Joy in Mudville

Local television news shows in recent weeks have dragged out World War II veterans, women in their late nineties and beyond in Cubs shirts, and everything but prehistoric animals to relate their memories of the Cubs and their joy in the prospect of ending the longest non-winning streak in sports history. As everyone by now surely knows, the Cubs last appeared in a World Series in 1945, when they lost to the Detroit Tigers, and last won a World Series in 1908, when in five games they defeated—one wants to tap in here Hannibal and the Carthaginians—the Detroit Tigers. The local joke has it that, hell, any team can have a bad century, though of course no other has.

Apart from the obvious nonsense about the curse of the billy goat—applied it was said when a local Greek named William Sianis wasn’t allowed to bring a billy goat into the fourth game of the 1945 World Series—perhaps the greatest bit of tosh of all has the Chicago Cubs as the team of the Jews. Some meshugener rabbi in Israel wrote a column in the Jerusalem Post suggesting that a Cubs victory in the World Series might herald the coming of the Jewish messiah, with Theo Epstein, the team’s president, in the role of Moses. A woman named Danya Ruttenberg, writing in Tablet, noted that “my brother is a Cubs fan the way I am a Jew,” adding that she happens to be a rabbi. The New York Times ran an op-ed under the title “The Cubs Reach the Promised Land. Now What?” The author of the piece wrote: “To me, the Cubs seemed like the Hebrews, wandering for decades in the wilderness. Moses understood that it would take a new generation, un-wrecked by the past, to claim the promised land. For the Cubs, that new generation has finally arrived.” (This Moses, a right-handed power hitter, was he not, though a sucker for a four-seam cutter.) The parallel breaks down, however, when one considers that the Jews wandered the desert for a mere 40 years while the Cubs have been stumbling about for the past 108 years without winning a World Series.

I was myself queried by an earnest reporter from the Wall Street Journal about this notion of the Cubs being the team of the Jews. I replied that I had nothing of interest to say on the subject, and, far from being the team of the Jews, before the advent of Theo Epstein as the team’s president, I could not imagine a more goyesque enterprise than that of the Chicago National League franchise. For decades, before being bought by its current owners, the Ricketts family, whose paterfamilias Joe Ricketts founded TD Ameritrade, the online discount stock brokerage firm, the Cubs were owned and run by the Chicago Tribune Company. The Trib, during World War II and for decades thereafter, was not allowed in many Jewish homes—it wasn’t in ours by order of my father—because of its owner Colonel Robert McCormick’s isolationist, anti-British policy.

With a single exception, the pitcher Kenny Holtzman, Cubs rosters have been notably Judenrein. Ernie Banks, the team’s Hall of Fame shortstop, then first baseman, later on the payroll as goodwill ambassador, used to represent what I long thought the Cubs’ hopeless empty optimism with his mantra, “Let’s play two.” I have for a good while now been attempting, without great success, to circulate the rumor that what Ernie, talking to Kenny Holtzman, was really saying was “Let’s play, Jew!”

Fairly early in life an American boy makes three decisions that he tends to live with for the rest of his days: boxer or jockey shorts, Democrat or Republican party, National or American League. I chose the former in all three cases—boxers, Democrats, National League—though I long ago abandoned my original political and more recently half my baseball decisions. I ceased thinking of myself as a Democrat when the party nominated George McGovern for president, and a decade or so ago I came out and courageously declared myself a baseball bisexual.

By baseball bisexual I mean I cheer on both the Cubs and the Chicago White Sox, which in this city one is not supposed to do. Sox fans loathe Cubs fans, and on any given day a White Sox victory is complete only if on the same day the Cubs lose. Cubs fans meanwhile look upon the White Sox with an almost disdainful indifference. Sox fans tend to be working class, Cubs fans middle class. Cubs fans think of White Sox fans as déclassé; White Sox fans of Cubs fans as clueless yuppies. (The football franchise, the Chicago Bears, is the team the city unites around.) In fact, the bleachers at Wrigley Field, where I used to sit to gamble on the game as a young man, in recent years have come to resemble nothing so much as a singles bar in a Big Ten college town. Last time I went to a Sox game a private vendor outside the ballpark was selling T-shirts reading “Typical Cubs Fan” beneath which was pictured a man on his knees in a highly embarrassing sexual position.

As a Cubs fan, I go back to the years of Andy Pafko, Phil Cavarretta, Bill (Swish) Nicholson, the incomparable Lenny Merullo (I use the adjective advisedly; no one has been able to compare with Merullo’s record in 1942 of committing four errors at shortstop in a single inning). I cheered on the Cubs, though there wasn’t all that much to cheer about until 1969, when the team with Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Ron Santo, and Fergie Jenkins, having been in first place for 155 days, in the month of September lost 17 of 25 games while the second-place New York Mets won 23 out of 30 to finish 8 games ahead of the Cubs, in one of the greatest peripeteia, chokes, utter collapses in the history of sports.

Although the decades of defeat are a bit of blur, for me they will always be characterized by a television commercial in the 1950s that invited fans to venture out to Wrigley Field as to a forest preserve, there to enjoy the sunshine, green field, and ivy-clad walls, have a hot dog and beer, and, while at it—an afterthought—see a ballgame. This was under the uninspiring ownership and management of the Cubs by the Wrigleys, the chewing-gum dynasty. A Churchillian writing a multivolume history of Cubs teams of this period might title the volume The Dismal Years.

Not the least dismal thing about them was the team’s television announcer Jack Brickhouse. Brickhouse announced games from 1948 to 1981, providing 33 years of cheerful nullity. One learned nothing from him, for he himself seems to have known very little about baseball. He would commend the Cubs, even in defeat, for nonetheless getting “good wood” on the ball. When a traded player first came up to bat against the team that had traded him, Brickhouse invariably said, “He would like nothing better than to wreak vengeance on his old team.” When a Cub hit a homer, he called out “Hey-Hey!” The comedian Bill Murray, who grew up in north suburban Chicago, has recounted as a boy returning home from school, turning on the Cubs game, and listening to Brickhouse put an optimistic gloss on yet another Cubs defeat to the accompaniment in the background of the echo of straggling fans stomping on empty paper beer cups. Sheer depression.

Jack Brickhouse was succeeded as the Cubs’ television announcer by Harry Caray, whom people without baseball intelligence or the least refinement in the use of language would doubtless call “iconic.” Moronic was closer to it. Behind thick glasses, Caray didn’t see very well, and relied on his partners in the booth to correct the blatant inaccuracy of many of his calls. His mispronunciations of the names of Hispanic players—”Gonzalleez”—was material fit for a Monty Python skit. I once entered a local NBC television affiliate fantasy sports contest, in which my fantasy was not to play one-on-one with Michael Jordan, or be thrown a pass from Jim McMahon, or catch Rick Sutcliffe, but to eat ribs with Harry Caray. I won the contest, and all I can say is may your fantasies never come true, for Caray turned out to be even duller, with booziness added, in person than on television.

Harry Caray supplied his own depression. George Will grew up in Champaign, Illinois, where his father taught philosophy at the University of Illinois, which was nearly equidistant between St. Louis and Chicago. He could as easily have become a St. Louis Cardinals as a Chicago Cubs fan, but, as he once told me, Caray’s depression (“Popped it up!” “There’s danger here, Cherie!”) drove him into the arms of the Cubs and thereupon brought him decades of unnecessary mental anguish.

In 2008 George Will took me to a Cubs-Dodgers playoff game, which the Cubs lost, and I could tell that he took the loss much harder than I. George is a longtime, unflagging, and I would venture to say diehard Cubs fan. Cubs fans divide into diehard, mildly depressed, and merely pleased to show their foolhardy loyalty to a losing team. I have a cousin, a contemporary, so diehard that, upon developing ulcers, he was warned by his physician to cease listening to broadcasts of Cubs games. (When the team actually caused his ulcers is not known.) I had a friend named John Lull, born in 1900, who as a boy actually attended one of the Cubs’ 1908 victorious World Series games and hoped to live long enough to see the team return to the series. He died in 1985, disappointed. A man about town named Pritikin, in his early eighties I would guess, attends Cubs games in cut-off jeans and regularly brings along large homemade signs cheering the team on. In a television interview, asked about his unremitting passion as a fan, he replied that, if the interviewer thought he was passionate, he should have known his father. His father’s deathbed words, Pritikin claims, were “trade Kingman.” A hard death for a diehard Cubs fan.

I was spared such diehard suffering owing to my having given up playing baseball at age 13—I played shortstop with a trapper mitt on a gravel playground—when I became serious about tennis. At that point I had little more than a passing interest in baseball. College, work, marriage, family absorbed my interest, and when I lived in New York and in Arkansas, which I did for five or so years, I was taken out of the Cubs’ ambit and all but entirely dropped away from any interest in baseball. My one regret is that I missed the great six or so years of Sandy Koufax’s astonishing career. Only later, for reasons I shall go into presently, did I realize that of all American games, baseball is the most complex, the most subtle, the best game really on offer.

When I did come back to an interest in baseball, I followed the Cubs without anything like the intense feeling felt by true fans. (The root of the word “fan” is of course “fanatic.”) I have a good friend who has kept two superior Cubs box seats—11 rows off the field, on the first-base side just up from the visiting team’s on-deck circle—through three marriages. I used to buy six or seven sets of tickets from him every season. The prices have gone steadily up, and are now, for games against first-caliber teams in mid-season, at $100.80. (It’s that 80 cents that galls.) I went only once this year, earlier in the season, to discover that ear-shattering rock music is now played between innings, so that one cannot talk to friends except during the game itself. Pro basketball does something similar during time-outs: tumblers, jugglers, dancing girls appear, small blimps ascend to the ceiling, team T-shirts are shot from cannons into the stands, everything short of human sacrifice is called into play to entertain the fans. Fun, I guess.

As baseball fans go, the category into which I now fit is fair-weather fan. To have stuck without deviation with the Cubs all through these years would have qualified me as, I feel, less a depressive than a masochist. Not long after I declared my baseball bisexuality, the Chicago White Sox won the 2005 World Series in four straight games. Not least of the pleasures of that team were the shenanigans of its manager, the Venezuelan Ozzie Guillén, a man with considerable baseball savvy and no sense of decorum whatsoever. Ozzie didn’t know which were acceptable and which unacceptable English words, which made interviews with him always interesting. He was feisty, stormy, unpredictable, wild, and able to stir his players into putting out for him.

I justify my position as a fair-weather fan based on the hard fact that the entire concept of fan is, if viewed at all closely, in itself, beyond contradictory, quite nutty. In becoming a fan there is an element of municipal pride, the notion that this team represents my city and thereby me. But do teams any longer truly represent the cities in which they are lodged? Owners not infrequently live elsewhere than the city in which their teams play and so in the off-season do most players. Many decades ago, players stayed with one team through their entire careers: Joe DiMaggio was forever a New York Yankee, Stan Musial a St. Louis Cardinal, Bob Feller a Cleveland Indian, Ted Williams a Boston Red Sox. But now with free agency—and with aggressive agents working for them—athletes go where the money is, and the question of loyalty to a team, which is at the heart of being a fan, for the players simply doesn’t come into play.

Marxism, with its central doctrine of economic determinism, may be dead in every other realm of life, but in sports it remains highly cogent. A journalist once stopped Don Ohlmeyer, the television producer, saying he had a question for him. “If the question is about sports,” Ohlmeyer replied, “the answer is money.” Just so. Why do athletes take steroids? To improve their performance and make more money. Why do they remove themselves from play at the least hint of injury? To prolong their careers and make more money. Why has the time between innings at baseball games lengthened and the timeouts in football games increased? To allow more time for commercials and hence television revenues and make more money. None of this profit, of course, is passed along to the fans. My brother not long ago told me that he took his three young grandsons to a San Francisco Giants game that cost him—for tickets, a few drinks, and sandwiches—$500. Half a grand for just another afternoon at the old ballpark.

If one is to be a fan, one has to set all this aside and forget that one is also at least partially a sucker. Just as one wouldn’t put up with a wretched meal at an expensive restaurant or a dirty room at a costly hotel, why should fans put up with dismal teams? They do because they are fans, which is to say, a little goofy—maybe more than a little. With everyone connected with the game cashing in all around, what, really, is the point in allegiance to dismal teams, to supporting mediocrity, to paying out loyalty when none is remotely returned? This is a question a true fan must never ask himself.

One can of course be a fan of the game of baseball, which has so much to recommend it. Unlike basketball, football, even of late tennis, baseball is among the last sports that can be played at the highest level by normal-sized human beings. Apart from the occasional collision at home plate or a pitcher deliberately hitting a batter, it is a game without violence. An odd element of parity exists in baseball as in no other sport. Only in baseball can a team in last place in its division win three or four games in a row against a team leading its division. Strategy in baseball is just short of infinite. I once heard Tony La Russa, then the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, set out eight possible moves a manager might make with men on first and third with one out. The young complain that baseball is too slow, not realizing that it is often its very slowness that makes for its tension—the lengthy battles between pitchers and batters in late innings in crucial games is but one example—and provides more inherent drama than any other sport.

Baseball has over the years changed in many ways. Today it is less the purely American sport it once was; fewer African Americans play in the majors (last I heard they numbered only 9 percent of all players). The sport has become greatly Hispanicized, with vast numbers of Cabreras, Rodriguezes, Ramirezes, and other Latin American players on every team’s roster. More Asians are playing in the majors than ever before. Meanwhile the game itself has improved. The pitching is sharper, faster, the kinds of pitches more varied: Forkballs, cutters, four-seam backspins, power curves, and more are part of pitchers’ repertoires. Infield play has become dazzling, often astonishing. Now that the accursed drugs are out of the game, hitting 40 home runs, batting .300, has returned to being the genuine accomplishment it is. From a hitter’s standpoint, baseball is the only sport in which one is vastly rewarded for succeeding a mere 3 times out of 10, which gives some rough notion of the game’s inherent difficulty.

Like a beautiful but reliably perfidious woman, a fair-weather fan does not waste his time on failure. As the White Sox in recent years have struggled and failed to attain the measly goal of .500 seasons, the Cubs, under the front-office management of Theo Epstein (no relation, though, to avail myself of what the public relations man Ben Sonnenberg called a secondary name-drop, I knew his mother well when I lived in New York) and the field generalship of Joe Maddon, became more and more promising. That the Ricketts family was ready to spend vast sums on premier players was no small help. The team made a $155 million, five-year contract with the pitcher Jon Lester, which has worked out well; and another, a $184 million contract for eight years to the outfielder Jason Heyward, which hasn’t. Win some, lose some. What’s a couple hundred million among contemporary sports franchise owners?

Best of all the Cubs players are young—the average age of the team’s infield is less than 24 years old—likable, and under the gentle guidance of Maddon seemed greatly to be enjoying themselves afield. Kris Bryant, the team’s third baseman, last year’s Rookie of the Year, is the son every sports-minded father would love to have had. Without any great established stars, the team nicely provided new heroes almost daily. One mark of a winning team is the ability to come back and win games in the late innings, which the Cubs did with a far from monotonous regularity. In the perhaps 80 or so games, or portions of games I watched on television this year, Joe Maddon never made any foolish decision or said anything egregious. He orchestrated the Cubs as if they were the Berlin Philharmonic, but without any of Herbert von Karajan’s displays of temperament. The 2016 Cubs, who finished their season winning 103 of 162 games, were a thing of beauty and a joy if not forever at least through this past summer.

The question, of course, was how the team would do in the playoffs. Would the team that historically never disappointed when it came to disappointment break through and win the World Series and silence forever the odious sentimentality that has affected even hard cases such as Maureen Dowd? Ms. Dowd, recently visiting Chicago, went all soft inside in her admiration for the lovable losers and found in them an antidote, however temporary, for our ghastly presidential election. “So when I found myself in Chicago, awash in positive emotions at the miracle of baseball in October,” she wrote, “I couldn’t get enough. I knew nothing about the Cubs, the underdog’s underdog, but I signed up as a fan.” This Dragon Lady of American journalism, this Jenny One-Note—the note is that of high scorn—Maureen Dowd bought a Cubs hat to wear at book signings, and signed the books she was flogging “Go Cubs.”

I understand her flow of emotion. For even I, a certified fair-weather fan, began to cheer the Cubs on with a fanatic’s combination of hope and worry. Once the playoffs began, the sense that Henry James called “the imagination of disaster” kicked in. After such a splendid regular season, it seemed only natural that the Cubs go down three games straight in the first round of the playoffs against the wildcard San Francisco Giants. But the team, rallying in the ninth inning of the fourth game, beat the Giants 6-5, and moved on to play the Los Angeles Dodgers for the National League pennant.

Against Los Angeles, the Cubs won the first game of the best-of-seven series in spectacular fashion. A pinch-hit grand-slam homer by the team’s reserve catcher, Miguel Montero, was easily the game’s high point, though the team’s second baseman, Javier Báez, stole home, something I’ve not seen done in years. In the second game Cubs hitters were handcuffed by Clayton Kershaw, a three-time Cy Young Award winner and by general consensus the best pitcher in current-day baseball. (Quick trivia quiz: Who is the greatest pitcher never to win the Cy Young Award? Answer: Cy Young.) In the sixth and last game of the series, the Cubs young yet impressively calm pitcher Kyle Hendricks did something similar to the Dodgers—against, of all people, Clay Kershaw—and the Cubs had an easy 5-0 win.

Onward and upward to Cleveland for the World Series. The Cubs quickly lost the first game in Cleveland, won the second, and then lost two out of three at home. The Indians’ best pitcher, Corey Kluber, beat the Cubs twice, the second time on three days’ rest. (In the modern era starting pitchers are pampered, and work only one day in five.) The bottom half of the Cubs’ batting order might as well not have shown up, so poorly did they do at plate in these early games. Down three games to one, the Cubs won game five at home. In a nice touch, at the conclusion of the game, its final home game, the team came out and applauded the people in the stands in recognition of their grand yearlong support. The World Series moved on to Cleveland for the final two games, with the Indians leading three games to two, and all the odds against the Cubs. The team won the sixth game in a walk, 9 to 3, tying the series at three games all. The Cubs, begorrah, were in the seventh game of the World Series, where they had once more to face the formidable Corey Kluber. The scene was nicely set for heartbreak.

Heartbreak there nearly was. The Cubs went out to a comfortable 5-to-1 lead, when in the fifth inning Joe Maddon took out Hendricks, the starting pitcher. Jon Lester, Hendricks’s replacement, promptly threw a wild pitch that allowed two runs to score, turning what seemed a pleasant romp into a tight, tense 5-to-3 game. With a two-run Cubs lead going into the eighth inning, the Cleveland fans, subdued, with that hangdog look usually found on the countenances of Cubs fans, came alive as the Cleveland centerfielder, Rajai Davis, hit a two-run homer off the Cubs closer Aroldis Chapman, tying the game. All joy leaked out of Mudville. Even a fair-weather fan has emotions, and I felt descending upon me the heavy gloom presaging ineluctable defeat.

As everyone knows, it didn’t happen. The Cubs came through and won the game 8 to 7 in the tenth inning. Melee on the mound among the victors; high-fives, sweaty hugs all round; inane interviews; champagne spritzing all over the locker room. Parade to follow. Happy days are here again! Joy returns to Mudville. Much for which to be thankful. If the Cubs hadn’t won, who knows, the suicide rate in Chicago might have topped the city’s far from unimpressive weekend murder rates.

Best of all, the Chicago Cubs World Series victory puts an end to the cliché-ridden narrative of the lovable losers. No more curse-of-the-billy-goat stories; no more woeful tales of unrequited fan loyalty. Ms. Dowd can remove her Cubs hat and return to dispensing vitriol to Donald Trump, the Clintons, and other unworthy politicians. Cubs win! Cubs win! As a witty friend emailed to me directly after the game, “Let’s do it again in 2124.”

Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author, most recently, of Frozen in Time: Twenty Stories.