Hey, Chicago Wait Till This Year

Long-suffering Cubs, White Sox fans have their hopes up again (sort of)

By Rick Telander

Issue date: April 7, 2003

As I stand here on the wooden "L" platform at Addison Street, peering between a pair of three-story buildings at empty Wrigley Field, this is what I think: If a fired-up Sammy Sosa batted lefthanded with a stiff breeze out of the Iowa cornfields, in the heat of midsummer, he could launch a ball that would soar over the rightfield wall and Sheffield Avenue and the bleachered roofs of these brownstones and land at my feet.

Why not? Once, in a breeze, Cubbies slugger Dave Kingman smacked a home run ball that cleared the ivy-leafed leftfield wall, crossed Waveland Avenue and hit the first house on Kenmore Street, perpendicular to Waveland.

Lefty-hitting Billy Williams routinely broke apartment windows along Sheffield. His righty pal Ernie Banks broke them on Waveland. It's just a few more feet to hit the train stop where I stand. O.K., maybe a hundred feet. Maybe 150.

But Sammy -- the god of rightfield-bleacher worshipers, the chest-thump, finger-kiss, point-to-the-fans ambassador of happy -- what couldn't Sammy do?

Ah, Chicago baseball. It is like a drink that makes you laugh, then cry, then babble. Hope springs eternal in Chicago. It springs insane. This same train line that can carry me south 13 stops to 35th Street and the home of the White Sox, Comiskey Park -- excuse me, U.S. Cellular Field -- ties together those two pockets of hope like a bungee cord. WHAT DO SOX AND CUBS FANS HAVE IN COMMON? asks the placard inside each car. THE RED LINE.

But they have so much more than that. Start with the hope. A lot of knowledgeable baseball people have picked the White Sox to win their division this year. This is a team that finished .500 last season. This is a team that hasn't won a playoff series since 1917. The Chicago Tribune's Phil Rogers has the Sox going all the way to the World Series. "There," Rogers gasped in his March 27 column. "I actually wrote the sentence and haven't yet turned to stone."

And the Cubs. Dear God, this is the team that hasn't won the World Series since 1908, the longest stretch of futility for any continuously active pro team in any sports league in the history of North America. And yet Cubs fans are fired up. There's a new manager in town, toothpick-twirling Dusty Baker, direct from the San Francisco Giants and their 2002 Series appearance. Baker hasn't managed a losing team since 1996, and he has a kid, four-year-old Darren, who looks so sweet in his miniature Cubs uniform that he could be replicated as a good-luck dashboard ornament. Yes, the Cubs finished 67-95 last year, 30 games out of first, but they've got Sammy, who through Monday was one homer short of 500 (and didn't he almost destroy the Miller Field scoreboard at last year's All-Star home run derby?), and a young rotation that is headed by 25-year-old fireballer Kerry Wood and includes three other twentysomethings -- Mark Prior, Matt Clement and Carlos Zambrano. The bullpen may be suspect and the defense dubious, but what does that matter if you're a Cubs fan feeling macho in your WE'VE GOT WOOD T-shirt?

"I was looking for a team that could be this year's Angels," says ESPN.com baseball analyst Jayson Stark of his assessment of which formerly bad team could turn it all around, the way the '02 Series champs did. "The Angels finished 41 games out of first in 2001, you know." So Stark eliminated teams based on various criteria and private theories and, as he says, "there I was with the Cubs and the White Sox." After further review, he eliminated the Sox, and voila! He was left with the Cubs going to the World Series.

"I recognize how much money I could have lost on the Cubs over 80 years," he says. "Nevertheless, starting pitching, Dusty, the fact that Sammy will be good, Moises Alou can't be worse, the NL Central's nothing special, so...." He seems to be recalculating, like a mathematician stunned by his own equation. "Why not?"

By such ringing endorsements are Chicago hearts inflamed.

Think of it: There are experts who say (if you condense their many thoughts and select the ones you like) that the Cubs and the White Sox will meet this October in a subway series. Then there is reality. Deep down, Chicagoans know -- history has proved -- that their baseball dreams are just bubbles. New York can have its Bronx-Queens classics with the Yankees and the Mets. But the odds against the Cubs going 95 years without a World Series crown are huge. And the odds against the Cubs and the Sox giving one city 180 years of combined futility are, according to Elias Sports Bureau, 10,000 to 1. Which is to say, statistically implausible. Yet true.

"Maybe there's somebody up there not looking after us," says former star White Sox pitcher Billy Pierce.

What all that losing has done is unite the teams' fans in an unacknowledged bond of self-contempt. The hope is there -- Chicago is a hardworking, extreme-weather town that handles even February with optimism -- but not the deep-seated belief that either team will amount to anything. The Cubs had the metal removed from their spines in the storied collapse of 1969 -- up by 9 1/2 games in August, they finished eight behind the Mets. The Sox had a giddy pennant drive in 1959 and then were slapped aside by the Dodgers in the World Series. That, of course, was 44 years ago, the last time either Chicago team would play for it all.

But the Sox also had 1983, when they won their division by 20 games and were promptly thrashed by the Baltimore Orioles in the American League Championship Series. Worst bummer of all, though, was 1994, the strike year. The Sox had their best team in decades -- led by guitar-playing pitcher Jack McDowell and young slugger Frank Thomas, they were 21 games over .500 when baseball shut down-only to see it neutered by the strike, with management's biggest nut-cutter being the Sox' chairman, Jerry Reinsdorf.

"Oh, poor Chicago," says Pierce, who played on that '59 team, never dreaming it would be a pinnacle that would erode like a spring ice chunk in Lake Michigan. "That's a long time ago. You think about a big city like this, and you think there's something wrong. The Cubs in 1984 -- you couldn't believe that could happen."

Oh, right. The '84 Cubs of Ryne Sandberg and Rick Sutcliffe fame were up two-zip on the San Diego Padres in the five-game National League Championship Series, then lost three straight. And let's not forget 1998, when the Cubs and their fans celebrated wildly after the club won a wild-card playoff game against the Giants. The reward? A 3-0 divisional spankfest on the Atlanta Braves' knee.

Bill Peterson, the Chicago-born star of the TV show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, is a Chicago sports fan of such intensity that he once left the film set of Manhunter in Atlanta and took a commercial flight to Washington, D.C., for a few hours just so he could watch the Bears play on TV. He is a Cubs fan and is on the April cover of Men's Journal, sitting at a bar with other rabid Cubs nuts.

"It's all about Fergie Jenkins and Ernie and Ron Santo," Peterson says. "A tie to your childhood." And, of course, dislocation makes the tie grow stronger. "I sit here in Los Angeles," says Peterson, "and it's just a wasteland. In Chicago you have elements to contend with. Here it's 76 degrees, it's perfect. And you know what? It sucks."

That's a Chicago sentiment. That's where the empathy for the '69 Cubs comes from. Hey, folks, we know how scrawny Don Kessinger suffered in that September heat. Hey, I once lost my car in a snowdrift. Kessinger was nearly a skeleton by Labor Day.

Peterson says he would root for the White Sox if there were no Cubs, and at any rate, "I don't root against them." But the Sox have what he describes as "bad dynamics." Many Cubs fans agree. "Man, they used to have exciting guys like Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox. Now, Frank Thomas, Mark Buehrle, Bartolo Colon? Like I could care? There are heroes on the North Side. Thomas is a mope. Snap out of it! Plus, I hate the park."

U.S. Cellular Field is the new name of the park that will host this year's All-Star Game, but it may be years before anyone refers to the place as anything other than Comiskey, or New Comiskey, which came into vogue after the original ballpark was demolished, in 1991. The newly renamed park -- fans will appreciate the improvements we're making with the signage money, says Reinsdorf -- is not exactly sterile, but it has roughly the charm of a clean utensil drawer.

Wrigley, on the other hand, is a quaint little relic from the days when elevators and parking lots weren't on ballpark architects' radar. Wrigley is so nestled into its yuppified neighborhood that its outside wall at one point is only 7 1/2 feet from the gutter of Addison Street. "A lot of the Sox fans' problems with the Cubs is jealousy," admits former White Sox home run champ Bill Melton, himself a diehard Sox man. Melton means the Wrigley attendance -- which is huge regardless of the Cubs' performance. (The past five seasons were among the Cubs' six best attendance years ever at Wrigley, despite the team's having finished a combined 107 1/2 games out of first place over that span.) He also means the festive atmosphere in a ballyard surrounded by dozens of bars, restaurants and million-dollar condos. "But Wrigley is a dump," Melton says. "I'd love to hit there. But it's a dump."

A dump can be beautiful and rare in its way, which is why the city of Chicago is trying to designate Wrigley a historic landmark. Naturally, Cubs ownership, the Tribune Company, doesn't want such a distinction. You can't build more skyboxes in a landmark or add giant bleachers to it. That's another thing: Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley is a born-and-raised South Side Sox fan, like his dad, former mayor Richard J. (Boss) Daley, and you always wonder if Junior wouldn't like to stick it to the Cubs somehow.

But the North Side Cubs have a unique quality that seems to be tamper-proof. Let's let Bill Jauss, the veteran Tribune sportswriter and a North Sider through and through -- and, of course, the son of a Cubs fan -- explain. "I have interviewed literally hundreds of Cubs fans around the park, made it a point to talk to them after excruciating losses," says Jauss. "I ask them, 'Did you have fun?' And about 90 percent say yes. I ask them why. Well, we saw the girls fall out of their halter tops. The beer was cold. The breeze was off the lake. What's better on a summer afternoon?

"The answers imply that the Cubs are not in the baseball business but the entertainment business. And the biggest entertainer in the troupe is Sosa. You can see it in the kids' faces. [Former White Sox manager] Jeff Torborg told me last year that when he sees Sammy run out before the first pitch -- with his right hand up and his finger pointed to the sky, his head down, sprinting as fast as he possibly can, circling in front of the rightfield bleachers in a counterclockwise fashion toward centerfield and back -- he gets goose bumps.

"Santo wore his emotions on his sleeve. Hank Sauer before him. The fans loved Rod Beck. The Cubs don't have to win to entertain. And the '69 Cubs epitomized that. When else has a loser been so glorified? Sox fans are more discriminating. They think they know more baseball than Cubs fans. They think they're all Tony La Russas. In the meantime the Cubs fans are having more fun."

That wasn't always the case, because the sly and effervescent charlatan Bill Veeck once ran the White Sox, bringing in midgets and spaceships and all manner of nonsense to amuse folks and deflect awareness that he had almost no money to invest in players. Veeck was once an executive with the Cubs, too -- it was he who planted the first ivy at Wrigley -- but his heart was on the South Side, where he could work with the common man who would happily come to his baseball sideshow. "Listen to me carefully now," Veeck wrote in The Hustler's Handbook, "because if you are a hustler, you are going to start out with a bad team. A bad ball club is generally the available one, the cheaper one, and the one you can best bring your talents to bear upon."

"Hoyt Wilhelm one time was pitching [for the Orioles] at Comiskey, and he was attacked by furious clouds of gnats," recalls Jauss. "He just smiled. He suspected Bill Veeck."

One of Veeck's friends, 81-year-old Chicago sportswriting legend Bill Gleason, retired these past two years, points out that there are other divisions in Sox-Cubs fandom besides geography or even economic class. "It's religious," the Irish Catholic South Sider says. "The Cubs started with Protestants on the West Side. Comiskey came in with the newer American League club, and the Irish Catholics were down here on the South Side. My grandfather, who came from Tipperary, was a Sox fan, and my father, who was born in Joliet, came up on the Inter-urban to old White Sox Park at 39th and Wentworth. I'm a Sox fan. I have two brothers who are Sox fans and one sister who is. Another sister became a heretic, a Cubs fan. My father said, 'I'd rather she left the church.'

"In 1959 Mayor Daley and his pals set off the air-raid sirens after the Sox clinched the pennant, and it scared a lot of little old ladies on the South Side -- they thought we were being attacked by the Russkies." Gleason pauses to reflect. He sighs. "It was so typical of the Sox, to get all excited and do the wrong thing. I'm convinced the White Sox are cursed. The Black Sox scandal is proof of that. Ray Schalk was the catcher on that team, and if you ever used the words Black Sox or scandal in his presence, you would hear a stream of curse words. He referred to it only as '1919.' But it destroyed the Sox. They lost eight players. Schalk told me, 'There never would have been any f------ Yankees if it weren't for 1919!'"

The lint of truth therein lingers sadly. Of the first 15 World Series, 10 were won by teams from Chicago or Boston. Since 1919 the Yankees and the Mets have won a total of 31 titles, and of course the Sox and the Cubs have won none. The Red Sox haven't won a Series since 1918, and they gave Babe Ruth to the Yankees way back then. But we'll let Red Sox fans tell their story another time.

There is one other factor in determining the Cubs' and the Sox' fan bases. "Yes, it's north and south," says Chicago native Michael Wilbon, a sports columnist for The Washington Post and cohost of ESPN's Pardon the Interruption "But it's also racial." Wilbon, who grew up on the South Side, remembers that black Sox players and even black Cubs players lived near him because they couldn't get housing on the North Side. "My dad tried to go see Jackie Robinson at Wrigley in 1948, and he was turned away, and he vowed he would never go see the Cubs again. Walt (No Neck) Williams of the Sox lived near us, and Ernie Banks lived just east. We'd all take the "L" to Comiskey, like, 20 times a year. But Wrigley, that might as well have been in Minneapolis."

Still, Wilbon is now a fan of the Cubs as well as the Sox, sensing their common ineptitude and linked striving. He has a satellite dish and a baseball package at his home in Maryland just so he can watch his hometown clubs. "Michael Jordan and the Bulls relieved pressure on Chicago baseball," says Wilbon. "Ditka and McMahon and the Bears of the '80s took a lot of summertime depression out of it.

"But I don't expect to see the Cubs or Sox win a World Series in my lifetime. I stopped daydreaming about it. I let it go."

All the bad trades and dumb deals by both clubs are enough to make most fans exhale like Wilbon. The Cubs' 1964 trade of leftfielder Lou Brock to the Cardinals for sore-armed pitcher Ernie Broglio, who won all of seven games for the Cubs while Brock became a Hall of Famer, is generally considered the worst in team history. But letting Greg Maddux go to Atlanta also ranks right up there, or down there.

The White Sox' signing of human virus Albert Belle for tons of money was bad. As was bringing in goofball pitcher David Wells, pre-diet. But canning singular manager La Russa in 1986, three years after he won the division and was named Manager of the Year, might win the dunce cap.

And what of on-field blunders? How about Sox manager Terry Bevington going to the mound and calling for a righty out of the bullpen, only to discover nobody of either arm was warming up? The White Sox' red uniforms and their honest-to-god game shorts would make even Elton John blush. But let's also recall Cubs eccentric Joe Pepitone, who once, after reaching first, got a wink sign from first base coach Joey Amalfitano confirming a hit-and-run play. Pepitone, who spent great lengths of time grooming his toupee, winked back at Amalfitano, blew him a kiss-and was promptly picked off.

Hack Wilson, who holds the major league single-season RBI record, with 191, was such a drunk in the 1930s that an enlargement of a newspaper story titled HACK'S LAST WARNING is posted in the Cubs' training room. "Talent isn't enough," Wilson says in the old interview, when he was near death. "You need common sense and good advice ... I spent all of my money, most of it in barrooms."

Wrigley Field itself has been compared to an outdoor barroom, and former Cubs manager Lee Elia's tirade against the Wrigley daytime habitues in 1983 was half-inspired, half-deranged. "The f---ers don't even work!" Elia ranted. "That's why they're out at the f------ game! Tell 'em to go out and get a f------ job and find out what it's like to earn a f------ living! Eighty-five percent of the f------ world works, the other 15 come here!"

Well, not all of them. A fellow like me is wandering around the outside of the park, marveling again that the only statue at Wrigley is not of Hack or Tinker or Evers or Chance -- Cubs all-but of bloated, grinning announcer Harry Caray, holding out a microphone to an invisible crowd, singing silently in the seventh inning. LET ME HEAR YA ... the legend chiseled on the base reads. A ONE ... A TWO ... A THREE ... It's perfect, really, just like Disco Demolition at Comiskey years ago, the blow-up-the-albums riot that canceled a game and destroyed the turf as well as the sanity of the place. Deejay Steve Dahl, who concocted the event and wore a military helmet during the detonation, says now that Sox fans and Cubs fans can accept the endless losing because "we're happy just to be outside for a few months."

There's truth there. But I think also of the bond among all the finger-pointing Chicago baseball fans, the loop of yearning and hope and wistfulness and suffering that ropes them all together like a herd. "All the baseball infighting in this city, and it means nothing," says veteran WMVP-AM 1000 radio producer Tom Serritella. "It's like the slug calling the worm a crawler."

And so I return to the "L" and climb aboard for the 25-minute ride south to the place called U.S. Cellular Field, thinking that this would be the preferred mode of transportation for fans in the event of a Chicago subway series. But what am I thinking? Even hope has its limits. A train can chug, but it can't fly.

Issue date: April 7, 2003