Cubs Lose, Cubs Lose
October 17, 2003
7:43 a.m.
I have always been, and will probably always be, a baseball fan. Baseball is certainly the most elegantly designed game in all of existence. It rewards guile as well as strength, intelligence as well as power or athletic brilliance. It has a mathematical crispness that can be defined by its statistical body of knowledge, and yet those same statistics that seemingly guide all decisions don’t matter a wit when the ball is traveling toward the plate and a hitter stands ready with bat in hand. Ninety feet between bases could not have been laid out for greater balance—even six inches farther either way would change everything. The ball, white and hard, in the hands of a pitcher 60 feet 6 inches away could not be more aptly chosen. It’s a hard ball. It hurts when it hits you, and that in itself is a part of the game—the pitcher uses the fact that the ball is hard to his advantage, the hitter tries to forget it’s hard for long enough to hit it as it travels toward him at 90+ miles an hour. Yes, the business end is a little ugly, but then all sports can say that. But the game is as beautiful now as it was when I grew up as a kid. It is a simple game whose rules have not changed appreciably in all of past history. Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth played the same game as Willie Mays and Ernie Banks and Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio played. Sammy Sosa plays the same game that those guys did. And there is another thing that remains constant too, as much as it pains me to say. The Cubs will always be losers. Like most mid-western kids, I grew up watching the Cardinals and the Reds and, of course, the Cubs. I’m not really a die-hard Cubs fan, though. I’m just a regular Cubs fan. All things equal, I would prefer to see them win. I enjoy baseball, mostly. I’ve re-discovered this important fact this past couple years. In the end I find the game fascinating, no matter who wins or who loses. But I’m having a very hard time absorbing the Loss. You know what I mean--three runs up in the 8th, five outs away. The moment Moises Alou did not catch The Foul Ball, I turned to Lisa and told her the Cubs would almost certainly lose the series. And with certainty I was right I watched the rest of the games with a sense of dread. Lisa said she’s almost glad they lost. She says that when she wakes up in the morning now, she can rest assured that all is right in the world. Everything is in its place. The Cubs lose. This is what they do. I can see her point. Structure in all things. But I’m not like that. This loss bothers me at fundamental level. To take baseball games as a metaphor for elements of life has been done so often as to make the idea cliché. And yet, the mere fact that the game is so perfectly designed and so roundly played make it the perfect candidate for such use. The fact that baseball’s season rises in the spring and crescendos to its full color in the fall gives it life and energy like no other game. Baseball is with us all summer. And in the winter it appears to lie dormant, but all fans know that it is growing under the surface—teams are changing, trading, and evaluating talent--and both winners and loser will blossom again in the spring. Baseball is also uniquely American in its never-ending cycle of hope. Hope that luck will shine on our team this year. Hope that we can all be winners. Hope that hard work will result in results. I don’t know that the Cubs worked any harder than any other team this year. I don’t know that the Cubs were better than the Marlins. In fact, if records are compared, and talent levels assessed, I expect the Marlins should have been expected to win. They had a better record than the Cubs. But the Cubs took a 3-1 lead. People flocked to them in droves throughout the playoffs. They went in Atlanta, and drowned out the home crowd. The went to Miami and did the same. Cubs fans, no baseball fans flocked to the Cubs. Baseball, it seemed, was prepared to give us another American lesson, and that lesson would be this. “Stay true to your beliefs. Stay firm in you hope. It will be rewarded in the end.” And in the end, baseball did deliver a lesson, but it was a harsh, painful lesson of endurance of never-ending pain instead of this one of justice. And in the most wicked of all cuts, it will turn out that a die-hard fan of the team will be viewed as being the root of its demise. The fan who touched the ball is a 26-year-old man who loves baseball. He has played the game since he was a kid himself, and still plays in competitive leagues. He coaches advanced kids in the game. He is, in short, apparently the perfect example of what a baseball fan is about. And so this is what has me unsettled about baseball today. Yes, the Red Sox lost, too. But they lost in the old-fashioned way. They played well. They got outscored, beat by a long home run in the bottom of the 11th that surely put a pain in the heart of Red Sox fans everywhere. But that is baseball. There are winners and there are losers. The Yankees beat the Red Sox, and as hard as that is for Red Sox fans to live with, I think baseball as a whole didn’t shudder too much. But it does not feel like the Cubs got beat. In the Cubs case, it feels like fate intervened. It feels like the dark side got away with something that it shouldn’t have. After all these years of truly being bad, of truly losing, the Cubs were a deserving team poised to prove to America that it is acceptable to think you are a winner at your core even when it doesn’t seem like anything could ever get better. But in the end, the Cubs lost. Hope was unrewarded. And a true fan is damaged in a way that no person should ever have to be damaged. Worse, it feels like there was nothing anyone could have done to prevent it. If this is true, perhaps, then there is no value to the work that happens in the off-season. If this is true, then there’s no point in the hope that grows in February and March. Perhaps it's not worth struggling all summer at all. I don’t like that.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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