My first trip to Wrigley Field, as I recall, was in 1957. I was seven years old. Dad took the whole family to the ball park for a double header with the Phillies which, if I remember right, we split.
Having watched baseball at Wrigley on TV for years (involuntarily; 1957 was the first year it actually caught my interest), I was in awe to see the place I’d watched in black-and-white for so long not only in living color but in person. I got a comparable thrill in my late 50s when the Cub coaches gave a hitting clinic for young fans before a game I attended, and I was allowed to fulfill a lifelong ambition and actually walk around on the field. Well, the outfield, anyway. It was amazing to see the place from the same perspective Billy Williams and “Moose” Moryn and Lee Walls and Andre Dawson had back in the day. When nobody was looking, I swiped a tile from the warning track. The idea was that if I ever proposed to the fanatical Cub fan I was dating back in Iowa, I would have it made into an engagement ring. It never happened, but it was a nice thought. I suspect that my ex-wife, though also a Cub fan, threw it away, still in the plastic sandwich bag I kept it in.
I was a Cub fan on the South Side. This was an interesting experience. Nearly all my schoolmates and the kids I played with were Sox fans. The aunt and uncle’s next-door neighbor was the engineer for the WCFL broadcasts of the White Sox games. When we went to visit Uncle Johnny and Aunt May every week, Mr. Swanson and I would always give each other a hard time. He got Dad and me into Comiskey Park one Saturday free to see the Sox play. I got a foul ball on the second pitch, and got to meet Sox owner Bill Veeck after the game. “So, son,” Veeck said. “Are you a Sox fan?” “Hell, no!,” I replied, or words to that effect. He threw back his head and laughed, as my embarassed father explained that he’d grown up across the street from the old Cubs Park on the West Side, where the team played before moving into Wrigley, and that Cub Hall of Fame catcher and manager Gabby Hartnett was a distant cousin of ours. They had a long talk about Veeck’s dad, who had owned the Cubs at one point. It was only later that it dawned on both of us that we’d forgotten to ask him to autograph the ball!
Sox fans hate the Cubs. It’s been said- and in many cases, I think it’s true- that given the choice between the Sox winning and the Cubs losing, Sox fans would prefer the latter. Part of the reason is class warfare. While working-class Chicagoans are divided in their allegience, generally depending on which side of Madison Street they live on, the Cubs have always been the more upscale of the two. There’s a story about a kid on the South Side who went to school one day wearing a Cubs can. “Why are you a Cubs fan?,” his Sox fan teacher asked. “Because my parent are,” he replied. “That’s not a good reason!,” she replied. “If your parents were a drug dealer and a prostitute, what would that make you?”
Without missing a beat, the kid replied, “A Sox fan?”
Wrigleyville is a neighborhood of small theatres, fashionable restaurants, and fern bars. It’s Yuppie heaven. Chicago’s affluent gay community is concenrated in the area of Wrigley Field. On the other hand, there used to be a tee-shirt that said, “I went to a game at Comiskey Park, and all I got was these bullet holes in my tee-shirt.”
Economics aside, Chicago has always been a Cubs town. The Cubs and the Sox have each won three World Series. The Sox have been in a grand total of six. The Cubs, on the other hand, have been in eleven. Historically, the North Siders have been a far more successful team. And of course, when Sox fans brag about having won a larger percentage of the World Series than the Cubs have, we point out that while we may have lost eight World Series, at least we’ve never thrown one.
Yeah. They play hard ball in this rivalry.
When the Sox won the pennant somehow in 1959, I was all set to root for the Dodgers in the Series. My dad talked me out of it. The Sox, he pointed out, were a Chicago team, and we should get behind them. So we rooted for the Sox. They lost.
Sox fans as a group, on the other hand, are traditionally jerks when the Cubs do well, and when the Sox got to the Series again in 1985 I rooted for the Astros. In 2006, when the Cubs played the Florida Marlins for the National League pennant, there were bars on the South Side where the drinks were on the house when the Marlins hit a home run. Sox fans, on the whole, hate the Cubs more than Cub fans hate the Sox. But there is no love lost either way.
I lived in the suburbs of St. Louis during the 1987, 1988, and 1999 seasons. I went to Busch Stadium just about every time the Cubs came to town (clergy get free general admission to Cardinals games). Each team won a division championship during that time, but the Cubs finished ahead of the Cards two of the three years I was there. Having been a Cub fan both on the South Side and in St. Louis, I can definitely say that I would rather be hated than patronized.
Cub fans tend to patronize Sox fans. We’ve certainly done a great job of patronizing them since 2015. Alas, while Theo Epstein managed to build our first world champion since my dad lived across the street from the old Cubs Park in 1908, he proved unable to maintain his success. I don’t know how much influence the financial fortunes of the Ricketts family had on his behavior, but we never did get a center fielder or a leadoff man to replace the departed Dexter Fowler after 2016. Gaping holes in the team went unaddressed for years; some of them have been there ever since. One of Theo’s personal rules was that the worst time to make a trade is when you have to, because it’s hard to negotiate well out of desperation.
It’s hard to object too hard about the one-year rental of closer Aroldis Chapman in 2016 even at the expense of prize prospect and future All-Star Gleyber Torres. After all, it’s doubtful whether we would have won the Series that year without Chapman. But when we sent Elroy Jiminez and Dylan Cease to the Sox for the mediocre Jose Quintana in a moment of desperation… well, in retrospect, there was no excuse. We squandered our impressive farm system without managing to repair the holes, and what we thought was going to be a dynasty turned out to be a one-and-done.
What remained of thr 2016 team was inconsistent and streaky. They struck out alot. They managed to win several division championships, but never got any further. And the Ricketts family was either unwilling or unable to spend the money to sign the available free agents, plug those holes, and get us back to the Series.
I’ve realized for a number of years that what happened this past week was necessary. The only way back to glory was to re-stock the farm system with prospects, and as much as Cub fans hate to admit this, the only way to get value in a trade is to give value. Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, and Javy Baez are among the most beloved players in Cub history. But each of them demanded more money in their new contracts than they were worth, money nobody is going to give them. That’s especially the case after the huge financial hit the Ricketts family took in their hotel business and other investments due to the COVID pandemic.
I love those guys, and I hate to lose them. I’ve actually had a couple of nightmares about the trades the last few nights. Like most Cub fans, I have a hole in my heart right now. I comfort myself with the strong chance that once he realizes that he isn’t going to get what he’s asking for elsewhere at least Rizzo will come back to the Cubs over the winter.
It hurts. But it was necessary. In place of the strikeout-prone El Mago, our shortstop will now be contact-hitter Nico Hoerner. As a result of the Kimbrel trade, we will have high-average contact hitter Nick Madrigal at second. These are exactly the kind of players the Cubs need. They will give us what Baez and Bryant did not: consistency. Future star Brenden Davis, an outfielder, will be coming up from Iowa to play at Wrigley next year. Pete Crow-Armstrong, the former first-round draft choice of the Mets who we got in the Baez deal, is another highly talented outfield prospect, as is Alexander Canario, a low-strikeout hitter whose mediocre batting average masks a stellar OBP. The Cubs have been addressing an area Theo neglected in the last rebuild- pitching- in recent years, and have a number of high-quality hurlers in the pipe. They got a couple more in this week’s trades. And Jason Heyward, who despite his defensive prowess has never lived up to his potential at the plate, will doubtless be gone after next year, taking his huge contract with him.
The wild-card in all of this is the improving financial situation of the Ricketts family and the amount of money they will save as a result of unloading Bryant, Baez, and Rizzo, and soon, Heyward. For the first time in years, the Cubs will be in a position to sign some free agents, perhaps including Rizzo. And taking that into consideration, given the improved look of the organization it won’t be many years before the Cubs are back on top. This rebuild will not take the ten years the last one did, or anything close to it. And this time, it won’t simply a matter of building a talented team. It will be a team built around contact hitters and offensive consistency, the very thing the Bryant/Baez era Cubs so conspicuously lacked.
In short, as depressed as Cub fans are right now, this had to happen. Perhaps it’s almost overdue. The remnants of the 2016 world champions were not going to win another world championship. Now the Cubs are doing what they have to do to build a team that can, and I truly don’t think it’s going to take that long.
But then, there’s the other thing.
I’ve never been exactly a fan of either New York team, but I’m still pulling for Rizzo and Baez. I have nothing in particular against the Giants; that rivalry cooled off decades before I was born. But I’m actively rooting for Kris Bryant. I doubt that more than one of them will be back, and I both expect and hope that it will be Rizzo.
I’m going to have a tougher time rooting for Kimbrel and Tempera. They weren’t part of the 2016 team, of course, and didn’t occupy the same place in our hearts Rizzo and KB and El Mago did. And they are, after all, playing for… that other team.
The shoe is on the other foot now. The Sox are well-situated for a run at another world championship, and will be for several years. The Cubs will be also-rans for at least a few years. That will be a hard to take as losing the Big Three this past week has been.
I’d find it easier to pull for the Sox if their fans weren’t such jerks about the Cubs. As it is, we’ll see what we will see. In the meantime. the Sox deserve their due. They’re a hell of a team, and despite their occasional obnoxiousness their fans deserve their turn to howl.
But before you know it, we’ll be back. The White Sox ascendency will only stoke the fire in our guts. So far, Chicago has only seen one Subway Series, in 1906. The Sox won that one in six games.
Here’s to a rematch sometime in the next five years. And a different outcome.
Watersblogged 