World Series Thoughts I

Ann and I drove to the sporting goods store today in Algonquin to look for a Cubs Championship hat. It was 2:00 and we probably weren't thinking clearly. By then, they were sold out of caps and were down to just t-shirts. A police car outside the store was proof of the story on the radio that the Algonquin store had called the cops because the crowds were too large and unruly. The Dick's Sporting Goods store is very large. Even so, the line to check out stretched from the front of the store all the way around the perimeter and back to the front. My guess is that it was probably a two hour wait to check out. We opted to go home and order a cap online, along with a hoodie sweatshirt. 

It is hard to describe why buying a Cubs hoodie sweatshirt mattered. It's only a game after all. But the amount of time invested in that game this season in particular and every season for the past 40 years is not insignificant. Ann and I went to four games this summer, two day games and two in the evening. We normally are lucky to make it to a game or two. This year just seemed extra special from the beginning. It started in March, when we traveled to Arizona to watch the Cubs in spring training. We've never done that before. But in January, on the spur of the moment, we bought game tickets, airline tickets, and hotel rooms, in that order, for the third week in March. We did lots of other things in Arizona. Ann especially liked the off road 4-wheel ATV drive through the desert north of Phoenix. I enjoyed it, but struggled to keep up with Ann's vehicle and our guide's vehicle. And we saw the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix. That was definitely worth the time we spent. But the ball game was the driving force behind the trip. And we've already made plans to go back next spring, this time with Mary and a newly-retired Dave. This time, we will be seeing the World Champion Cubs, not just the "This Could Be The Year" Cubs.   

Roger Angell has been writing about baseball for a long time. His mother was the first fiction editor for The New Yorker, his father was the head of the ACLU for a time and his stepfather was E. B. White, who wrote Charlotte's Web and co-authored a book on writing called The Elements of Style, commonly known as "Strunk and White." Roger started writing for The New Yorker  in 1944. He is 96 now and, 20 hours ago, wrote an article entitled "At Last" about the Cubs victory over the Indians. In Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion, published in 1977, he answers the question of why buying a Cubs hoodie sweatshirt matters:   

What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about: this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazard flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

It's a long off-season and winter is coming. You could do a lot worse in January than reading Roger Angell, even if he is a Mets fan. It will get me ready to board that airplane in March and start this all over again.