Wednesday, April 4th: Cubs 4, Reds 1 at Cincinnati
Uh oh. I’m getting scared. I mean it. Today, Ted Lilly handcuffs the Reds on three hits and nine strikeouts in seven innings, Mar DeRosa gets the big hit, and Dempster shuts Cincinnati down in the ninth inning. We’re gonna go all the way!
Wait, wait. It’s the second goddamned game of the season.
Deep breaths.
Okay, I feel better now.
Here’s one of the countless reasons I love the Cubs. They’re entertaining even when they’re not on the field. (Of course, the argument can be made that they’re entertaining only when they’re not on the field.) Reserve catcher Henry Blanco isn’t with the team for today’s game. He’s in Miami testifying in the trial of his agent who’s accused of running a human smuggling ring.
According to a federal indictment, the agent, Gus Dominguez, funneled some $200,000 out of Blanco’s bank account to finance an operation using a convicted drug trafficker to sneak baseball players out of Cuba. The ballplayers then would be obligated to employ Dominguez as an agent.
Under Dominguez’s alleged plot, the players would be transported from Cuba to Florida by high speed boat. Then they’d be sent to California for private coaching, after which time Dominguez would make them available to the highest bidder. Needless to say, the players would owe everything they have to Dominguez. They’d be, in essence, indentured servants.
Prosecutors say Blanco had nothing to do with the plot and that Dominguez, who has control of Blanco’s finances, used the catcher’s dough without his knowledge.
Henry Blanco is a popular Cub even though he plays about once a week. He’s affectionately known among fans as “Hank White.” He came to Chicago a couple of years ago on the recommendation of Greg Maddux, who preferred him as his personal catcher. He’s a fine defensive backstop and the pitchers love him, two phrases no sane person would ever apply to the Cubs’ regular catcher Michael Barrett.
Blanco was hoping to testify in the morning so he could hop a plane and rejoin the team in Cincy for tonight’s game. But jury selection took an unexpectedly long time and the judge decided to break for lunch so Blanco missed his chance to make an early exit. Here’s the topper: one of the potential jurors was excused because he happens to be the cousin of major league pitcher Bronson Arroyo. The very same Bronson Arroyo who was pummeled by the Cubs tonight!
I wonder of old Hank White will keep Dominguez as an agent.
Whenever I feel in jeopardy of slipping into Cubs giddiness, they find a way to bring me back to Earth.
***
Lou Piniella is trying to change Cubs culture. Who does he think he is, a messiah?
The grizzled old hare preaches his gospel in the ninth inning today. Ryan Dempster, the nominal and infuriating closer, strikes out the first batter he faces, Adam Dunn, trying to close things out for the Cubs’ first win of the season. Dempster then violates one of Lou’s commandments by walking the next batter. After he throws a first-pitch ball to the third batter, future Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr., Lou storms out to the mound and unleashes a torrent of reproach.
The bill of Lou’s cap bobs as he orates and he opens his mouth so wide to deliver his anti-walk diatribe that I’d guess Dempster can count the number of fillings in his teeth.
I like the fact that Lou wastes no time establishing some ground rules – like giving up walks ain’t such a hot idea. Previous Cub managers might have prioritized Dempster’s feelings over any message communicating that control is paramount. Not Lou. His message is Get the goddamned ball over the plate!
Thursday, April 5th: Reds 2, Cubs 1 at Cincinnati
The Reds take the rubber game of the first series of the season. Cubs starter Jason Marquis looks strong in his six innings, leaving with a 1-0 lead. Reliever Bob Howry takes over and the Reds get their first two batters on base. Lou calls on Will Ohman to put out the fire; instead, he squirts lighter fluid on it. Ohman throws a wild pitch to allow one run to score. Then he walks the first batter, with ball four being a Michael Barrett passed ball that allows the game-winner to score. Eek.
My friends back in Chicago are beginning to worry about my preoccupation with the Cubs. John, an author and financial commentator, has been on the receiving end of a bushel-ful of my frantic emails concerning the team. He tries to talk me down off the ledge after today’s game:
Mike:
You know, worrying about the Cubs every day is hazardous for your health.
John.
***
Who or what is responsible for this millstone tied around my neck?
It all began with the smell of yeast.
As a kid, I tried my damnedest to live my entire life outdoors. There were, after all, games to be played.
We – the neighborhood kids and I – would play softball from March through late October. We rarely played hard ball (or “league ball,” as we referred to it) because our “diamonds” were located in the alleys behind our houses.
We played in these narrow, pot-holed, pebble-strewn stretches of concrete despite the fact that there was a nice big parking lot across the street from my house. It served Topper’s Café Chablis, a restaurant and nightclub whose kitchen had been dynamited by the Outfit. Once the Wise Guys took over, we were loath to trespass the nightclub’s lot lest, we feared, we’d wind up in the trunk of a car.
Playing ball at a park was out of the question as well. Galewood wasn’t terribly close to either of the two parks which served our area. Amundsen Park was about three-quarters of a mile to our east, much too far for 9, 10 and 11-year old kids to traipse to after school, and Riis Park, much bigger with countless diamonds and even a cinder track for runners and a swimming pool, was more than a mile to the north, past the Chicago and Northwestern rail tracks that our mothers without exception had forbidden us to go near. (Not that we listened – the tracks and the brush surrounding them became our impromptu academy for lessons in smoking, swearing, showing each other our penises, and studying the odd Playboy magazine that one or another of us had found at home or in a neighbor’s garbage. Still, Riis Park was too far away.)
So our alleys were our home fields.
We played Chicago softball, the kind with no mitts and a 16-inch Clincher, the brand name every kid in town preferred. A softball made by any other company just wouldn’t do. They’d become mushy and distorted, the seams would tear, and the stuffing would come out. The sound of a bat hitting a well-worn Clincher was as much a sign of spring as the chirp of the robin or the smell of fresh cut grass. It was a booming thwock reverberating in our alleys.
Our diamond was more of a rhombus, squeezed by the tight confines between garages on either side of the alley. We played pitcher’s-hand, meaning if the one of the infielders managed to field a ground ball cleanly, he could toss it to the pitcher. If the throw reached the pitcher’s hands before the base runner got to first, the runner was out. This rule quirk led to countless arguments with the toughest of us invariably emerging victorious.
There’s no calculating how many games we played, how many innings we switched sides, how many at bats any of us had. We really didn’t even play in quanta that could be called “games.” We simply chose up sides early in the morning and commenced playing. Perhaps two or three times throughout the day, just for freshness, we’d re-choose sides and pretend to start a new game. But the truth is, the day was really just a long game whose conclusion was only the sound of the first kid’s mother to yell out that it was time for dinner.
As I grew older, I’d hear one or another mother laugh about her son coming home, breathless, beet red from the sun, with black dirt lines at the crooks of his arms and around his neck, crowing that had hit four home runs, six triples, five doubles and three…, no, four…, wait a minute, no…, three singles. Well, sure. Each of us had come to bat several dozen times in the day. No matter how lousy any of us was, we all would have been able to collect a passel of extra-base hits. Each of us was a superstar at the end of the day.
I was Ron Santo. The White Sox fans among us, and there were one or two, would call him a fat ass. In those days before adolescence, I too, carried a pound or two more than the height and weight charts in the doctor’s office called for. This almost microscopic overweight condition led the more discerning among my peers to label me a fat ass as well.
Fine, I thought. It’s OK to be a fat ass as long as Ron Santo is one, too. We’d have interminable arguments over who was the better third baseman, Santo or the White Sox’s Pete Ward. I was obliged to hate Pete Ward. He may have been a swell individual, perhaps one of nature’s noblemen. No matter. He was a member of the White Sox so therefore his very character was suspect. “I hate Ward,” I’d spit. “He stinks.”
The retort would come back: “Yeah? What’s Santo good for? Eatin’ pizza? He’s a fat ass!”
“He is not!” I’d reply and this witty repartee would continue for the better part of an afternoon.
We all became adept at holding our water. We couldn’t pee in the alley because some nosy neighbor’d be sure to spot us and tell our mothers. And we sure as hell didn’t want to go home to use the toilet too often because our mothers might decide that we’d been out long enough and we should stay in for a while, heaven knows why. So we could play softball for hours without voiding our bladders.
When we went so long that the laws of physics were in danger of being violated and our very anatomies would soon betray us, we’d grudgingly make the trek home to use the facilities. We’d all learned to become terse, even hostile, at those junctures. We didn’t want to give our mothers the impression we were interested in chitchat. And if the looks on our faces were off-putting enough, perhaps our mothers’d think twice about asking us to stay in for a while.
I’d slip in through the back door and stride purposefully toward the bathroom which was past the kitchen, my mother’s roost. I’d be huffing and puffing, communicating the sheer exhaustion of my labors, clearly not about to let anything stand in my way as if I were part of a rescue team trying to reach buried miners.
That’s when the aroma of yeast hit me. Passing through the kitchen, I’d see my mother, hunched over an enormous metal bowl sitting atop a step stool, using the weight of her upper body to drive her fists into a mound of bread dough. Her knuckles, wrists, and sometimes even her forearms were speckled by sticky bits of dough as she massaged the mass into a workable, airy mixture that she would then let sit for an hour to rise.
Ma made bread every week. Every day during the school year, she’d pack me a lunch with a sandwich made from her homemade bread. I was embarrassed no end by this. The other kids all had neat square sandwiches made of packaged Wonder Bread or, if their mothers were less cost-conscious, Butternut bread. Every time I’d pull out my lunch bag and unwrap my sandwich, some kid was sure to stare at it and ask, with lip curled, “What is that?” as if I were holding my own feces in my hands.
Ma’s bread was assymetrical. She’d split the top before putting the loaves in the oven and depending on which side of the loaf she favored with her steak knife, the top that continued to rise during baking either mushroom out to the right or to the left. In either case, the resultant slices were neither neat nor square and I was filled with shame during lunchtime, eating sandwiches made of my own feces.
Ma was always serious about any task she was engaged in. If I’d happened to come in while she was working her dough, she wouldn’t even raise her head to acknowledge my entrance, nor did I expect her to. She stood her ground above that enormous tin bowl of dough, her legs like concrete pillars spread shoulder width apart, giving her just the right amount of leverage to knead the dough, to attack it really, for that’s how she approached every chore. Her nostrils would flare every time she inhaled. Her lips formed a tight pinched dot, signaling her desire not to be distracted from the task at hand except in the case of dire emergency, a head wound, say, or a fractured femur.
Her concentration was so singular that now, as I look back on it, I’m surprised she even thought to have any kind of outside stimulus, but she did. Next to her, on the Formica kitchen table, was a tiny transistor radio, tuned as always to WGN. Then, as now, Ma didn’t have any friends, not flesh and blood ones at least. Two fellows kept her company from April through September, though. From 1:20 until the late afternoon, when there was a game at Wrigley Field, she spent her warm days with Vince Lloyd and Lou Boudreau, the radio voices of the Cubs.
For this 11-year-old, free on his summer vacation, spending every day outdoors from sun-up to the moment the street lights went on, home meant the aroma of bread dough and the voices of Vince and Lou.
Prior to that summer of 1967, the first summer the Cubs had shown any life since the ancient black-and-white days of World War II, I hadn’t given a second thought to actually watching sports. My father and older brother Joey communed every Sunday afternoon in the fall in front of the television set, jerking and ooh-ing in reaction to another bone-crunching hit delivered by the likes of Dick Butkus or Ed O’Bradovich of the Bears.
Dad and Joey loved watching football on TV about as much as I loved astronomy or drawing or playing softball in the alley. I never envied them their bond for I didn’t care one whit about anyone named O’Bradovich. Nor did I care about Bobby Hull and Stan Mikita whose exploits were filling up the ancient, decrepit Chicago Stadium in the fall and winter. Basketball? That was played by an expansion team in front of thousands of empty seats in the even more ancient, more decrepit Chicago Coliseum on South Wabash Avenue.
Yet I played softball every day in the alley. The only impediment to playing was snow or bitter cold. When it was inclement, we played Whiffle ball in someone’s basement until his mother, driven to rage by the noise and the crashing of lamps, threw us out.
No matter where we played, I imagined we stood on the carefully manicured infield of Wrigley Field itself, just like my fellow fast ass, Ron Santo.
Santo seemed more to me than simply a sports idol. He was an Italian American who, like my mother, made pizza. He had his own pizzeria, Slugger’s, in suburban Park Ridge. I’d learn later that when a delivery driver would call in sick, Santo himself often would deliver pizzas in his Cadillac. Santo also was emotional and demonstrative and when things didn’t go right for him or the Cubs, he threw fits and didn’t care who saw him do it. He was so like us that I imagined Santo was a member of my family.
The only thing that kept me from playing Santo’s position, third base, was my fear that a sharp grounder would hit a pothole or a Coke bottle and bounce up into my face. Besides, by general acknowledgement, I was deemed to be best suited to right field or catcher. Still, I played more baseball than the finest players in my neighborhood.
By the time I was 11 years old, Santo began to supplant the astronauts Wally Schirra and Gus Grissom as my heroes. Until that time, I never watched or listened to baseball games but I was glued to e television for every lift-off from Cape Kennedy. The voices of Walter Cronkite and Jules Bergman, accompanied by the regular beeping of the CapCom communications system, were lullabies to me.
All that changed in 1967. Ma, who before that season was about as ignorant of professional sports as I was, somehow became hooked on the Cubs.
That summer her mood became dependent upon the result of the day’s game. She took to Ernie Banks as if he were her very son. I don’t recall her ever referring to him as Banks; it was always Ernie. She was a little cooler toward Santo, whose demonstrations of rage embarrassed her, I think. She liked Billy Williams, too, although she wasn’t on a first name basis with him. Ferguson Jenkins burst on the scene that summer and Ma would call him Fergie except when he lost and he became That Damned Jenkins. Manager Leo Durocher was always Durocher, mainly, I suspect, because she disapproved of his reputation for drinking, womanizing, and enjoying the company of gangsters.
All in all, Ma took each and every Cub to her bosom. She was tolerant of Adolfo Phillips, a supremely talented yet moody centerfielder, who’d eventually be crushed by the tag underachiever. When he was at bat, she seemed to want to will him to succeed. When he made an out, she whispered gosh dang it, indicating affectionate disappointment rather than the wrath that a Santo strikeout that her outburst of Dumb Santo! would signify.
The Cubs reached first place – first place! – in July with a win against the powerful Cincinnati Reds. After the game, bleacher fans refused to leave their seats until the scoreboard operator had run up the white flag with the blue W, signifying victory, atop the flagpole. By then, I too was drawn in by the aroma of yeast and the excitement of something special and rare taking place in Wrigley Field.
To this day, the exploits of whoever wears the Cubs uniform are as important to me as those of all the astronauts, all the authors, all the politicians, all the rock stars, and 99 percent of all my relatives put together. Probably more so. And I have Ma and her breadmaking to thank for it.
Damn it.
