Wait 'til Next Year

Take me out to the ballgame, take me out with the crowd

It's the end of another baseball season. More specifically, the end of another Chicago Cubs season. Oh sure, there will be baseball for another three weeks or so, a handful of victories added onto the total of the eventual World Series champion. But that's show baseball. Runway baseball. Swimsuit competition baseball.

The real season, the one that gives October its importance, stretches for 162 games, from the chill of April to the changing leaves of late September. That's when Cub fans begin the wait for spring training and another possibility that maybe this will be the year.

The Cubs won their final game, but still finished 30 games below .500. In fact, they had one of the worst records in baseball. But it was Fan Appreciation Weekend, and here's the funny thing about Cubs' fans. When the team took the field to say thank you to the 3 million-plus fans who came to see what, at times, resembled major league baseball, we stood and cheered.

39,609 fans standing, cheering a last place team.

Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack, I don't care if I ever get back

Why do we do it? Why do we allow our hearts to be broken year after year after year? To fool ourselves into thinking that by winning the season opener, we just might go all the way this year? How is that we forget about the other 161 games that stand in the way of a winning season? Maybe it's because the Cubs are somehow bigger, are more than just a baseball team. They are summer evenings, the aimless freedom of a weekday afternoon, hope and possibility just 400 ft away in straightaway center. They are a part of our everyday.

At 1:20 on summer afternoons, it's a good bet that the Cubs are playing, under God's lights, on God's green grass. We take a long lunch at the office, ditch our afternoon classes, and go watch grown men play catch. And if there is a God of baseball, he surely lives at Wrigley Field. No industrial park surrounded by acres of parking lots, no concrete bowl with DiamondVision and rock bands to keep you entertained between innings. Instead, it's the ballfield on the corner, across from the fire station, where not long ago you could take your lawn chair up to the rooftops across Sheffield or Waveland and watch the game for free. For three hours we watch a game, while the everyday continues around us.

So it's root, root root for the Cubbies, if they don't win it's a shame

Before TV, ballplayers were giants. Myths created in our imaginations and fed by reporters who painted them larger than life. Back then, going to a ballgame, getting a chance to see those heroes in person was something we dreamed about. As time went on, however, and TV brought them into our living rooms on a regular basis, they shrank. A little at first, then more and more as we saw that really, they were just human after all. But TV also brought the Cubs everywhere, since they were broadcast nationwide. No matter where you went, there was a good chance you could see a Cubs game, could see your team. Eventually, your team became our team for people all over the country, people miles away from the nearest major league franchise, people who became a new kind of Cubs fan. And in a similar sense, the myth transformed itself and continued.

Now this season is over. The flags have been put away, the infield covered one last time, and the ivy left to burn in gold and red. Wrigley sits quietly, pulled tightly into the everyday of the neighborhood that embraces it.

It might be, it could be. . .it is!
Back, back, back. . .hey hey!
Let's play 2 today

For it's one, two, three strikes you're out at the old ballgame

And wait til next year.
AC03.61.98