MY CUBS TICKETS HAVE ARRIVED. Seven sets of two tickets each. And what seats: eight rows off the field, on the first-base side, right at the visiting team’s on-deck circle. I buy them from a friend who has held Cubs season tickets through three marriages. He could get more for my seats by selling them to an agent, but he generously sells them to me. He told me that he was reserving a seat to one of last year’s Cubs World Series games for me. But, as every baseball fan knows, for the Cubs it didn’t happen.
It’s supposed to happen this year, though one would have to be Dr. Pangloss’s even dreamier brother not to have the most strenuous doubts. Most Cubs fans, if they are anything like me, are working out scenarios of disaster for the team this year: Two pitchers from the starting rotation go down with shoulder and elbow problems in August; a $10-million-dollar-a-year outfielder loses his concentration afield because he is contemplating a same-sex marriage; the team’s manager is accused of having al Qaeda connections. Many are the roads to failure, of which the Cubs have traveled most, few those to success, of which the Cubs have found none.
I don’t have the Cubs sickness at the fatal or even chronic stage. I’m pleased when the team wins, slightly down when they lose, but thoughts of suicide do not play in my head. The larger fact is that I enjoy baseball, and seem to enjoy it even more as I grow older. I continue to discover details of deeper intricacy about this ostensibly simple game: such as the complaint that the great catcher Ivan Rodriguez, to protect his percentage of throwing out base runners, calls for too many fastballs with men on base. But I find no subtle metaphors in the game, seek no secret geometries as I gaze out at the diamond. I merely enjoy watching the players do the remarkable but insignificant things they do for the astonishing sums they are paid to do them.
As with all baseball fans, I have also had to apply at a high power what, in a very different context, Coleridge called “a willing suspension of disbelief.” I have to put out of my mind that these players feel less loyalty to the teams for which they play than does the normal fan. Let their agents arrange another million dollars or so for them and–later, alligator–they are gone. Ballplayers on steroids is another matter that must be put out of mind, as home runs go crashing out of parks and asterisks are one day likely to come flying back, noting that certain records were established with chemical support. About player salaries, best not to speak.
The greater part of the attraction to the Cubs for me is what old-timers call the ballyard, the team’s splendid old stadium, Wrigley Field. Anyone who has been there knows the charm of the place. Wrigley Field has serious advantages over more modern baseball parks. Fans are closer to the playing field than in most other parks; no signs advertising products are allowed to deface the field, though I did note last year that the Cubs ownership, the Chicago Tribune Company, permitted Sears to attach its name, in fairly subdued yellow neon, to a sign that registers the speed of pitches. The team still plays the preponderant number of its games during the day; this, too, is slowly changing, and the number of night games–which was originally supposed to be no more than 18–is scheduled to increase in coming years.
But the greatest advantage of all in Wrigley Field is that it does not have a scoreboard on which televised images are shown. This means that one doesn’t have to endure the sound of trumpets drawing one’s attention to an immense television screen where a race of M&Ms is underway. Nor is any but organ music played at Wrigley Field, and this, happily, only intermittently, which gives one a chance to talk to friends between innings. Unlike NBA games, where no time without entertainment is allowed–bring on the dancing girls, clowns, small blimps–at Wrigley Field one feels the sweet slow leisure of a summer afternoon, given over to the fine but trivial pursuit of watching men do superbly what as a boy one did merely enthusiastically.
My Cubs tickets are always for midweek day games. Going to a baseball game during the day in the middle of the week, when everyone else is working, lends the outing the small but genuine piquancy of vice. I usually leave home a full hour before the game so that I can find a free parking space and thus save the $20 fee. (This, along with being one of those selective cheapnesses that I believe we all have, gives me a precise valuation of my hourly worth: twenty bucks.) I buy my peanuts and a hot dog outside before going into the park. Eight rows off the field, I sit in the sun, watch the game, and, my mind floating pleasantly, wonder why it was that I ever thought life was complicated.
–Joseph Epstein
