Slaughterhouse E-mail #1

“Cubs finally win the World Series. You can tackle it from a city or a Brian perspective.” -Brian Mascheri

10:48 PM Friday January 2, 2009
Done 12:03 AM Saturday, January 3, 2009
1131 words

It’s well established that it was 1908 since the last Cubs World Series victory, and 1945 was their last World Series appearance. They didn’t even taste the playoffs for another 39 years after that. But did you know that we’re only six years away from one of the most out there, wild sports projections of all time?

Yep, break out your hoverboards and self-adjusting Nikes, because according to noted prognostication source Back to the Future II, the Cubs are scheduled to win the World Series. They’re also supposed to make 14 more Jaws movies, I think, so there’s time.

But let’s say, as the sloganeers and T-shirt hucksters are wont to do, that “it’s gonna happen.” Let’s say that Brian, my friend of nearly 30 years and lifelong follower of the North Side team, actually gets to see his team win the World Series. What would that be like?

Well, for one thing, Brian’s life would probably change the same way that mine did after the White Sox won the World Series. There was a feeling of relief, and the knowledge that the phrase so many of us heard about baseball while growing up-“They killed my grandfather, they killed my father, and now they’re coming after me” would simply not apply. Brian is a fanatically devoted sports fan who could probably tell you right now who the top lefthanded pitching prospect is in the Cubs’ organization. He can name the starting left fielder for each of the last ten seasons. And the problem is, he’s not a typical Cubs fan.

The typical Cubs fan, particularly the bleacher denizens, is a subset of humanity that is not normally affiliated with the phrase “lovable loser” and would point frantically at their Abercrombie shirt and VW Jetta keys as evidence to the contrary. They’re atmosphere junkies, and over the years that would be enough to get them through some positively awful baseball…if that’s what they were there to watch.

But not Brian. While Brian appreciates and respects the mystique of Wrigley, and I can say even as a Sox fan that it is a very picturesque place to watch a game, he wouldn’t care if this team was playing in a sandlot. Consider the Cubs’ recent history as near-miss contenders. More than most sports, the ebb and flow of baseball demands patience. And even if you show that requisite patience, as the Cubs displayed this past season, compiling a record in which people who ought to have known better were gleefully predicting that This Was The Year, it can all be snuffed out in three days of mediocre play. You watch the season for six months. In three days it can be gone. And fans like Brian were angry, no matter how pretty the ballpark was.

I got to experience the flip side of this scenario this past year as well. My team, the White Sox, was faced with a scenario in which they would have to win something like eleventy billion games on the road to even make the playoffs, despite leading the division for months at a time. As the last three games appeared, there I was, in front of my television or computer, swearing like a dockworker at every miscue and pumping my fist at success, as involved as if I were somehow able to will the desired outcome to occur. As a rational human being I know that my actions have no effect on what happens. As a White Sox fan, I wore one of five khaki shirts during their World Series appearances and refused to sit anywhere but one prescribed area of the house to watch the games. You should never combine an obsessive-compulsive personality with a baseball team. They went on to win one game in the playoffs, but at that point, I think even the team was exhausted from the journey, like a small child who saw Tropic World AND the bears AND the dolphins AND the monkeys AND the tigers and really just wants to go home now.

And I know Brian would be the same way, and a Cubs World Series victory would give him the same sort of placid ability to look back and realize that all the money, all the time (and you would be astonished at how much time it actually is) and all of the effort did not go to waste. And while the living and dying with every pitch doesn’t stop, it is tempered by a knowledge that you’ve seen the best of where it can lead and you did not find the moment wanting.

I was accused of a level of shallowness for becoming teary-eyed upon the White Sox winning the World Series, when I had not become teary-eyed at other events such as my wedding, the birth of my children, or dicing onions. I pointed out, rather feebly, that my involvement with the White Sox predated any involvement with the others, so I should be given a pass. This did not help to burnish my reputation as a Sensitive Guy.

It’s unfair of me to speculate on what a Cubs victory would do to the city, because there are certain lodestones that my life depends on, such as the Cubs won’t win, the compass will show me true north, Mick and Keith will outlive me by about ten minutes or so, and I won’t want to see the movie if Freddie Prinze Jr. is in it. In a life where change is constant, you need things to hang onto. Hunter Thompson believed in breakfast, even when he’d work all night and not have that breakfast until 4 PM. Warren Zevon, bless his dark little obsessive-compulsive heart, bought so many gray Calvin Klein T-shirts that they gave them away, still wrapped, at his funeral. Mine are those four things, and in time I know that I’m going to be stuck with just the compass. It’s the law of averages. It HAS to be.

I imagine the city and the outlying areas will be swathed in hats and jerseys, and the parade will be amazing. I’ll watch as the participants are canonized in that manner unique to small towns more than major cities-there are members of the 1985 Bears who probably haven’t had to buy drinks since that moment. And I’ll smile for a number of my friends who will find themselves at peace with choices they committed to well before knowing what they were getting themselves into, even though it means I’ll also be smiling for the likes of Jim Belushi and Ronnie Woo Woo. But if either of my sons announce themselves as Cubs fans in the wake of this development, be they eight, eighteen, or eighty, I will swiftly denounce them as frontrunning, contemptible, traitorous little pigs.