Tuesday morning it was announced that Chicago Cubs manager Lou Piniella would be hanging it up at the end of this season after four years in the Windy City. Lou is a great man and an even better manager and I'm sure that ESPN and all other sorts of hack writers out there will tell you about the times of the man himself a lot better than I can, therefore I have dedicated this column as to why I can't just do what Lou did—Give up on the Cubs.
Cubs fans are everywhere. You see them in places like Fargo and Ft. Lauderdale wearing blue caps with a red 'C' in the middle. Maybe these are not necessarily true Cubs fans (see Red Sox or Yankees cap owners that happen to find the hat more meaningful when the team is doing well) but the truth is that we come in all shapes, sizes and creeds and we got to be this way in a lot of different ways. All roads leading to the masochistic tales that make people who cheer for decent franchises cringe.
My own personal tale is as interwoven as a Shakespearean tragedy with all of the love and betrayal, but rarely any of the joy and wonderment. My father first introduced me to the Cubs when I was still very young. We'd catch them on WGN on a Saturday afternoon while I was still running around in underoos and spilling juice all over my Pee-Wee Herman t-shirt. He was always more of a smoker than an athlete, but watching the games brought him back to a time when he was young and living on the outskirts of Chicago. He would tell us about his journeys as a factory worker for Brach's and interacting with the sort of people and cultures that one can only find in a city larger than the one I grew up in. Although I didn't quite know what it was yet, he'd also share his stories about smoking pot with Mexican immigrants and African-Americans, a real novelty act for a poor white kid from Eastern Kentucky. I can't say that I've heard my dad speak lovingly of my mother, but mention the city of Chicago and he would light up the room without even saying a word.
Although my father's fondness of a city I had yet to know was part of the reasoning behind me choosing to be such a Cubs fan, the other is WGN, Harey Carey and Steve Stone. For some reason, and I still don't know why, WGN has always been a part of basic cable packages. Yes, I am grateful for that as an adult because of the Cubs, but other than their coverage of Chicago sports, do they have syndicated television that people actually watch? Are people calling their cable company's making sure that they have their WGN so they don't miss re-runs of the Beverly Hillbillies or Becker? Either way, their constant coverage of games always turned me on to a sport that was beloved by me since I was old enough to control my neck. And the booth could not have been better.
I could write this entire article on how great it was being a kid in the late 80's and early 90's watching a semi-sauced Harey Carey and a straight-laced baseball mind like Steve Stone banter for three hours a day. It was unlike anything that Joe Buck and Troy Aikman could dream up and in fact, they would dry up in conversation if they had to watch what those guys did. Harey was always such an easily lovable character and you listened when fumbled through the play-by-play because, like your parents, he'd been there enough to know everything that was going on. Maybe the message was a little different than how you would tell it, but the point remained the same. And Stoney, being one of the first former players to really master the art of a color man, gave everyone insight to the point where you felt like you were in the dugout with the guys without dumbing it down or being condecending (Looking at you, Joe Morgan). His antics and views, which later lead to his exile from the Chicago Cubs, were always concise and direct while sparing fans the banter that is constantly thrown around these days.
And those teams were terrible—And I mean terrible. The early 90's Cubs teams had Sandberg, Dawson, Grace and Dunston, yet somehow never made it to the playoffs or even close. A couple of times I remember Clyde explaining to a very young me that normally you wouldn't pitch with a position player, but since they had used up all their pitching in the past couple of blowouts, it made perfect sense for Doug Dascenzo to come in and pitch the middle innings. Yet still we were glued to the television like we watching them play for the pennant.
It's hard to skim over the next 20 or so years without talking about the disappointment of the mid-00's. With Wood recovered from his injuries, Prior and Zambrano coming into their own and a decent offense behind them, the Cubs were due to be competitive for the next decade. Unfortunately Wood is still constantly injured, Prior may be in the military because I genuinely haven't seen him since 2003 and Carlos Zambrano is legally insane. Really. Combine that with the fact that the face of those teams, Sammy Sosa, is the 3rd biggest name of the steroid era and you have a recipe that makes you wonder why you put yourself through. Add on to all of that, Jim Hendry who is easily one of the 10 worst general managers in all of sports (including the NBA who has 5 horrible GM's I can think of off the top of my head) and, well, you get the picture.
So here I am, no longer a toddler running from base to base in our small living room pretending to be Mark Grace, yet imagining that at some point during my lifetime the Cubs will bring me the kind of happiness that Yankees fans have felt five times since I've been alive (I always thought—No, I knew—that we would win a championship before the Red Sox. I would have imagined a plane would have fallen from the sky and on to my forehead before they would have won two, but again, Jim Hendry). Every September I scream at the television and dare myself to be a Cubs fan next year, because they just turn you into the dumbest man alive. If a girl cheated on you every year and every time you accepted their apology, took them back and then watched her do it all again, you would be an idiot. But to let the Cubs do this to you is normal and makes me ask the question. How did you do it Lou? Please tell me your secret.
