by Will, George
When, however, the Cubs got to the National League play-offs against the Padres in 1984, the introduction of lights to Wrigley Field became inevitable. Commissioner Peter Ueberroth knew that Major League Baseball’s national broadcast partners, having paid steep fees in anticipation of prime-time audiences, would not accept daytime games. So Ueberroth said that in future seasons, any Cub postseason games might not be played at Wrigley Field. Four years later, on the evening of 8/8/88, the lights were switched on for the first night game at Wrigley, which was rained out in the third inning.
To the surprise of no one other than dismayed purists, most fans—impurists?—like night games. The dispensers of beers in Wrigleyville bars probably do not. They would prefer games to begin at, say, five P.M., so that fans leaving the ballpark around eight would not need to hurry home. Lights have, however, rendered anachronistic the portion of Lee Elia’s rant about Cub fans being, necessarily, people who “don’t even work.”
Fourteen months later, Game 1 of the 1989 championship series between the Cubs and the San Francisco Giants was played in Wrigley Field and was broadcast by Vin Scully, who has been broadcasting Dodgers games (first Brooklyn, then Los Angeles) since 1950. Before the game, he waxed poetic about Wrigley Field:
She stands alone at the corner of Clark and Addison, this dowager queen, dressed in basic black and pearls, seventy-five years old, proud head held high and not a hair out of place, awaiting yet another date with destiny, another time for Mr. Right. She dreams as old ladies will of men gone long ago. Joe Tinker. Johnny Evers. Frank Chance. And of those of recent vintage like her man Ernie. And the Lion [Leo Durocher]. And Sweet Billy Williams. And she thinks wistfully of what might have been, and the pain is still fresh and new, and her eyes fill, her lips tremble, and she shakes her head ever so slightly. And then she sighs, pulls her shawl tightly around her frail shoulders, and thinks, This time, this time it will be better.
Maybe. On the other hand, perhaps the old lady of the North Side is like Miss Havisham, the sad, spectral old woman in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. She had found, or so she thought, Mr. Right in a swain named Compeyson. But at eight-forty A.M. on her wedding day, as she was dressing for the ceremony, she received a letter from him, revealing that he had defrauded her of her inheritance from her father, a successful brewer, and would not marry her. She responded by having all her clocks stopped at twenty minutes to nine. The table set for a banquet was left untouched, and she never changed out of her wedding dress. It eventually catches fire and she dies from the burns. This is Miss Havisham as seen through Pip’s eyes:
She was dressed in rich materials—satins, and lace, and silks—all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white.… I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its luster, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure on which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone.
So, no. Let us avoid thinking of Wrigley Field as a melancholy old lady. It—she—does, however, have one haunting memory of what might have been. It concerns an ugly episode that should be remembered whenever Cub fans get misty-eyed and natter on about the “Friendly Confines.” Around ten P.M. on October 14, 2003, friendliness was suddenly in short supply at the corner of Clark and Addison.
The Cubs were leading the 2003 National League Championship Series against the Florida Marlins, as the Miami Marlins were known then, three games to two. Ahead of the Marlins 3–0 in the top of the eighth inning of Game 6, with a Marlins runner on second base, the Cubs were five outs from their first World Series since 1945. For Major League Baseball, that would be a matchup made in heaven: David against Goliath, the Cubs against the Yankees, perennial losers against the definition of the word “dynasty.” Then a Marlins batter lofted a soft fly ball down the left-field line where the seats are only a few feet from the foul line. Cubs left fielder Moises Alou, his glove hand raised, crossed the foul line and reached for the ball. So did some fans, including Steve Bartman.
A twenty-six-year-old computer consultant, a former high school second baseman, a youth baseball coach, and a besotted Cub fan, he was listening to the game through headphones. He was sitting in aisle 4, row 8, seat 113, a few feet from the wall. Except now, as the ball descended, he was not sitting. He was doing what fans reflexively do: standing and reaching for the ball, which was coming down tantalizingly close to him. It was falling into the stands, not onto the field of play, which is why the umpires correctly ruled that what Bartman did was not fan interference. If he had reached out of the stands, he would have interfered with Alou, so the batter would have been out and the Cubs would have been four outs from the World Series. The relevant rule reads: “Spectator interference occurs when a spectator reaches out of the stands, or goes on the playing field, and touches a live ball.” Bartman touched the ball. Alou, reaching into the stands, did not touch it. He made a gesture of angry frustration, slamming his fist into his glove, then trotted back to his position.
If Alou had not vented his frustration, the crowd probably would have turned its attention back to the game. But the gesture changed the crowd and Bartman’s life. The crowd became a mob and Bartman became a pariah, and nearly a victim of violence. Neither team’s manager questioned the umpire’s call on the foul ball. I was sitting upstairs, behind home plate, with Cubs president Andy MacPhail. He glanced at a replay on a television in his box and murmured two words: “Good call.” Then things turned ugly, on the field and even more so in the stands.
The Cubs unraveled. The Marlin batter, who had been given a second life when Alou didn’t catch the foul ball, was walked. The next batter singled, driving in the runner on second. The following batter hit what certainly could have been, and probably should have been, a double-play grounder to the Cubs’ shortstop, Alex Gonzalez. A fine defensive player, he led all National League shortstops in fielding in 2003, and if he had fielded the grounder cleanly the inning would probably have been over, leaving the Cubs three outs from the World Series. But he bobbled it, getting neither the runner at second nor the batter-runner at first. The situation was now three men on, one out, and bad karma rising.
The Cubs were still ahead 3–1. The game was proceeding to a climax, but the attention of many in the ballpark was focused not on the field but on the young man who, it is important to remember, was just one person among many who had reached for the descending foul ball. The fan who’d plucked the ball from Wrigley’s concrete floor was not Bartman. But there were more than a dozen television cameras at this postseason game, and replays showed that the hands that had deflected the ball away from Alou belonged to the fellow wearing a green turtleneck and headphones.
Catching Hell, ESPN’s documentary on this event, clearly records a spectator’s voice saying, “Good job, asshole.” Then another: “Somebody hit that cocksucker! Hit him!” In the Marlins’ dugout, third baseman Mike Lowell remembers a teammate saying about Bartman, “Let’s make him famous, you know, make this a turning point.” In a few moments the score was 3–3. But instead of exhorting the Cubs to stop the bleeding, much of the crowd, including the large throng gathered on Waveland Avenue outside the left-field bleachers, was chanting, “Asshole! Asshole! Asshole!” Then the chant turned to “Fuck you! Fuck you!”
Soon beer was being thrown on Bartman, and pizza and pretzels. Before the third out of the disastrous eighth inning was recorded, the Marlins led, 8–3. That was the final score. The crowd continued to scream and throw debris at Bartman as security guards struggled to get him to safety. A famous fan said to a reporter, “If someone ever convicts that guy of a crime, he’ll never get a pardon out of this governor.” This was Rod Blagojevich, who eight year
s later was convicted of corruption and sentenced to fourteen years in prison.
Security personnel removed Bartman’s glasses, headphones, and Cubs hat and dressed him in the white jacket worn by Wrigley Field safety services. Nevertheless, a fan outside the ballpark recognized Bartman, so a security officer who lived in the neighborhood took Bartman to her home. Later he was put in a van and driven to the hotel where he and two friends, who had been seated with him in the ballpark, had rented a room for their planned celebration of the victory that sent the Cubs to the World Series.
The next day, the Chicago Sun-Times published Bartman’s name, the fact that he lived with his parents in the town of Northbrook, and the place where he worked. He released a statement apologizing “from the bottom of this Cub fan’s broken heart.” As far as is known, he has never returned to Wrigley Field.
If the next night the Cubs had won Game 7, Bartman would be a mere footnote in baseball history—the answer to a trivia question. But the Marlins scored three runs in the first inning of that game. The Cubs regained the lead after Alex Gonzalez doubled off the center-field wall and pitcher Kerry Wood drove him in with a home run. Moises Alou also hit a two-run home run. But the Cubs lost, 9–6.
The fan who scooped up the ball that blighted Bartman’s life sold it in 2003 for $106,600. It was destroyed in a ceremony at Harry Caray’s restaurant. Bartman was offered serious money—hundreds of thousands of dollars—to appear in commercials or make public appearances, but he never took a dime or any other benefit in exchange for telling his story.
Near the conclusion of Catching Hell, the narrator says, “As time passes, the city is haunted more by what it did to Bartman than what Bartman did to Chicago. There are many who say the city should forgive Bartman, but it’s really up to Bartman to forgive Chicago.” A former major leaguer who had some fine years with the Cubs spoke some sympathetic words for Bartman: “To get crucified the way he did was mind-boggling. He didn’t do anything, he didn’t do anything different. You take a major league baseball player and sat him in that seat, he’d have done the same thing that Bartman did. I mean I would have done it.” So said Bill Buckner.
As I slowly inched my way down a congested Wrigley Field ramp after the final out of the Bartman game, a fan recognized me and shouted, “We’ll get them tomorrow night, Mr. Will!” I replied, “Not a chance!” I had seen this movie before.
In 1984, the Cubs had advanced to the postseason for the first time since 1945. There were just two divisions in each league in 1984, and the division winners faced each other in a best-of-five play-off to determine who would meet in the World Series. The Cubs played the Padres. The first two games were in Wrigley Field, and the Cubs won both. As I left the park after the second game, with the Cubs heading to San Diego and needing to win just one game, I was walking next to Don Drysdale, the Dodgers’ Hall of Fame pitcher who had been one of the broadcasters for the national telecast that day. He said to me, “Now, Will, do you Cub fans believe?” I said to him, “Every Cub fan knows it will be the Padres in five.” The Cubs lost all three games in San Diego. They lost the last one because an unchallenging ground ball went through the legs of Cubs first baseman Leon Durham. This was two years before, in Game 6 of the Mets–Red Sox World Series, the Red Sox lost a chance to win their first World Series since 1918 because a softly hit ground ball went through the legs of former Cubs first baseman Bill Buckner.
In Chicago: City on the Make, Nelson Algren perfected the city’s tough-guy tone of voice. The place “isn’t so much a city as it is a vasty way station where three and a half million bipeds swarm.” Yes, but. “Yet once you come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” Wrigley Field’s loveliness is a function of how real it is, of its practicality.
Here, however, is an unlovely thought: Perhaps Wrigley Field should be decorated with a large warning akin to those that appear on packages of, and advertisements for, cigarettes. If the government were really comprehensively concerned with our potentially injurious choices, the big red sign that looms over Wrigley Field’s home plate gates would read, “The Surgeon General has determined that this is a gateway to neurological difficulties.” So say the contributors to a naughty book published in 2008, Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans. It is a collection of essays by doctors and others knowledgeable about neuroscience and brain disorders associated with giving one’s allegiance to a team that last won a World Series exactly one hundred years before the book was published.
In a New Yorker cartoon depicting a man and a woman seated on a restaurant banquette, the man says, “OK, Cynthia, I’ll tell you my hopes and dreams, my joys and my passions. But be forewarned—they all concern a particular sports team.” The sometimes terrible truth is that being a sports fan is a physical phenomenon as well as a psychological condition. Without dogpaddling too far out into the deep philosophic water of the mind-body distinction, let us just say this: The world is divided between the many persons who say, “I have a body,” and the few who say, “I am a body.” I think that the more science teaches about the brain, the more reasons we have for thinking that the few speak correctly. They are supported by what neuroscience knows about being a sports fan, which involves observable—thanks to brain-imaging technology—alterations of brain matter.
Group memberships—in families, tribes, neighborhoods, cities, nations, religions—are common and powerful as components of identities. They are so common and powerful that they must be in some sense natural. We seem to be hardwired for such allegiances. Presumably they are adaptive aspects of the evolution of human beings as social creatures. But how does the group identity of Cub fans help them flourish? By giving them brain calisthenics.
This is the good news, and there is precious little of it in Your Brain on Cubs. It seems that “given the complex situations and thinking that Cub fans have had to engage in,” their “frontal lobes are consistently activated” as they consider their thought-provoking affiliation. So says Jordan Grafman, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, in suburban Washington, D.C. His thesis is the fruit of scientific education leavened by hard experience. He was born and raised in Chicago, so he knows whereof he speaks when he speaks, as he does delicately, about the “paradox” of being a Cub fan even though baseball is supposed to provide relief from life’s problems. Grafman has been to the most pleasant of purgatories, Wrigley Field, and he has returned with good news.
Yes, rooting for the Cubs is a minority taste. How could it be otherwise? It is, after all, a lifelong tutorial in deferred gratification. But, Grafman says, “there is some evidence that being in the majority (everyone loves a winner) reduces reflective thinking.” Rooting for a steady, consistent loser makes one thoughtful. Or perhaps neurotic. Which, on Chicago’s North Side, may be a distinction without a difference. “The scientific literature,” Grafman writes, “suggests that fans of losing teams turn out to be better decision-makers and deal better with divergent thought, as opposed to the unreflective fans of winning teams.”
Relative to the brains of other animals, human brains have disproportionately large prefrontal cortexes. Hence the human knack for planning, reasoning, and experiencing subtle variations of feelings. Grafman tells us that when a fan’s team wins, “the brain’s reward system, including the ventral brain stem and basil ganglia,” pumps dopamine into the brain, which gives—or perhaps is—the experience of intense pleasure. Narcotics do that, too. So, are fans of winning teams in danger of addiction? Perhaps. If so, are Cub fans fortunate because of their misfortune? No.
Kelli Whitlock Burton, a science writer, and Hillary R. Rodman, an associate professor of psychology at Emory University, cite studies of activities in the portion of the brain that registers depression, sadness, grief, and euphoria, the first three of which are pertinent to Wrigley Field patrons. Burton and Rodman note
that drug addiction can cause changes in neural sensitivity and structure, and they wonder whether a Cub fan “has subtle and long-lasting changes in his or her brain reward circuitry, comparable to a kind of addiction.” They also say that the “limbic structure called the amygdala, deep within the temporal lobe, shows abnormally high activity in depressed patients.” Studies of “induced sadness”—for example, the brain activity of a person grieving about the end of a romantic relationship—might tell us something about a brain on Cubs. Furthermore, when rats are made to experience “acute and persistent defeat,” there are observable physiological effects: Certain nerve cells undergo long-lasting changes in their ability to respond electrically to stimuli.
Burton and Rodman report that scientists are identifying “the chemical bases of long-lasting brain changes after social defeat, with the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is also heavily implicated in clinical depression, among the substances most clearly involved.” In sports fans, as in players, a team’s success or failure can cause hormonal changes, particularly in the production of testosterone. One implication of this might be that Cub fans, in a kind of Darwinian natural de-selection, have trouble reproducing.
Two other contributors to Your Brain on Cubs, Tom Valeo and Lindsay Beyerstein, say that cognitive neuroscience has found evidence that the brain strains to produce explanations for things “and it will make up stories to cope with phenomena it otherwise cannot account for.” This may indicate that we are hardwired for religion, which generally explains as well as consoles and enjoins. And the deep craving for explanations may explain why baseball is rich with superstitions, such as that of Julio Gotay, a journeyman player for the Cardinals and others in the 1960s, who always took the field with a talismanic cheese sandwich in his back pocket. Superstitions give people a sense of security and control amid uncertainties. The brain “wants” to see outcomes as connected to preceding events. So fans get the brain-driven, if utterly irrational, pleasure of thinking that their rooting, which is a kind of prayer in a secular setting, somehow helps cause their teams’ successes. It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes. There should be lots of them in Wrigley Field.