Thanks to the beneficence of both Tuftsbud Elliott and the inimitable Beck, we had tickets for both Monday and Wednesday night's Cubs games v. the Diamondbacks. Elliott and gotten us (read: ME) the tickets as a wedding present, and an awesome one it was: seats about 20 rows back down the first base line at the back edge of the infield. SWEET! I, being a supreme baseball nerd, looked at the 6:40 first pitch time and said, "that means I should get there at 4:30."
Why? To take laps and stretch before the game? Obviously you aren't a golfer. About 2.5 hours before the game, the home team takes batting practice, aka BP. SO the DBacks start this about 4 when the game starts at 6:40, but being the colossal idiots that they be, do not open the doors to the stadium until 4:30. So the best you can hope for is catching the second half of DBacks BP and the whole of the Cubs. Which, given the DBacks "ability" to hit a baseball, is just fine with me thanks. Actually, it's not fine, and here's why: in BP, the batters take turns in groups of 4. So traditionally, the first guys to go are the top 4 guys in the batting order, then the second 4 guys (the 5-8 hitters). So by the time the doors opened and I was able to take a fieldside seat, it's 9-12 guys. And yeah, there are only 8 starting batters, so you get to watch the DScrubs take BP. Boo-urns. Seriously, if you thought Stephen Drew was inept, take a look at his backup.
I kid, I kid. But it's true, really, that rushing to get there and watching backups take BP makes the whole thing feel a bit dumb. Ah, well. Of course, the main point of all of this is to see the Cubs, in all of their centennial glory, take BP. And you get to see THOSE GUYS 1-8, and that is sweet enough.
BP is holy. That's coming from a dude who had the wonderful, if somewhat synthetic, experience of seeing Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire (on separate occasions, obviously) take BP in the Astrodome. In that time, it was holy on a level of spectacle. I did not try to get as close to those behemoths as possible; like any addle-brained American obsessed with the idea of risking life and limb to catch a 7 dollar commodity, I positioned myself in the second deck of the left field bleacher to catch a home run from one of those then-god-now-vandals. And woah, was I ever disappointed, because the vast majority of their stupid hits landed in the friggin' third and fourth decks. Sheesh. Two clear memories: first, I was watching Sosa BP with a little kid whose brain was exploding with joy. Just great, but I don't remember what the kid looked like or whether he was a Cubs or Astros fan or anything, I just remember the clean-cut thought that should I be lucky enough to catch a ball, there was a special place in hell reserved for me if I didn't immediately hand it to the tyke. It didn't happen, but nice to know that some sort of baseball sense of right and wrong is firmly ingrained in my being. The second memory: not a BP memory, but a memory of Mark McGwire hitting a ball to the back row of the Astrodome. The idiotic "tale of the tape" said 450 feet, but A, that spot is at least 480 feet away from home plate, and B, physics be damned, that ball was still on its way up when it hit the seat. So I feel comfortable estimating that bad boy at 783 feet. Inauthentic? Maybe. Majestic? Surely.
But the superhuman supershots of BP are their own thing: impressive, sure, but to some degree a kind of circus side show. The real meat of watching BP is the artistry of men who are so unbelievably good at a skill that is so intricate and complex. Artistry has a wealth of definitions, as does genius; I'm sure that a fairly profound intersection of those concepts occurs in the man who aligns eyes brain nerves muscles hands arms bat swing to flick a flying object to a precise location in the opposite field. And during BP, you can, irrespective of the presence / absence of 400 dollars in your pocket, grab those seats twenty feet away from the batters and watch them practice their trade. I'm sure there's a pretty prevalent golf-watching effect going on here: watching golf is insanely boring, UNLESS you realize just how difficult those shots actually are. Well, yeah, thirteen years on diamonds spent slamming the ball with a metal stick gave me a special appreciation of how hard it would be to do samesaid thing with a piece of wood. So, to turn the experience of a Grateful Dead concert on its head, the experience of watching BP can be part baseball game, part church. There's mysticism and beauty in the line drive. And it's even better when the Cubs hit them.
Now, all of that said, the mystic was missing that Monday afternoon. The usual screaming line drives were not flying from D-Lee's bat. Or Aramis's, or Fukudome's, or Soto's, or Edmonds's, or Theriot's... on and on. There was something dead about the affair, partly due to the synthetic can that is The Bob or Chase Field or whatever the hell they're calling the DBacks ballpark these days. The Cubs looked tired... a bad omen.
Of course, that didn't stop Kosuke or Daryl Ward from adopting their chillaxed stances:
But something wicked had that way came, and the game betrayed it. A deadlocked pitcher's duel for most of six innings, Harden finally let go of his no-hit bid and gave up a homer to a DBacks rookie. D'oh. Stephen Drew added a run scoring double/triple later, the only other DBacks hit of the evening. The Cubs came up with nothing - they threatened in the 8th and ninth, but nice double plays killed both efforts. A sad day for Cubdom - who, incidentally, overran the crowd - but also a quick one, as the whole thing took 2 hours and 17 minutes. Crazy.
A nice moment in the post-game crowd walkback to cars: DBack fan talks trash, Cubs fan yells "How does it feel to be almost .500?" in response, DBacks fan responds "How does it feel to lose to a team that isn't even .500?" Necessitating all kinds of "yeah, well, you got us there" shrugs. Classic baseball banter.
The Tuesday game was viewed at home, but the Cubs fared similarly: another loss. So at the risk of broom-fueled embarrassment, I got ready to head downtown for the Wednesday game. Beck got off of work early, and she was wonderful enough to head to the game early with me to watch BP again. A different affair - the Cubs were poppin', so things looked great. And the game did not disappoint: homeruns, grand slams, triples, a wealth of stolen bases, and a Cubs rout. We sat along the third base line this time, again a grand view of the game. Fun times.
Since then, the Cubs have notably swept the Brewers in Milwaukee and grabbed a five game lead over the Brewers. We all know how this sort of thing tends to end up, so we won't get too excited... still, there's something cool in the air re: this 100 year anniversary. The Cubs embody so much for me, and not just the typical sentimental attachemnts. It's the weird sensation of knowing for a fact how stupid it is to root for, essentially, a uniform, worn by a bunch of ridiculous millionaires who couldn't care less (and when you stand twenty feet from them, the absurdity of them and their overblown image becomes that much more apparent. I'm talking to you, Alfonso), and yet still caring, still gtting nervous when the game gets tight, elated when they win and wanting to vomit when they don't. I probably hold on to that more out of habit than anything else, but with all the other pitfalls of truth-pursuit, it's good to know that a little illogical fandom can keep things churning. Go Cubs Go.
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