A girl can dream, can’t she?
So I thought as I read the just released “The Cubs: The Complete Story of Chicago Cubs Baseball” by Glenn Stout (photographs by Richard Johnson), Houghton Mifflin press.
Stout opens by recounting that as the 20th century opened, the Chicago Cubs was, in fact, THE powerhouse baseball team. They had won three straight National League Pennants and two consecutive world championships. “The Cubs were kings.”
“So,” Stought asks, “. . . what the hell happened?”
What indeed? As I write, we are two down to the Diamond Backs. I just asked a knowledgeable friend if any team has come back from this far down in post-season playoffs to still win. “Yes” he said. “Against the Cubs.”
Or at least mostly against the Cubs. (One instance? 1984, the Padres. The Cubs were up 2 games in the post-season play offs, the Padres came back to win three in a row to clinch that best of five series.)
Sigh.
Stout points out that until recently, the Chicago Cubs and White Sox, and the Boston Red Sox shared the infamy of lost and dashed dreams. No world titles for any of them in close to 100 years. But the Red and White Sox have broken the curse. The Cubs now stand alone. As Stout puts it, the Cubs are “baseball’s last unsolved mystery.”
The book, really a coffee table style volume filled with great pictures, stories and statistics is outlined by chapters in groups of years, with every year getting covered:
From 1906 – 1908 – “Peerless” to
1939–1945 “War Stories” to
1966–1968 “Here Comes the Sun” to
1999 – 2006 “Cubs Win. . . Doh!”
It’s all there.
Different contributing authors keep it lively, and most of all (for someone like me) keep the book from ever getting too “inside baseball.”
Stout seeks to explain why, in spite of it all, the Cubs are still so darn loved by their fans.
Although, I’m not so sure the word is “loved” as, “endlessly put up with,” but yes, we Cubs fans are nothing if not loyal.
The story of the Cubs is the story of Chicago itself. Going back to the very beginnings of baseball – and Chicago – in the mid nineteenth century, Stout writes of Chicago, “It was a city where the bounties of the prairie intersected with industry, where immigrants and plowboys clawed and scratched for survival. Chicagoans didn’t wait: men made themselves and created their own story. And when baseball met Chicago, Chicago changed the game just like it changed everything else.”
So. back to . . . what happened? Is it the Billy Goat curse (Which, Stout argues, was essentially made-up out of whole cloth in very recent decades)? Is it the strange dimensions of Wrigley Field (smaller than other fields)? The fact that they are the only team to play the bulk of their homes games in searing summer daylight?
Is it all in their heads, our heads?
Or is it, as Stout argues, that since 1908, the year of the Cubs’ last World Series win, the Cubs just haven’t been the best team in baseball, they just haven’t been good enough? Well, maybe so. But why not, given that they are one of the wealthiest teams in baseball? Why can’t they just buy what they need and get the job done – I mean, the Yankees do it – so why not us?
Well, Stout concludes that the Cubs have consistently been owned by corporations, yes Including the Wrigley family and the Chicago Tribune, which were more concerned with other businesses than they were passionate about the Cubs and winning.
I’m not usually one for corporate bashing, but Stout makes a convincing case here.
Stout notes optimistically that the Cubs are “on the block” again, and hopes that this time the owner will be someone knowledgeable about baseball, someone willing to stake it all on winning, someone who is all about, well, the Cubs. One can only hope.
But I’m not giving up on the game Saturday not ( or the series or even THE series) yet.
I’m not one for magical “coincidences,” or “omens.” But, the last time Stout and his colleagues wrote a comprehensive book on a sports team it was all about the Boston Red Sox – in 2004.
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Betsy Hart is a nationally syndicated Scripps-Howard columnist who also writes exclusive columns for The Chicago Daily Observer where she serves on its editorial board.