The Chicago Cubs by Rich Cohen

Author:Rich Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

CHAPTER NO. 09

THE BIG QUESTION

As I got older, I became fixated on a single question: Why can’t the Cubs win?

Years had gone by and I had grown up and moved away and Cubs teams had formed and dissolved and still the result was the same. I decided that if I really wanted to figure it out, I’d have to go see for myself. In the summer of 2000, I pitched the idea to Harper’s Magazine. Let me travel with the team, hang out in the clubhouses and around the batting cages, talk to the players and coaches and executives—maybe I can solve the greatest riddle in professional sports.

Two weeks later, I had credentials and was walking into Wrigley Field. It was mid-July and the team was already more than a dozen games out. They’d go on to lose ninety-seven that season. The clubhouse was cramped, not much better than a high school locker room. The Cubs lingered in front of lockers, jerseys on hangers, bats and cleats, gloves and supplements on the shelf above. They sat taping their ankles and knees as their radios played. I wandered from athlete to athlete, asking my question in all three tenses: Why didn’t you win? Why aren’t you winning? Why won’t you win?

I talked to Mark Grace, the classic Cub of the 1990s, slim and blond, with eye black and chew and sneaky charisma. You loved him because he was old-time—no batting gloves, no weight room, just a beer with the fans at Murphy’s after the last out. He was thirty-six years old and had spent a dozen seasons with Chicago. He was a great baseball player. When I asked him why the Cubs did not win, he gave me a Little Rascals double take, laughed, then said, “Expectations. No one here expects us to win, so we don’t. They’re happy if we finish above .500, so sometimes we do.”

I talked to Joe Girardi. He started his career as a Cub in 1989, then came back as a thirty-five-year-old catcher. He grew up in Peoria, Illinois. “When I was in third grade, I wrote an essay about how I would play for the Cubs,” he told me. “Ten times a summer, I drove with my father from Peoria just to see the games. When I left the Cubs the first time, I was crushed. I had always wanted to be a Cubbie.” Between 1996 and 1999, Girardi played for the Yankees, where his team won three World Series in four seasons. It made him uniquely qualified to answer my question: Why don’t the Cubs win?

“In New York, you go into spring training expecting to get to the World Series,” he said. “You feel it when you walk in the clubhouse. The pictures of all those Yankee greats, the monuments. There is something special about putting on the pinstripes. In Chicago, they hope for a good season, maybe the playoffs.”

“But they have pictures here at Wrigley Field,” I said. “The Cubs’ greats. Hack Wilson, Kiki Cuyler.

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