This week in (ahhh) Cubs Baseball
Image courtesy of @hmaguire
Often times when I go view apartments across the city I’ll picture you in these rooms. Crashing til 11 in the morning, on a couch in the living room. Telling me you’ll take care of breakfast, “Okay, no, maybe lunch,” and cackling at my complete lack of faith in this ever happening. Then an Uber Eats rider will show up, you’ll ask me for 20 euros, and I’ll call you an asshole.
I look for places on the walls to mount a second screen. In this future, which is closer than even I perhaps realise, you’re always playing 2K and I’m always watching baseball. I read, write, and do taxes to it when I don’t quite have the appetite for jazz. On really good days I picture you jostling for space, clumsily, politely, good-naturedly, with a lady who refuses to move in with me, or maybe a cat that’s a bigger asshole than you. Sometimes we all go together to the movies, or we help her carry home loads of groceries. We tell her about the life we used to lead, in the country we come from, how we always talked about this exact life in a global city. This is how I feel about Wrigley Field. I can see it perfectly, almost breathe it in sometimes, all the way out here in Pankow: that Chicago chill, servings of craft beer and artisanal hot dogs, some autumn afternoon on the Rooftop seats while we wait for the first pitch to fly.
This weekend I finally gave in. If the Yankees and the Cubs are at home, simultaneously hosting very good baseball teams, my soul — yes, soul — wants to watch Cubs baseball. This is truly the last application I will venture, regarding the push-and-pull between aesthetics and ethics: I think I’m supposed to be a Yankee fan, because I’ve been on this largely literary “New York, New York” crusade for as long as I can remember, and because I love the Knickerbockers; but without much consideration at all I want to behold the ivy at Wrigley. I want to own Cubbies merch and explain who the Cubbies are, why I love them despite themselves and their failure to scrape out of their division every year. I’ve wondered if this ‘whoring’ between franchises, particularly between the Cubbies and the Yanks, is a thing I do simply to distract myself from the world. I’ve wonder if it’s love somehow; either for the franchise I’ve followed reluctantly since Jeter’s final season in the Bronx — or for the one I discovered accidentally when your mom went to Chicago that time. Right after they won a World Series.
On Saturday afternoon, you could sense the anti-establishment buzz in the stands, with Shohei Ohtani and the Los Angeles Dodgers in town. A team like the Cubs, who politely put are very good at living within their means, can prove something to themselves by besting a guaranteed World Series contender — even if there are over a hundred more games to go before the postseason. I too have a grudging respect for those sons of bitches from LA, the cleanliness of their brand identity, and how resplendently they loom in any showbiz-driven pilgrimage westward. Their lead-off trio of Mookie Betts, arguably the sports’ most versatile player, Ohtani, easily its most gifted, and Freddie Freeman, one of its most reliable, is absolutely terrifying. The few times I have witnessed the Dodgers this season, they get on base: doesn’t matter how early the inning is, doesn’t matter how deadly the opposing pitcher is. At least this weekend, the same could be said for the Cubs. In game 2 of this series, they faced Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a pitcher they and the Yankees were prepared to move heaven and hell for before the Dodgers did what the Dodgers do — make a mockery of everybody else’s accounting.
Yamamoto has a stoic mound presence, embodying perfectly the old cliche of starting pitcher as executioner. He has the gaze of a man, and the fastball of one too, who will assassinate world leaders for a reasonable fee if contacted several months in advance. Somehow Chicago’s leadoff hitter Ian Happ sent the baseball swooping into centre field, and Seya Suzuki (whom someone candid referred to this week as “the Japanese Bryce Harper”) managed to read Yamamoto’s darts outside the strike zone. He slings that thing at a top speed of 97 fucking miles, possibly more. Dansby Swanson, the Cubs’ archetypal Captain America figure, is currently known to hit fastballs the hardest of anyone who swings in the Major League — but more than once he couldn’t see Yamamoto coming. A slow-motion replay of Swanson gritting his teeth, misplacing a bunch of force, made me wonder what sorts of negotiations sluggers carry out with themselves as they advance up their 30s. How and when one first notices the hitting twitch is late, and how and when one decides to mask it from the organisation, the fanbase, the world.
Even with both teams failing to convert loaded bases into runs, those first few innings, and with the Dodgers assuming an unassailable lead by the 7th, there are few mundanities I will witness as attentively as I do a Cubs loss. This, lad, is how I know.
The morning after, a little crazed, I cancelled a Fanatics order for a bunch of Yankees gear. A black hoodie to tuck under my Gerrit Cole jersey in the fall, and three masks emblazoned with that damned logo. I chatted with someone in customer service and the whole thing was resolved in less than 10 minutes. I replaced that initial haul with my first ever Cubbies hat, a brightly-coloured hoodie, and a Chicago Bears beanie for good measure, because I think I’ll take those Bears too. I like the fit of it, on my bones when I wear it and on my tongue when I have to announce it to people. With a shrug and a helpless smile, because I love who I love.
I’ll shoot you the Cole jersey in the mail or something. I always knew it belonged to you.
