, who told Mike, “I’m curious about the culture of Springfield.” For many people, real, live adults, in the Champaign-Urbana area, we were the first source for news, what they read with their morning coffee, bagel, and Adderall. We took this responsibility seriously: The “City/State” editor was a more valued position than the “Campus” editor.
This was a job perfect for Mike, who ate up the world of filibusters and transit service municipality allocations and school board members. He’d grown up worshiping great Chicago newspaper legends like Mike Royko, Clarence Page, and John Kass. On Lower Wacker Drive in Chicago, the famous Billy Goat Tavern—immortalized not just by the notorious Billy Goat curse (which is supposedly the reason the Cubs haven’t won a World Series is so long; Billy Goat owner Sam Sianis cursed the team when he was denied a ticket to Wrigley for his pet goat, perhaps because goats probably shouldn’t be allowed in baseball stadiums), but also John Belushi’s old “Cheezborger, Cheezborger, Cheezborger. No Coke. Pepsi” sketch, actually written by Chicagoan Bill Murray—sat strategically between the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times offices, and served as the unofficial center of Midwestern political journalism. It was a shrine to the days of the ink-stained wretch, and specifically to Royko, whose picture graces every open area of wall space to this day. It’s a living monument to the romantic, bygone, fedora days of men spending the day destroying one another for scoops and then heading out to slug whiskey and smoke cigars together until ole Sianis threw ’em out into the street. Mike was a reporter’s reporter. All he wanted was to be one of those guys: caustic, grizzled skeptics hiding poets’ hearts. Champaign-Urbana was a pit stop for Mike. Four years there, then back to a suburban paper, working his way up to the city beat, to the Billy Goat, to that gorgeous big-shouldered soul of America’s last great city. That was the plan. Newspapers would thrive forever.
It wasn’t until a trip up to Chicago, my first visit to the Billy Goat, before a drunken passing out of about eleven people on the floor of Mike’s parents’ living room (I have no idea how anyone ever survives college), that I even knew Mike was an only child. Most only children—and, hey, who’s up for some blind, blanket social stereotyping? Me! Me!—particularly those from wealthy families, can’t help but be a little spoiled, mollycoddled by baby boomer parents who wanted to be their kids’ best friend rather than their disciplinarian. Mike wasn’t like this at all. Once we’d been friends long enough to ask personal questions without being damned gaywads about it, I expressed my surprise to Mike that he wasn’t a pampered snot. “They’d kick my ass at the Billy Goat if I came in there like that,” he said. “Besides, I don’t think Cubs fans are allowed to be spoiled brats.” I think 38,000 frat boys at Wrigley Field at two in the afternoon would beg to differ. But I’m not sure they’re real Cubs fans, real Chicagoans. But Mike is.
You can probably guess where it comes from. Mike writes again:
I’m a Cubs fan because of my father—and Andre Dawson. I can’t remember any specific play by Hawk or game Dad and I watched together that would explain my loyalty. I just know these two men—one a fan who never let a losing season discourage him, one a member of that last class of baseball heroes who didn’t burst the sports superhero mythology—are directly responsible for my summer pastime, and pretty much everything.
AFTER EDMONDS’S HIT, Tim McCarver says, “Wrigley Field is the perfect park for Jim Edmonds’s stroke,” and, not for the first time, I want to slap Tim McCarver. Pineiro then walks rookie catcher Geovony Soto on four pitches, and you have to appreciate that sort of pitch economy. If you’re wild and reeling, hey, why waste time?
Pineiro throws two more balls, to Mark DeRosa and the crowd senses some beauty brewing. Pineiro is one of those pitchers who can’t strike anybody out, doesn’t throw hard, and can give up too many home runs. The only reason he’s in the major leagues, the only reason he’s pitching in the game in which the Cubs can clinch the division, is because his sinker ball induces ground balls.
Cardinals pitching coach Dave Duncan—who has two sons in the majors, Chris, a Cardinals outfielder, and Shelley, a Yankees first baseman, each of whom are about a foot taller than their father (something that would make me wonder about the Duncan family milkman)—is obsessed with “pitching to contact,” which runs in the face of common baseball wisdom that the best pitchers are strikeout pitchers. Duncan, like most geniuses, is a control freak with a God complex; he believes he can mold anyone into an effective pitcher, strikeouts be damned, as long as the player gives himself over to him and allows Duncan to shape him in his image. Oftentimes, this works: Duncan did wonders with Jeff Suppan, Braden Looper, Dennis Eckersley, the late Darryl Kile. Sometimes, though, Duncan fools himself into thinking he can fix anyone, and you end up with Kip Wells, Mike Maroth, and, today, Pineiro, who came into the game with a 5.15 ERA and a total lack of confidence in himself, and from any Cardinals fan who dared watch him pitch at any point this season. A fundamental fact about pitch-to-contact hurlers? Hitters usually hit the ball, and this year, Joel Pineiro has been hit often, in many different directions. And now he’s down 2–0 to Mark DeRosa with two runners on, nobody out, in a game neither my father nor I are mentally prepared to lose. Mark DeRosa is not a large man, but his nostrils are flaring and he might be swinging an ox.
Mike leans over to me, and his face does not change expression. “Big pitch here.”
Pineiro throws a hanging, but low, breaking ball, and DeRosa obligingly beats it straight into the ground. It is, to be kind, one of the more perfectly placed double-play balls in baseball history. If aliens were to land on Earth, and you needed a physical example of the perfect double-play ball—and, of course, this is exactly how aliens should be introduced to Earth’s culture—this is what you would show them. Joel Pineiro, with his 5.15 ERA, his ridiculous facial hair, his dipshit smirky smile, his two-year, $13 million contract, gave us the ground ball we needed. This game will not grow out of control. This will remain sedate and safe and not a problem.
Second baseman Felipe Lopez picks the ball up on an easy hop. The play here is so obvious that the lady accountant from your beer league softball team, the one who comes to the plate with the bat upside down and runs to third base when she makes contact, knows what to do: Flip to the shortstop for the force-out, then back over to first for the alien-approved tailor-made double play.
But Felipe Lopez is, to put it mildly, a flake, an all-star talent who never seemed to take the time to learn the intricacies of the lovely game he’s playing. When he came out of high school in 1998, Baseball America called him the best defensive shortstop in the country, and he was named Florida’s player of the year. The Toronto Blue Jays chose him in the first round of that year’s draft but traded him three years later, quietly citing “personality quirks.” His talent exploded in Cincinnati, earning him a spot on the 2005 All-Star Game, but the Reds tired of him quickly and traded him to Washington, where the amazing defensive shortstop led the majors in errors. The problem was never skill. The problem was his brain: He just stopped paying attention sometimes. The game was so easy to him that part of him simply couldn’t help but make it hard. In a pinch, you could always count on him making the wrong decision. The Nationals finally became fed up with it and cut him outright. Which is how he ended up here, in Wrigley Field, fielding a double-play ball that you would show to aliens.
All Felipe Lopez has to do is flip the ball to Cesar Izturis as soon as it lands in his glove, a routine, rote, obvious play that anyone at this level of professional baseball has done scores upon scores of times. But this is not what Felipe Lopez does. No, Felipe Lopez becomes distracted by the Geovony Soto–sized blur passing in front of him and decides he wants to touch that blur, that he must tag that blur, because hey: There’s a guy right there! Let’s touch him! Soto’s too far away to touch, so faraway, so close, so Felipe Lopez readjusts and finally—finally!—flips the ball to Izturis. At this point, Felipe Lopez’s hesitation, the split-split-split second, forces Izturis’s throw to Albert Pujols at first base to be a split-split-split-split second late to beat DeRosa. He is safe. So instead of a runner at third base with two outs, there are runners at first and third with one out, and an inning that was nearly closed has turned into a valid, beeping opportunity. Because of one split-split-split second. Because Felipe Lopez was distracted by the Geovany Soto–sized object. Because the Washington Nationals had seen this many, many times, and the Cardinals had not.
Baseball is full of infinitesimal moments like this one, plays that don’t seem to mean much but ultimately mean everything. One inch here, one half-second hesitation there, one slight whisper of wind—each adding up to turn the universe inside out. These moments are what baseball is: specks of sand that build up until you suddenly realize you’re neck-deep in the desert with vultures circling. One little head bob, one tiny step forward, and it’s all different now, the entire course of history altered forever. When these moments break right for you, you’re spending a warm September afternoon on sacred baseball ground, trying to win the National League Central. When they don’t, you just try not to look around you, hoping that you’re the only one who senses the coming storm, pretending that if you act as if it isn’t there, it won’t be. But it is. It’s right there. You just saw it. And so did everybody else.
MIKE’S TOP FOUR CUBS MEMORIES, NO. 3, BY MIKE
Mark Grace vs. Frank DiPino: Damned if I can remember exactly when this happened (and the Internet is no help), but it must have been in the spring of 1989 because I recall hanging a picture of Grace slugging DiPino in my eighth grade locker. DiPino, then a member of the hated Cardinals, threw a pitch just a bit too inside (there had been some off-the-field problems between the two), and Grace charged the mound, belting DiPino with a wicked undercut. I realized then the Cubs-Cardinals rivalry was not something to be trifled with. Another Grace memory, the 1989 playoffs. Grace batted .647 in the NLCS with an OPS of 1.788. If only his teammates had played half as well.
Mike was never particularly skilled with women, and, though he’d never admit it, I always sensed he took a certain pride in this. Everyone we knew was a newspaper nerd, so it’s not as if anybody we knew was out having threesomes and drunkenly taking random women home every night (you know, the stuff you’re supposed to do in college), but Mike was unusually sanguine about the whole thing. Not only did Mike not ever try to pick up girls, he never seemed to consider it a legitimate option. This saved him considerable embarrassment—embarrassment the rest of us, particularly me, knew all too well—but it also took him out of the game a little bit. Chasing girls occupies a disproportionate amount of a college student’s life, and it never seemed a big deal for Mike. “It’ll happen when it happens,” he said, “and there’s no need to push it.” I took this to mean that he was a virgin. I’m pretty sure I was right.
It was unnerving, but a lot about Mike was unnerving to me. He was as affable and loyal a friend as you could ask for, but nothing ever seemed to faze him: He never seemed to go through any of the agonizing soul-searching that’s an obligation for college students. He knew who he was and what he wanted to do, and setbacks never brought him down. I secretly hated him for it.
One evening, we sat out on the porch of our dingy hovel across the street from the Daily Illini, smoking cigarettes and drinking Mad Dog 40/40. I was wallowing in one of those spates of self-pity that regularly visit during college, reaching heights of self-absorption that only pampered middle-class white people can achieve. I don’t know what I was upset about, probably some girl. I told him that nothing meant anything, that the world was a stupid, mean place, that life was just a series of pointless, cruel interludes and that death was our only solace. (The odds are excellent that I was wearing flannel, listening to a lot of Nirvana, and wiping my hair out of my eyes. The nineties were such a dumb decade.) “It’s all nothing!” I wailed. “Everything we are doing is impotent!”
Mike, who had always been my trusty sidekick, the low-key reporter counterpart to my histrionic, self-indulgent “columnist,” paused and threw an empty pack of cigarettes at my head. “You’re being a moron,” he said. “The world’s just fine. Stop whining. If you ever have a kid who talks like this, I hope you slap him.” This was not the talk of an only child. This was the talk of a man with a plan. I laughed, and then we put on the new Smashing Pumpkins CD and played Nintendo RBI Baseball for about six hours.
The summer before our senior year of college, Joan, the cute blonde who worked on the city desk at the paper, finally decided she’d had enough of smarmy, egocentric boys like me and made a move on Mike. She was smart about it: She waited until everyone else from the paper was busy with something else and pounced. She and Mike were an immediate staple. They were both Chicago kids, and she was willing to turn away from the White Sox.
Mike ended up getting that newspaper job. He’s now the managing editor for the Aurora Beacon-News. It worked out differently than it was supposed to. The Billy Goat Tavern is now a tourist trap. The Sun-Times is bankrupt and in a building clear across town. Mike’s the oldest person on staff; they laid off all his contemporaries, and now he supervises a staff of cheap, disposable recent grads. And he’s in charge of the paper’s Twitter page. There’s a blogger in town that keeps ripping on Mike all the time. Says he’s not a real journalist. Says he’s old media. Says he don’t know nothing. No Pepsi. Coke.
Mike’s still pretty cool with it all, though. His casual contentedness remains unnerving, and awesome.
KOSUKE FUKUDOME is hitting .136 in the month of September and is barely playing. Manager Lou Piniella has told him he needs to “Americanize” his game, though he must not have said it in Japanese, because it hasn’t worked. Joel Pineiro doesn’t seem to mind any of this: He walks Fukudome on four straight pitches, and the sky around our row grows darker.
Fortunately, Ted Lilly is up next, and even though his career stats imply that he can hit, his batting stance, in which he does a rather convincing impersonation of someone suffering from spina bifida, is the first sign of hope I’ve seen all inning. (Lilly, awaiting the pitch, looks like he has an itch in the middle of his back he’s trying to scratch with the bat.) Which brings up Soriano. Lackadaisical, heavens-blessed Alfonso Soriano. With the bases loaded. We’ll know real fast how this is going to work.
MIKE’S TOP FOUR CUBS MEMORIES, NO. 2, BY MIKE
May 28–May 30, 1999: Will Leitch and I attend all three games of the Cubs-Cardinals series at Wrigley Field. The Cubs sweep the series. Four years later, Will and I watch the Cubs beat the Cardinals again, in fifteen innings, on a two-run homer by Sammy Sosa, who’s still a dick, regardless.
Unlike today’s game, in 2003, in a five-game series over Labor Day weekend at Wrigley Field, the Cardinals and Cubs were both still in the National League Central race. Coming into the series, the Cardinals were tied for first with the Astros, and the upstart Cubs, led by pitching phenoms Mark Prior and Kerry Wood, were just a half game back. This was the series for the Cardinals, winners of the last three division titles, to assert their authority. We had lost Game 1, thanks to that blasted Prior, but I felt positive about Game 2, because this was the Cubs. We all knew the rules.
I sat in the upper deck with Mike and Joan, whom I was visiting from New York. They were living together by then, all normal and grown-up, and I was their madman friend starving while trying to figure out how he could find someone to pay him for typing. We were awfully happy up there, boozing and talking about O’Malley’s, but there was a certain muted pity in their mannerisms: Mr. Wild Searching Columnist Guy was a lot less cute in 2003 than he’d been in 1997. Right before the seventh-inning stretch, Joan left to use the restroom, which struck me as strange: Isn’t locking arms and singing—singing! everyone all as one!—at the seventh-inning stretch half the point of going to Wrigley Field?
Once Joan was safely away, Mike turned to me. “So listen . . . Joan and I are getting married. And we’d love for you to be the best man. It couldn’t be anyone else.” I said I’d be honored. I would. Of course. Mike smiled. “Good. You can even bring a date.”
“I’ll do it as long as the Cardinals win this game,” I said, and it wasn’t discussed again until the wedding. I gave a lousy speech: I felt like I had too much to say. I think I just talked about the Cardinals. They lost that game in 2003. Jeff Fassero threw a batting practice fastball to Sosa in the bottom of the fifteenth, and he smashed it onto Waveland Avenue, sending everybody home. The Cardinals went 1–4 in the series, and for all intents and purposes, the National League Central race was over. The Cubs ended up winning the division and advancing to the National League Championship Series against the Florida Marlins. Odd: I just can’t remember what happened next.
Three years later, Mike and Joan had a son, Jackson, the kid in the Edmonds jersey screaming and playing with the Zombies. He’s three years old now, and Mike says he hasn’t quite figured out the Cubs stuff yet. Jackson doesn’t know any of the players—though Mike likes to make him say, “Fukudome,” because it’s funny—and he has trouble sitting through a whole game, like any respectable three-year-old. But Mike keeps buying him anything he can with a Cubs logo on it.
’Cause hey: If Mike wants to put the indignity of being a Cubs fan on a whole other generation, far be it from me to stop him.
ON A 1–0 PITCH, Soriano flicks his wrists ever so slightly—he will never, ever look like he’s trying—and rips a line drive just out of the reach of shortstop Cesar Izturis. Pineiro wasn’t going to be able to dance between the raindrops forever. Unfortunately, his defense betrays him again: In his hurry to charge the ball and make a play on the second runner trying to score, Definitive Genius Brian Barton overplays his hand and muffs the play. The ball gleefully skitters past him and goes all the way to the wall. It happens so quickly, so whipdashwhipdashrewww that it takes a few seconds to register. Baseball happens like this. It’s nothing . . . and then it’s everything. One bad pitch, and one bad fielding play, and we go from a nice calm 0–0 game to a 3–0 Cubs lead and forty thousand Cubs fans screaming in my father’s and my ears. If I had decided to look at my watch, I would have missed the whole thing. I wish I had.
Mike yells “Yeah!” That’s all he does. No other words, not even a change of facial expression. After Ryan Theriot flies out to end the inning on the next pitch, he looks at his phone, opens it, and shows it to me. It’s a picture of Jackson in that Cubs jersey. “Ain’t he cute?” he says.
“He looks like a fucking serial killer,” I tell him. Mike puts the phone back in his pocket and finally allows himself a smile and that little fist pump thing white people do when they’re happy but are too repressed to actually show it.
He’s earned it. It’s 3–0 Cubs. I pat my dad on the back. “Maybe if Barton weren’t so busy studying, he’d have gotten that ball,” he says. He’s lashing out. I understand.
“Make sure you get that in your score book,” Mike says. “Three runs. Three. T-H-R-E-E.”
MIKE’S TOP FOUR CUBS MEMORIES, NO. 1, BY MIKE
Game 6 NLCS, October 14, 2003: I still feel that sickness deep within my gut. Rooting for the Cubs has not been the same. I have not—cannot—be as invested. It hurts too much. Something (the charm of low expectations?) was lost that day.
Watching Mike at the end of this inning, with the Cubs up 3–0 and his fellow fans exuberant and tan, I absolutely do not believe him on this. And you know: I am glad I don’t.
KNOWLEDGE YOU NOW HAVE