It’s no secret, really, that I have an emotional attachment to the Chicago Cubs, a professional baseball club that won the World Series last year, in case you hadn’t heard. From time to time, this attachment leads me to make decisions that are of questionable prudence, such as spending precious stipend dollars on inside-joke t-shirts or eschewing healthy sleep habits for a solid month to watch postseason games on my laptop in the wee hours of the morning. 1
Of course, the Cubs finally won it all last year, after 108 years of, um, not winning. I tried to write about it, but to scrunch it down into something expressed in mere words seemed offensive. I spent last winter basking in the surreal glow of a season that didn’t end in heartbreak, perplexed at the reality that a collection of grown men in pajamas hitting a ball with a stick had garnered such depth of meaning, and also wondering with some trepidation whether that meaning -- and the unbridled distillation of joy that comes with it -- might dissipate on the other side of victory.
This season has been largely devoid of the same frivolity that marked the Cubs’ climb to glory, which really started in earnest in August of 2015. As Brett Taylor recently observed in an insightful piece on Bleacher Nation, while we described the 2015 and 2016 seasons with words like “magic” and “destiny,” the 2017 campaign can really only be accurately summed up with the word “grind.” There have been highlights, to be sure -- on a Saturday afternoon in July, as I drove to my new home in Kentucky, I listened as the Cubs ran the Tear Their Hearts Out of Their Chests and Show It to Them as They Die Play2 against the Cardinals, which was pretty dang wonderful -- but on the whole, being the defending champions who are expected to win it all has been a freaking slog compared to being upstart renegade youngsters who don’t give a flying pig about your unwritten rules, Cardinal fans.
Despite the year-long drudgery, the Cubs managed to win their division and reach the playoffs for the third straight year, which hadn’t happened since ‘06-’08… NINETEEN-OH-SIX TO NINETEEN-OH-EIGHT. I am abundantly aware that the success of these strangers to whom I am tenuously tied is virtually unprecedented.
The first-round matchup against the Washington Nationals was a grueling five-gamer; the finale prompted the same heart palpitations that I thought might’ve died last year. The Nats outplayed the Cubs in four of the five games. The Cubs won three of them anyway.
Then, before anyone could catch their breath, the Los Angeles Dodgers won the first three games of the NLCS. The Cubs were out of lives. Leading up to Game Four last Wednesday, I spent the day trying to talk myself out of being emotionally invested: this season has been more than a worthy follow up to last year’s championship, I told myself. I am happy, and if it ends tonight, I’m not going to let it hurt.Holy freaking crap baskets.— Rob Goodale (@rgoody33) October 13, 2017
A funny thing happened.
Willson Contreras hit a dang moonshot. And then Javy Baez, a human highlight GIF, the Best Things About Baseball Incarnate, hit two. And blew a bubble during the second one.
The Cubs won Game Four, 3-2. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.
I drove to work the next morning, riding a wave of irrational confidence. He who recommends lower expectations as a salve for disappointment is surely not a baseball fan. Crawling along I-75, I began performing amateur mental calculus, figuring out how many things would have to break the Cubs’ way for a historic turnaround, conjuring comparisons to the 2004 Red Sox3 and foolishly encouraging my hopes to soar far higher than any sensible person would allow.
There in the car, a Pope Benedict XVI quote popped in my head, because as you know by now, in addition to being a shameless Cubs fan, I’m also an unabashed theology nerd.
“I… become like someone in love,
Of course winning a World Series doesn’t make it hurt less the next year. Of course I can’t talk myself out of being affected by the end of a Cubs season. For better or for worse, all those years of watching on WGN at my grandmother’s house and listening to Pat Hughes and Ron Santo on the radio broadcast in the car with my dad have shaped me into a certain kind of person, one whose heart is irrevocably open to being shaken up by this stupid game.The Cubs’ season ended a night later, in a dull and mercifully stress-free 11-1 drubbing. It still hurt. I spent the weekend searching for phantom box scores, scratching at a no-longer-existent itch. For seven months out of every twelve, the melody of Cubs games form the soundtrack to my life. It’s fitting, if a bit on the nose, that the radio station that carries their games is called The Score.
I’m already looking forward to spring training, and a winter full of reconstructing expectations. Being a baseball junkie, for better or for worse, is part of who I am. It has formed the structural undergirding of countless memories, and has been the seed planted in the earth that in turn yields lasting friendships.
The joyful torment of fandom, of allowing a small part of myself to live and die based on something entirely beyond my control, lives on. And for that I am most grateful.
1 Last year during the Cubs’ magical playoff run, I was living in Cork, Ireland. This did not deter me; I didn’t miss a single out.↩
2 H/T @Aisle424 on Twitter.↩
3 The only team to ever come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a seven-game series, a feat immortalized in the excellent 30 for 30 documentary Four Days In October and, more importantly for my mother and girlfriend, in the 2005 film Fever Pitch.↩
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