Coach's Corner

To Kill a Fan To see me today, generally indifferent to the national pastime of baseball, you'd never believe I was, for much of my life, a rabid fan. Almost from birth, I inhaled baseball. Some of my earliest memories are from the ballpark. I knew who all the players on the team were. As I got older, I knew their batting averages, collected their baseball cards, wore their uniforms, and had their autographs on baseballs. In the Fifties their games were always on the radio ... at a grandparent's house, in a car, at my house. Later, the new local television station proudly carried every home game (and still does). Late at night, I'd take my new transistor radio to bed with me, listening to broadcasts from faraway places like St. Louis and Cincinnati. Yeah sure, a dull cliché. But I did. Baseball was a regular feature of my life.

When I was a teenager, the team drove me to truancy. If every person who claimed to skip school and ride the train down to the ballpark really did, the stands would have been (as is the rule these days) full. In fact, "crowds" of more than 10,000 were rare. Folks were more discriminating back then, I guess. When September came, and the kids went back to school -- with the team its customary 20 games out of first -- the park was, for all practical purposes, empty. The quaint, picture-perfect ballpark of today was, back then, just another baseball park. No big deal. There were no "state-of-the-art facilities," as baseball parks are called today, back in the Sixties. The only thing that made the ballpark stand out was one quirky eccentricity of the team's odd owner (a chewing gum magnate): Mr. Wrigley didn't like night games. So his field had no lights.

The modern concept of the "lovable loser" is, I believe, a seminal event in the early political correctivity of America. Once, there was nothing particularly lovable about a team that always lost. They were just bad. Not cute or cuddly ... just bad. But I was still young. The team been awful since before I was born, but, ya know ... what the hell, cookies are bad for you too. I was hooked. I was a fan.

The years, as is their wont, passed. Picture those old black-and-white movies where the passage of years is illustrated by an icy wind blowing the years off of a wall calendar... 1970, '80, '90. Occasionally (by accident really), the Cubs, in case anyone hasn't figured it out yet, would stumble onto a good team. And even these rare occurrences always ended in disaster. To an older Cub fan, those black years are as deeply emblazoned into our consciousness as are Dec. 7 and Nov. 22. The plunging, elevator freefall choke of '69. The debacle of '84, when we went up two games to zero in a five-game series before losing three straight to San Diego, the weakest National League champion in a century. Oddly, the meek playoff defeat to the Giants in '89 didn't hurt that much. The fan in me was half-dead. I just didn't know it yet. The Cubs were like a long, drawn-out bad relationship, reaching deep into my soul and slowly, day-by-day, loss-by-loss, year-by-year, extinguishing, smothering, killing a once heated, loyal passion.

The horribly mangled attempt last week to trade Sammy Sosa was vintage Cubs. A front-office fiasco. Greed. Terrible judgement. Overpaid executives displaying less common sense than a tin can. It was a very public demonstration of why the Chicago Cubs don't deserve to have fans. Cub management doesn't try to win. Not in 1945, and not in 2000. No other sports franchise on earth comes close to the Chicago Cubs over the past half-century in the gross mismanagement of a franchise and worse, 55 years of careless, blasé disregard of their fans. They didn't care in '53 when I sat in the grandstand on my grandma's lap. They didn't care in '62 when I was one of 2,000 fans in the stands. Today, out-of-town conventioneers come in droves to see a real "old-time ballpark," in what the late Steve Goodman so perfectly labeled "The Cubbies' ivy covered burial ground." With the turnstiles spinning to see rotting garbage on the field, they sure don't care today. It's not cute. It's criminal.

Once I'd given up the Cubs, I just didn't care any more. I go to a few games (non-Cub) every year. I can still enjoy the visceral pleasures of the ballpark. But there's no passion left. It was drained years ago. If you don't care, you're the antithesis of a fan. That's me.

Sure, you say, but what if the Cubs turned up in the World Series? You'd be back, wouldn't you? In that most unlikely event, here's what it would be like: Imagine you had a longtime passionate love affair but it was, at its center, a pretty one-sided deal. You finally, painfully, kick the habit. Ten years later he or she shows up, looking pretty good, and says, "let's try it again." You may say yes, but you know it won't be the same. Too many tears. Too much humiliation. It won't feel right. So yes, maybe I'd get interested. Maybe I'd watch. But it wouldn't be the same.

The Cubs killed the fan in me. I resent them for that. I wouldn't want to go home.