on baseball

What I was wondering about your sports fandom was not so much whether you played sports as a kid, but how come you never became a sports fan, you know like rooting for the Bears or the Lions, but I guess you have explained that with your comments about hysteria, you kind of have to give up part of your mind to hysteria to be a sports fan, or else it is not much fun.

There is a cerebral part to it, like where should the shortstop play a pull hitter, when does bunting make sense, should the pitcher bat ninth or eighth, which is not that different from talking about how to grease a bearing, I think it was. But those guys, talking that cool logical talk, drop it as soon as there is a big play and howl with hysteria.

Hard to believe you didn’t pick up a little baseball fandom when you were a youngun. It seemed like it was all over in my neighborhood, you had to talk some baseball or you were a conversation dropout, but maybe you didn’t mind that much being a conversation dropout.

I don’t have much to comment on Orin’s farm, except to ask exactly where it was, so I will go on about my Cub fandom.

I don’t know why I picked the Cubs, they were always in seventh or eighth place. The Sox, on the other hand where always fighting it out for first place and even won the pennant in 1959. And everybody around me was a Sox fan, I was the only Cub fan I knew. Well maybe that’s part of the reason, even though I ran with the herd, I always wanted to be a little different. I always wanted to be left handed, I used to practice writing left handed because you never knew when you were going to break your right arm.

My mother, the saint, used to take me and a handful of neighborhood kids (all Sox fans, but a kid would go to any baseball game) out to Wrigley Field. What was a cool thing about that, besides seeing other Cub fans in that mysterious alternate universe of the north side, was riding the el. So high, so fast, I think the only el I ever rode before coming back here in 1987 was the train that went by Wrigley.

Anyway I continued to be a Cub fan until I went to college. At the beginning of college I was overwhelmed and had no idea of what was going on outside of my classes and the dorm. Towards the end of my college I was becoming a hippie, and sports were so square I never paid any attention.

I remember once when I was in southern Illinois in 1970 I had a transistor radio and I happened to pick up a Cub game on it one summer night. There is nothing, nothing in the world like listening to that tinny play by play while smelling a freshly mown lawn.

When I came back to Champaign in 1971 and started working at the House of Chin bar, I was surrounded by Cub fans, and so it has gone ever since.

I love the structure of the game. It is a game within a game within a game. There is the pitcher and the batter and the only outcome is a man on base or an out. The balls and strikes pile up, but have no meaning when the at bat is done. A guy can have a 3 and 0, and end up being out, or an 0 and 2, and get on base.

And then within the inning is another game. You can load the bases and still not score. You can have two outs and nobody on and still end up scoring. At the end of the inning you will either have scored or not, and the next inning will begin as if the previous inning had never existed.

Then there is the whole game, and you will either score more runs than the other guy or not. Time is not a factor. The game will take however long it takes. There are no ties. Conceivably the game could go on forever.

Oh, and I enjoy giving myself up to hysteria once the first pitch is thrown.