I am aware, as is more or less anyone who reads this site, that Chicago baseball has been getting just fucking excellent coverage from CSTB’s Chicago and Chicagoan-at-large bureaus. This has done well at filling the vacuum of Mets-related coverage. Gerard handled some of the Mets end-of-days shit; my last word non-comment word on the subject was in my recap of CSTB Day at Shea, which was a lot of fun even if it did help me realize that the Mets reaching the playoffs wasn’t going to be much of a value-add for my life.
For the most part, CSTB’s favorite baseball team (besides the Round Rock Express) has been out of the discussion of late — although Wally Matthews’ hot-douche-stove is apparently heating up. That relative silence doesn’t mean I (and presumably other Mets fans) haven’t been grumping in private over another disappointing season, but at some point it just feels like everything that needs to be said has been. I’m used to the Mets losing, being disappointing, being ridiculous in ways faint and obvious and sometimes graceful or ironic but more often just ridiculous-ridiculous. (I’ll again self-link here and send you back to a game from last year’s collapse in which ’08 Round Rock Express hump Jorge Sosa was entrusted beyond all reason with an important game). It’s a fucking theme in my novel, that’s how used to it I am: when I write what I know, I write about relievers giving up bases-loaded doubles. But Cubs fans…
…Well, they’re used to the losing thing, too, but by this point we know that Cubs fans have a century’s worth of generally not-good memories to sort out, and thus are still working through last week’s nasty, brutish, short sweep at the hands of the Dodgers. We’re lucky, though, that there are Cubs fans writing on the internets who transcend the currency-trader frat-beast Wrigley demo and actually have 1) some perspective on cheering for their team and 2) the ability to communicate that in print. Ben Schwartz is a smart and talented dude, and does so here. And Jeff Johnson, of FittedSweats, is every bit as smart and talented and — despite being from Eau Claire, Wisconsin — apparently also a Cubs fan.
His recent, rambly discourse on that fate at his blog has cameos from John Milner (running interference for Dave Parker), Pavement horseracing expert/percussionist Rob Nastanovich (beating the author’s ass at ping-pong) and Dave Kingman (being a fucking dickhead). But as it makes its course through Johnson’s Cub-fan life, it also picks up a lot of other details — mainly how much more weird and human professional sports were even a couple of decades ago — before winding up at the sort of honest, ambiguous conclusion that I wish all blog-writing had. Here it is:
This year. An amazing regular season. Best in my lifetime. I saw zero games in person. What else is new? I live half a country away. I have two small kids. I watched the televised games when I could. My dad is in the hospital in Wisconsin now. He will be there for a while. My mom took the opportunity to come visit us here. We watched most of the Dodgers series together. I saw the Cubs score maybe one of the few runs they put on the board. They fell apart completely. Across three games. It felt inevitable. This is not meant to be a cliche. I am not a guy who likes Joe Torre or Manny Ramirez. I don’t want Russell Martin to enjoy success. I despise that bearded fucker. There was literally nothing I could do as a fan, though. I couldn’t pout. I couldn’t sit in disbelief. (If you’re a Cubs fan, how can you even feign surprise at this point). I couldn’t put on a rally hat.
So a new perspective finally, slowly washed over me. It is this: If you are a Cubs fan of any age, relish the fact that they may never win a World Series, much less get to one, before you die. And let’s face it, “may” is really a stretch.
This is unique in its own ugly, pathetic way.
There are plenty of teams that have never won it all. Or even made it to a World Series. They have relatively shorter histories. The Cubs have been screwing things up in a different way each season, for 100 years.
Relish the fact that you are not a Red Sox fan, who now feel, every season, a bit more like Dallas Cowboys fans, in their certainty that God is on their side and that everyone in the country remains psyched about their uplifting little story, and their little antique stadium. And, wow, they can incorporate shamrocks into their gear, and drink Sammy Smith and Sammy Adams, and sing “Sweet Caroline.”
Life was great when all I knew about the Red Sox was Fred Lynn, Luis Tiant, Jim Rice and Carlton Fisk and the Green Monster. And I didn’t know that their fans were these Ben Affleck-meets-Staind-meets-Jimmy Fallon drunken douchecakes. There is nothing special about the Red Sox, and there was nothing special about them when they won it all. Johnny Damon aching to whip off that helmet every time he ran the bases just to show off that special glossy hairdo. The other guys’ soiled helmets. We get it. You’re knuckleheads. Millar, let me cut your hair, please. And Schilling, lord, please be quiet. Enough!! It’s fitting that David Wells spent some time up in Boston. It is also fitting that Rudy Giuliani ended up wishing the Red Sox well, too. Like 9/11, New Yorkers should never forget that.
I need to shut up now. The Cubs claim George Will as a fan. Billy fucking Corgan. That alone negates any dis in the previous paragraph. Sorry, Mr. Damon. I wish Hank Steinbrenner would let you grow your hair, so you could do all of that magical stuff again (P.S. if you could send me a picture of your ex-wife Angie Vannice–this is the 90th time I’ve complained about this–please do so. You have no idea how many people wind up on this site looking for an Angie Vannice picture). Finally, if you want to figure out why the Cubs never win, forget the goddamn goat, it’s because Jim Belushi is a Cubs fan.
I need to erase that stuff from my mind. And make my point:
Give me a team that can NEVER prevail. That will NEVER do it. That no matter how well things go for them, they will not go well at all in October. And maybe September. And August. And really, any time after May, most years. There is a certainty in this that right now, at least, is a lot more comforting than “surprise.” Sure, on the years the Cubs get close, and do very well in the regular season, it is hard not to get sucked back in to believing. Don’t do it though, Charlie Brown.
Keep losing Cubs. This fan doesn’t hate you for it.
We’re not experts, generally, we blog-persons. I’ll even give the guys over at the frat-core sports n’ titz blogs enough credit to suggest that they’re not the solipsistic dickweeds they seem to be. The internet lets us act like other things — smirking ironist is the move of choice, but gonzo misogynist or political insider or no-BS tough guy are popular, too — but when internet writing works it’s because we, the people who are writing the stuff, are being honest and really writing. The mutability and anonymity and distance of the internet gives us all kinds of enticements not to be honest — to forget that there are readers reading or even a real author, with some literary obligations, writing. But the same principle holds for this as for any other writing that works: the more honest, the better. The truer, the truer. Jeff’s piece is a good reminder of how many and how different and how many interesting different ways there are to care about a team, and to write about that.
Serious question here:
Are you the MOFO who used to head up the greatest rock band of all time?
Are you David Lee Fucking Roth?
I Gotta Know right now.
Oh, and how do you feel about Sarah Palin?
Ignore Ger Ger for a second and let me know your real feelings,
It’s late, so instead of talking about most of that very true post, an act that would involve thinking and brain exertion, I’m going to ask the one question it raised in my mind: You have a novel? And that’s not a smirking ironist question, I’m genuinely interested in a book whose theme could make me think of the lesser Sosa.
Sammy was a god (whilst amongst the cubbies) then that fuckhead was a cheater (although never proven). We Cubbies love him!!!
Well put, Diamond Dave. Let me do the stage adaptation of your novel. (Warning: all my stage adaptations end up looking like Mummenschanz).
But really, it is absolutely true that spurtsbloggery contains pleasant surprises on a fairly regular basis and that the best of these come from really personal places. I think the degree to which a piece is for the ages is in inverse proportion to the degree it resembles (or is informed by) marquee scribbling from the Simerses or the Morrisseys et al- which actually isn’t meant as a knock on those guys, just that in general, they aren’t paid to get something off their chest. Maybe nobody in sports writing anywhere is.
You know, wallowing in the poetic gloaming is fun and all, but come on. JJ bags (perhaps rightfully) on Red Sox Nation’s newfound post-season entitlement, but the “lovable losers” mantle that Cubs fans used to share with Boston and now have all to themselves (if you want to buy into that storyline) is equally insufferable, and equally bullshit.
Getting trounced in 3 straight games by a team that looked like (but most definitely wasn’t) a second-division charity case definitely sucks. But at the same time, those 3 games aren’t indicative of where the Cubs are right now — it’s been said plenty of places, but this sweep happens in June instead of October, and folks brush it off. Except for the self-flagellators in Wrigely and other points who I hesitate to call “true fans,” who’ll gladly whip out words like “clutch” and “choke” more often than Click & Clack to explain their dire straits.
This is not a team of lovable losers cursed to burn down barns or blow up baseballs or forever spill semaphore-blessed water on dugout steps. This is a team one or two moves away from becoming a champion (and I hope to god one of those moves is to get Alfonso Soriano the fuck out of the leadoff spot). Change a few of the details of JJ’s write-up, and it could’ve been the bleating of the woe-is-me Red Sox fan circa 2003 — it’s not meant to be, hope is for the foolish, we yam what we yam. And that team managed to buck the odds (thanks to actual competence in the front office, not witchcraft) and make Red Sox fans into the spoiled pricks everyone loves to hate.
If JJ’s sad-sackery is truly honest, then kudos, but how honest can someone be when they’re unable or unwilling to see what’s right in front of their face?
I worry, looking back at this one, that I was imposing some of my own bummed-out pre-Yom Kippur seriousness on a piece that’s really more wistful than anything else. I don’t see a lot of wallowing in Jeff’s piece in anything but nostalgia — if you read the whole thing (and it’s long, I know), it’s really more of a collection of memories and ways in which the Cubs’ longstanding goofiness has fitted into a life than a Sox-nationy aggrandizement of suffering, long- or otherwise. I think Rob is right in that that sort of unhurried and unpointed (not to say pointless) writing is definitely the province of the internet. I know the absence of word counts and harsh, structure-oriented editors has definitely made my CSTB writing that much…well, not better. But I enjoy it more, at least.
Also, to the gentleman in the pork: I am David Lee Roth, the former lead singer of Van Halen. Three shows next week at Foxwoods, if you’re in Connecticut!
Having read the actual blog post (which maybe I should’ve done before spouting off), I can see and appreciate the wistful sweetness in JJ’s recollections. And “wallowing” was definitely too strong a word — maybe “marinating”? But still (and maybe it’s that detour to needlessly rant about the Red Sox that’s throwing me off — sorry that Jerry Remy forced Juan Pierre and Alex Gonzalez upon the team, bro) the conclusion strikes me as a defeated and condescending “there, there” headpat-cum-booby prize that, having read the rest of the post, shouldn’t be in there at all.
But that’s me probably reading way too much, and bring too much baggage, into all this. It just seems odd that this post is resigned to (and at peace with) the Cubs being also-rans when they’re actually poised to be post-season locks. But, ultimately, the post is about making EMOTIONAL sense, not logical sense, and on that level, though I (obviously) disagree, I get it.
But, seriously. Soriano. Work a count already.
I got from Jeff Johnson what I get from the few Cubs fans I’ve spoken to, which is reeling from the sweep and sorting it out in our heads. Even for those of us who didn’t think World Series Or Nothing in 2008, it was a tough four days of baseball to sit through. Piniella, in calming down fans after the clinch, pointed out that Bobby Cox has been to the post-season 14 times and come home with one ring (see Mrs. Cox’s face for an imprint of it). It’ll happen, but not just because of a nice, round number like 100 years or because you think it’s Our Turn.
Rob’s 36 hrs of Sox glory and his jog to the shrine of fans turning their backs on the Cubs is, imo, one of the silver linings of the 2008 sweep – Cub fans are acting more and more like baseball fans. Think about it, in 100 years of profitable loserdom for the Cubs, something finally happened to make fans realize, “This is bullshit.” That fans are fed up with losing is the change in Chicago, and it’s too bad it’s revealed this way – but there it is. Jeff Johnson is exactly what’s kept the Cubs profitable for 100 years.
People who talks curses, who talked Our Year as it was over in July, aren’t looking at the huge changes in the Cubs organization and fanbase since Sosa and McGwire’s run at the Babe. Steroid revelations or not, at the time, we all saw Wrigley as the setting for something historic and great BESIDES Cubs as patsy to Babe Ruth, Pete Rose, Bob Gibson. The 100 year dingus hanging over our heads was a national joke that only made it worse, but how much better do the Giants feel at 54 years out of the Series?
All Cub fans are embittered to some degree, even Ronnie Woo Woo if you got him on the right night … but not appreciating that 7 (?) straight losses in the post season means you made the post-season at all, or Zambrano’s no-hitter, or 97 wins, is just stupid. But then, as Rob and I have pointed out 100 times each, Cub culture is a combination of retardation and arrogance. I also agree with David on a point, Lovable Loserdom is just as insufferable as Red Sox Nation preening.
I disagree with Jeff Johnson, losing is never better. Hopefully Cub fans will continue what’s been going on for the last ten years – demanding a better product. Since Sosa, the mood has shifted from, “Woe is us,” to, “Why not us?” After this play-off sweep, no one talked curses, just shitty baseball. That’s an improvement of sorts, too. Johnson’s embrace of the loss does not help things. Walking away, leaving the Cubs your torn up post-season tickets on Ernie Banks’ statue … I appreciate that gesture a lot more than “Wait’ll next year.” Hopefully, now that the worst has happened, Piniella’s Cubs can play baseball as human beings instead of The Team That Did It … before they did it.