Baseball

A side view of Wrigley Field

I’m reading A Nice Little Place on the North Side, by George F. Will, and I’m thinking about baseball.

I have not always been a baseball fan, but I definitely married into it. My husband is a lifelong Cubs fan, and while I enjoyed going to some baseball games with him early in our marriage, my passion was usually more for the snacks. I actually got to go to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field with him years ago, but I don’t remember much beyond the Chicago dog, the freezing weather, and the rude Brewers fans a few rows behind us. I was thrilled when Joe finally decided we could leave. 

But I actually became a baseball fan after our kids were born, after Joe bought them Pop Tarts with the Major League Baseball team logos printed on the icing and nudged them into choosing their own teams. My daughter chose the Giants, as her favorite Madison Bumgarner was leading them to a World Series victory and Joe excitedly talked her through the games. My son, for reasons unknown to anyone, chose the BlueJays, which he still supports, but really everyone in our house is a Cubs fan. When they are on, no one else matters. 

As I have read this book, which is a history of Wrigley Field and of the Cubs with just enough punch in the writing to keep it interesting, I thought about how much baseball matters to people, as do sports of any kind. Right now, with professional sports in America cancelled, we were thrilled to find Korean baseball, of which everyone in my family is now a fan (we have chosen our favorite teams there too, based on their names), and we are all a little at a loss as to what to do with all this time with no other baseball to watch. 

Sports are such a great connector, and ultimately that may be where the loss is now. I always admired my husband’s ability to talk to anyone, and then I figured out that that’s one of his tricks. He loves all sports, so all he has to do is find out which one a person likes, and he can talk for hours. 

I feel like everything I write lately is prefaced by “I miss,” but I really do miss connection. I’m trying to piece together emotions and relationships through FaceTime, Zoom, and social media. I look at the crowds of people on the old baseball DVDs that my son likes to watch, and I think about how wild it is to see all these people standing so close together and high fiving each other, and also how I’m not sure when I’ll feel safe with that kind of simple contact again. 

The Cubs, of course, are the “lovable losers,” playing in the “friendly confines” of Wrigley Field, and going for over a century without a World Series win. In this book, George Will discusses the possibility that Wrigley is so friendly that the fans care more about the stadium’s atmosphere than the losing seasons anyway, but I can personally attest to how hard it can be to be a Cubs fan and to watch them lose again and again. And yet being a fan of a perennially losing team has definitely taught me to hope against hope, and then to hope some more.

Tonight Joe told me that Major League Baseball was considering plans to play in empty stadiums this summer. While it probably won’t happen, and it’s probably not even a good idea, it’s still exciting just as a possibility that we might be able to watch the Cubs in a couple of months while sitting here on our couch, all four of us pressed up against each other, connected by love and elbows and baseball.

So, once again, I read to remember how it was once, and how, God willing, it will be again. I read to remind myself that I don’t have to let fear win. I read to hope. I read to look ahead to baseball.