The Meaning of Cub Fan Suffering

Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub

Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub

Sports Saturday

In one of the tidiest sports weekends of the year, one sports comes to an end while another begins.  March Madness holds its semi-final and final games while baseball kicks off its season. To celebrate opening day, I promise reader Carl Rosin a write-up on a baseball novel.

It seems like the great baseball novels invariably take advantage of the sport’s mythical dimensions. Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) does this as well as any of them.  Waugh is an accountant who compensates for his empty job by creating his own baseball universe.  By rolling three dice, he is referred to various charts he has composed that inform him how the game is unfolding.  Waugh has created a colorful cast of characters, and the game’s legendary Babe Ruth figure—Brock Rutherford—has sired a son who, as the book opens, is in the process of throwing a perfect game.  As a rookie.

Damon Rutherford revitalizes a game that has been growing old, and suddenly Waugh finds a new spring in his step.  He feels like a young man again and his sexual trysts have a new vitality.  Then the unthinkable happens.

So excited by his rookie’s perfect game, Waugh decides to start him again with only one day’s rest, and the dice seem to react in protest.  By coming up 1-1-1 twice in succession, they send Waugh to the “chart of extraordinary occurrences,” which occurs so seldom that he can’t remember what is to be found there.  He discovers that, if he rolls 1-1-1 for a third time, the player at the plate (who happens to be young Damon) will be struck and killed by a bean ball. 

Waugh considers removing him to be safe but realizes that no one in his imaginary uiniverse would countenance such a move.  So he leaves him in and, in fact, disaster occurs:  Damon dies.

The rest of the book shows Waugh spiraling into madness.  To correct for the unfairness of life, he intervenes, manipulates the dice, and makes the pitcher pay for his throw.  But his move throws off the cosmic balance of his baseball world.  Suddenly the players are confused about their relationship with their creator (by the end of the book we are seeing the world through their eyes).  Does God intervene in human affairs?  What is His rationale for doing so? What implications does this have for humans?

There are a number of ways to read The Universal Baseball Association, including as a meditation on God’s relationship with his creation (J. Waugh invokes Jahweh), an exploration of the meaning of suffering and death, and a thought experiment on what life would look like if we had a puppet master deity.

I’m most interested, however, in the way that we look to the narrative of sports to work through our frustrations with life.  Waugh turns to his baseball game because he finds his work life  unfulfilling.  It brings drama, myth and meaning into an otherwise colorless existence.  Only by giving himself over entirely to a game is he able to find meaning.  Waugh’s novel gives us insight into why sports fans are so passionate in today’s world.

Their dramas can be intricate.  Some have to learn how to live with perpetual disappointment.  This is true for my  favorite National League team, the Chicago Cubs.  Coover’s book causes one to think about one’s own fandom, and the Cubs come up for me.

My favorite team of all time was the 1969 Cubs (I was between high school and college at the time).   The fabulous but aging “it’s a great day for baseball” Ernie Banks had been moved to first, Glenn Beckert (who seldom struck out) was at second, Don Kessinger was at third, and Ron Santo was at third.  The very fine catcher Randy Hundley was behind the plate, the indestructible Billy Williams was in left, and we had fine pitchers, including the Canadian Ferguson Jenkins (now in the Hall of Fame) and Ken Holtzman, who threw a no-hitter that year (although it took the Lake Michigan wind pulling a Hank Aaron homerun back into the field of play to pull it off).  They were managed by Leo “nice guys finish last” Durocher.  That year in the mid-season All-Star game, the National League’s infield was composed entirely of Cubs.

Unfortunately, this was also the year of the equally mythical Amazing Mets.  They had phenomenal pitching and they broke my heart as they came charging back in September to win the division and then go on to beat the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series.  Because I was so distressed, my favorite American League team became the Orioles, an allegiance that would serve me well when I ended up in Maryland in 1981.

I became a Cubs fan, incidentally, because that was my grandfather’s favorite team.  After he retired, he would watch the Cubs virtually everyday on television (all their home games in those days were during the day).  My grandfather was born in 1899, and I’ve often thought how strange and frustrating his love of the Cubs must have been.  When he was nine years old, just when he was getting interested in baseball, he would have seen them win the world series—and then would never see them do it again in his life.  They still haven’t won another title.

Now, if some god were to take pity on the long-suffering Cubs and present them with a world series championship, would their fans be happy? Coover would say no since this would throw off the fine relationship between the physical and metaphysical realms.  Our suffering let’s us know that we are autonomous humans.  Mess with that relationship and we become no more than puppets.

I have the strong feeling, however, that nothing short of divine intervention will get the Cubs into the World Series.

 

 

 

 

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