CHAPTER 6
Hope
Chicago Is a Place Called Hope
THERE’S A RAMSHACKLE STADIUM on the corner of Addison and Clark in Chicago that houses an (ostensibly) professional baseball team. As of this writing, that team has managed to complete 105 seasons of play without a World Series title to show for it. One hundred and five seasons. During that stretch, twenty-one other baseball franchises have celebrated a world championship. This list of winners includes multiple titles for every extant 1908 American and National League club (the Braves won championships in three different cities), not to mention the likes of the Florida Marlins, a franchise that is as ridiculous as it sounds and that, by the way, didn’t even exist until the Cubs’ drought was in its eighty-fifth year.
The sheer statistical improbability of this streak is somewhat astonishing: My back-of-the-spreadsheet calculation says it’s about 0.004, or a 250-to-1 shot. Had you been a prescient gambler in 1908 and laid down cash on a big-league team rolling snake eyes for 105 straight seasons, today you’d be swimming in it, Scrooge McDuck-style. That is, if you were still alive. (The odds of that are approximately 250 million to 1.)
If there is a gate on this earth deserving of Dante’s inscription Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate (Abandon hope, all ye who enter here) it’s Gate F at Wrigley Field. Yet, as they have every April since Wrigley opened in 1915, Cubs fans raise a collective middle finger to experience while they shuffle through it, their sense of hope firmly intact. “Come on, man,” the chorus goes, “they’re due!”
Over the preceding century-and-change, the Cubs have sold approximately 150 million tickets to these hope-addled—or if you prefer, hope-sustained—dreamers. Among them were my grandparents, Iowa farmers whose 1934 honeymoon trip east to Chicago included a game at Wrigley. The Cubs were a hot ticket then, just two years out from a National League pennant and in the thick of another race. Grandpa was disappointed by the Cubs’ loss to the Cincinnati Reds, but he did return home with a souvenir ticket—as well as a souvenir sliver of wood he whittled from a phone pole outside the Biograph Theater, where John Dillinger had been shot just days before.
Grandpa and Grandma’s next Cubs game was in 1945. This time they had two kids in tow. One of them was my eight-year-old dad. It was during that hopeful moment between VE Day and VJ Day. Wartime gasoline rationing had already ended, and Grandpa decided it was time for a celebratory trip to the Windy City. This time the Cubs won, beating the Pirates en route to another National League pennant. The Cubs would lose the ’45 World Series to the Detroit Tigers, four games to three. It was their seventh straight World Series loss. Some blame Chicago restaurateur and Cubs fan Billy Sianis, who cursed the team after he and his pet goat were tossed from Wrigley during Game 4. Superstition or not, the Cubs haven’t been to a World Series since.
Their National League pennant from that (cursed?) year today hangs near the salad bar at Wrigley’s Stadium Club restaurant, a forlorn and barren senior citizen. I’ve had occasion to ponder the relic a few times since moving to Chicago. My first Cubs game was in 1969. I was an eight-year-old vacationing Iowa farm boy, just like my dad had been in 1945. Dad and Uncle Arlen treated me, my brother, and our cousins to a day at Wrigley. It was a glorious victory by the first-place Cubs over the Astros, the perfect introduction for a young boy to fandom. And educational, too. The next month the Cubs underwent the greatest collapse in Major League history and missed the playoffs.
I eventually ended up living not far from Wrigley, and these days I occasionally take my own boy to Cubs games—the sins of the father being visited upon the son and all that. On his eighth birthday—the date was October 14, 2003, which you may recognize—the Cubs were about to close out a playoff series against that ridiculous baseball club from Florida. In the eighth inning, a well-meaning fan named Steve Bartman reached out for a souvenir foul ball. There is some comfort in knowing that my father, my son, and I learned the hard, eternal truth about the Cubs at identical ages. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.
Despite all that, a lot of people in Chicago were stoked about the Cubs’ chances this year. Well, not this year, but maybe next. Although the rebuilding could take longer. But playoff contenders by the midcentury, tops. You know how this hope stuff goes.
A straight-thinking fan base would have thrown their support behind a less depressing team fifty years ago. And by all conventional lights, the Cubs would then have packed up and moved to Orlando or Jacksonville or some other arriviste city in Florida to get a better stadium deal and a fresh start. Yet deep inside, no matter how grumpily and fatalistically he dismisses their chances, even the most hard-bitten Wrigley bleacher bum truly, truly believes that this might finally be the year.
The question, then, is why would anyone consider this sort of historical, counterlogical, masochistic, Pollyanna belief a virtue? From any objective standpoint, the Cubs fans’ perennial, unshakeable hope really only benefits the team’s front office. Hope is a virtue? Hell, it’s a character flaw that leaves us prey to overpriced ball caps and eight-dollar cups of Old Style. If you’re going to be purely rational about it, hope is for the gullible. The self-deluded. The suckers. Wise up, boy-o, hope is for dopes. It’s nothing but a dressed-up, theologically approved version of the gambler’s fallacy. Want to see hope at work? Walk through a casino floor in Las Vegas at eight o’clock in the morning. You’ll see plenty of unshakeable hope in people’s bloodshot eyes—every one of them genuinely believing they’re just one lever pull, just one button push, just one dealer’s face card or river turn from sweet deliverance. With virtue like that, who needs vice?
If you’re going to be purely rational about it, the truly virtuous attitude would be to put a hand on the poor schlemiel’s shoulder, buy him an all-you-can-eat breakfast, and explain how his faithful hope in the eventual charity of that roulette wheel is going to result in a trip to the pawnbroker and a long, smelly Greyhound ride back to Dubuque. In the words of the great twentieth-century theologian Kenny Rogers, “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” Or, if we’re going to switch metaphors back to the Cubbies, I should have sat my boy down and said, “Son, I know we live in Chicago, but geography doesn’t have to be destiny. What are your feelings about pinstripes?”
If you’re going to be purely rational about it, then our sanctification of hope as a cardinal virtue is less due to S. T. Aquinas than to P. T. Barnum. Which means that we’d do better training ourselves to follow enlightened self-interest rather than the pie-in-the-sky dreams of pie salesmen. Because let’s face it, “Winners never quit and quitters never win” is a great motivational slogan—so long as you’re playing with house odds. And it makes a difference whether that house is Caesar’s Palace or Wrigley Field.
And yet. Having presented an analytical, rational case against it, we ought to at least consider whether this hope stuff has any redeeming product features. First, let’s accept that however thin the semantic line between hope and gullibility may be, there is one. After all, English—and nearly every other language—assigns separate words to these concepts. “Gullibility” has a closer kinship to stupidity. “Hope” is often defined as a negative space—that is, as the absence of, or the active resistance to, despair. And now we’re starting to get somewhere.
I wouldn’t call despair a vice, exactly. All of us are, in some respect, susceptible to it. It’s probably humankind’s default position, actually. Just about everyone can look at the hollow-cheeked screamer in the Edvard Munch painting and think, Been there, dude. But if despair isn’t a sin (except to Catholics; you know how they are), it’s probably best seen as a weakness—as an instinct that, like fear, is perfectly human and logical—but that doesn’t do us any favors in practical terms. If you get tossed in a pit with a rabid animal (or a Yankees fan) you have every reason to be afraid. But cowering in fear isn’t going to help you survive. You have to master your fear, distract the animal, and then figure out a way to escape. (I suggest confusing them with a riddle. For instance, ask if they think Derek Jeter is omnipotent, and when they say yes—they always do—ask if Derek Jeter could make a hot dog so big that even Derek Jeter couldn’t eat it. This should buy you a week or so.)
Hope involves the determination to transcend the crippling weakness of despair. Consider a lifeboat from a sunken ocean liner, adrift in the Pacific, with three survivors: a despairing pessimist, a hope-filled optimist, and yourself. The pessimist passes the time with constant reminders about the boat’s dwindling supplies and by giving pet names to the sharks circling below. The optimist starts paddling, in the hope that maybe—just maybe—you’ll catch a wave and be whisked away to an island paradise with movie starlets, hot Kansas farm girls, and a professor who can make shortwave radios from coconuts.
Now for the sake of argument, let’s say the pessimist doom-sayer was right all along and predicts with uncanny precision the exact day when all the food runs out. Now I can’t speak for you, but when that moment comes I’m voting to eat him. In the end, Mr. Gloomy Cassandra’s 100 percent accurate diagnoses may have bought him a brief moment of smug, triumphal I-told-you-so. But it gets followed by a few days as the featured dish on the lifeboat lunch menu. By contrast, no matter how wrong he turned out to be, Mr. Sunshine Pollyanna isn’t going die regretting his optimism. The pessimist was correct, but even by his own cynical standard—so what? What did it benefit him? From the most self-interested perspective, even under the worst possible outcome, hope is ultimately the logical choice.
And then there’s the other possibility: That the optimist turns out to be right. You make landfall and live out your days on a tropical paradise with Ginger on one arm and Mary Ann on the other. Either way, you’re better off throwing in your lot with hope.
But of course those are just the practical reasons to give in to hope. The more philosophical argument concerns hope’s ability to affect everyone aboard our shared cosmic lifeboat. Despair and hope are both contagious, perhaps equally so. If we are going to face a global attitudinal epidemic, better one of hopeful expectation than the alternative. Hope lays the foundation for the other virtues that advance humanity—courage, industry, exploration. And while hope may not be a plan, neither is despair. In fact, without hope, why bother with planning at all? Hope, or the lack thereof, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a society that assumes an inevitably bleak future is going to get exactly what it expects. Sustaining hope benefits not only you but everyone around you—even those hopeless, eye-rolling cynics who remain immune to your good cheer. Whether they like it or not.
It isn’t all puppy dogs and ice cream, mind you. Hope can, from time to time, leave people vulnerable to exploitation. Every good con artist, ad man, and political message consultant knows that “hope” has a boffo Q score. As always, caveat emptor. Here’s a good rule of thumb for you kids: If something is branded “HOPE,” then it’s probably a swindle. Remember, there is no inherent contradiction between being hopeful and being skeptical; it’s what separates hope from gullibility.
But just as a healthy bit of skepticism keeps hope from lapsing into gullibility, a healthy bit of hope keeps skepticism from lapsing into corrosive cynicism. Humankind is not neatly categorized with bright lines sectioning off the scheming grifters from the naive marks. You can’t always tell Lucy from Charlie Brown. But instead of being on the constant lookout for the sharpies, it’s probably best to recognize that the vast majority of this world is pretty much like you—good folks who just want things to turn out all right.
Which brings us back to the corner of Addison and Clark. I have to believe all the Cubs who’ve played there—from Kiki Kuyler and Phil Cavaretta, to Ernie Banks and Ron Santo, to Kerry Wood and Sammy Sosa—are as pained by the streak as I am. Even as they rake in all those millions in merchandise, TV, and beer revenue. I have to believe the Cubs front office wants to win the World Series every bit as much as I do. If only so the rest of the baseball world will leave us alone and start talking about the curse of the Cleveland Indians for a change. Hope may be a cardinal virtue, but it’s also a Cubs virtue.
So maybe the Cubs won’t win the World Series this year. Or next year. Maybe not in my dad’s lifetime, maybe not in my lifetime. But eventually they will. I know this for a fact, because when the odds are above zero, everything is inevitable. And when that day comes, I’ll raise the W flag from my celestial sky-box and buy a round of Old Styles for Grandpa and Dad and Uncle Arlen. And we’ll tell everybody who’ll listen: We told you, man—they were due.