Why Am I a Cubs Fan? (part 1)
An existential search for the roots of a predestined misery.
I am on a deeply personal quest, seeking answers to “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” to quote Churchill. I am that most miserable specimen of the human species: I am a baseball fan, the fan of a sport in which failure plays a starring (HOF, .333) role, …a Chicago Cubs fan. The question has been asked and answered in a universal or general way by writers who are far better at this craft than I am, especially by conservative political columnist George F. Will, author of A Nice Little Place on the North Side, Men at Work, etc. The fundamental question is this: Why was the trajectory of my fan life bent toward the miserly Cubs, who dole out their World Series wins in centuries…and not toward the more profligate Cardinals (4 WS in my lifetime). I would have been, if not happy, at least happier.
Personally speaking, the quest for a satisfactory answer begins with the day and year and location of my birth. This is not because the Cubs played an unusually important game that day. Though I was born in late April, it happened to be an off day for the Cubs. The club was celebrating rare back-to-back wins that day. The two winning games had been played at home at Wrigley against the Dodgers, the previous year’s World Series Champions, making the victories taste even sweeter, and the two wins brought the Cubbie record to a Cubbie-respectable 2–8, just 3 games short of .500 for the nascent season. Let’s just say this inauspicious start was a micro-sample preview of the full 162-game slog. They would finish the season 59–103, tenth of ten in the National League, with a winning percentage of .364. Who took first place in the NL that year? Those same Dodgers, of course.
There had been only one winning season for the Cubbies in the decade before my birth, but hope springs eternal on the North Side of Chicago. (As I write on the day following the coldest Chicago temperature in recorded history, the vans are already loading for the 2019 trek to Mesa with the perennial promise that “next year” is already here, mid-way through what was supposed to be a Cubs dynasty. But more on that later.) If only I had been born three days earlier, perhaps this catastrophic life-nudge could have been averted.
It did not have to be this way, of course. My parents were not avid baseball fans, nor were my grandparents. Our family on both sides was part of the great, no-nonsense (play is a four-letter word), northern migration — second-, third-, fourth-…and eighth- children of share croppers leaving for factory work in the aftermath of the sudden arrival down on the farm of the mechanized tractor. After the mules were sold, they traveled north in an exodus from West Tennessee and eastern Arkansas and the Missouri Bootheel, eventually settling in the heart of the windy city of Chicago. On the shores of Lake Michigan plenty of those families still kept their allegiance to the St. Louis ball club, traveling south for a week in mid-summer to renew old cultural ties or taking their own children back to the farm to spend the summer vacation from school with family. But some transferred their loyalties to the teams of the cities of their exile, to Detroit or Cleveland, or to the “South” Side of Chicago. Perhaps it was the unformed, unfixed, un-tethered-ness, of my family’s baseball fandom (rather, the lack of any established fandom) that enabled my own unfounded, infantile predilection for the lovable losers. The hospital in which I took my first breath was less than 5 miles from Wrigley (and twice that to Comisky Park); the apartment just off North Avenue to which my parents brought me home during that first week of life was further removed from the magnetic northern pull of the friendly confines, but with the epicenter of Cub fandom a mere 8 miles to the E-NE, my fate was more or less sealed.
Eight miles in the city is not “close”; we did not live in Wrigleyville, but close enough.
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/27923269/willie_mays_hits_511/
The headline on the sports page of the Chicago Tribune on that fateful day screamed (all caps) Willie’s feat from the day before: MAYS HITS 511TH; TIES MEL OTT’S MARK. This was the era of real news and Mays’ career was certainly reason enough to become a bonafide baseball fan. The Tribune ran the AP report of the Giants Astros game with a byline from the Houston Astrodome. At the time only Ted Williams (521), Jimmy Foxx (534), and the Babe (714) remained ahead of the 34 year old Mays. Willie had attained his mark in 15 seasons and would retire in 1973 with his future in the Hall of Fame secure, a 24-time All Star with 660 career homers. The second headline that day was Sox Win; Cubs Jar Dodgers Again. The Sox would be more than modestly better than the Cubs, ending their season at 83–79 with a .512 winning percentage, which was good enough for fourth place, middle of the pack in the AL. The feel-good news about the Cubs win that filled the rest of the page was, to say the least, misleading in the implication that it portended better days.
How different was the game back then? The hero of the win over the Dodgers the day before was Ken Holtzman. It was his major league pitching debut as a starter (the previous September he had pitched 4 innings in relief). He went 6 innings against the previous year’s World Series champs, having not pitched more than 3 innings at any time all spring. Most remarkably, Holtzman was a part-timer, a 20-year old Junior whose plan was to become a French teacher. The plan was to play home games and weekend away games until school let out in June. As reported by the Tribune’s George Langford, the pitcher was late leaving Wrigley because the media wanted to chat, but soon enough had to drag himself away from the festivities to complete a 100-page English Literature reading assignment for a 9:00 a.m. class at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle the next morning.
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/27925245/ken_holtzman/
Holtzman’s future plans as a French teacher had to be set aside. He would make it to the postseason 4 times, 1972–1975, but not with the Cubs. He won Game 1 of the 1972 series, Games 1 and 7 of the 1973 series, and Game 4 of the 1974 series with the A’s. Holtzman was the reason the Cubs got a little better in the ensuing years, until he had a rough season, was criticized by the manager, and asked to be traded. He went to the 70’s A’s. Nothing else need be said about that. He was the first Cubs pitcher since Larry Corcoran (1880–1884) to pitch two no-hitters with the club (and the last until Jake Arrieta), and only the second person in MLB history to pitch a no-hitter without a strikeout (August 19, 1969, Baseball Reference). Holtzman was better off playing for the A’s (to state the obvious) and his absence left the Cubs demonstrably weaker. That pretty much sums up the story of my life as a Cubs fan. There were a few bright spots, like Ron Santo, but more often than not, they were strong players on weak teams and even when they were better they were not quite good enough. The players change over the years — and I would not take anything for 2016 — but Cubs fans know that “just wait ’til 2019” is more likely a vain hope than a purchase on reality. At least we have the friendly confines. Go read Holtzman’s SABR bio. It will distract you from the players that the Cubs are not signing this off-season and, while the trucks rumble toward Mesa, it will fill your winter evening with memories of seasons long gone and the thinking man’s ballplayer. Who knows, you might even be enticed to crack open your copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in the original French.
