Enough about the Mets for a moment. What Chicago needs now, with the Cubs having added to their historic run of baseball failure, is someone whose allegiance to the team—and whose sense of humor—is not diminished by grinding, recurrent baseball disappointment.
Steve Goodman died in 1984 of leukemia, only 36 years old. But, before he went, among the splendid songs he wrote was “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.” It is a roguishly heartfelt ditty, not so much crying-in-his-beer hopelessness as an expression of lasting affection.
Do they still play the blues in Chicago when baseball season rolls around? Goodman sang. When the snow melts away, do the Cubbies still play, in their Ivy-covered burial ground?
It was Chicago native Nelson Algren, a prominent literary figure of the 1940s and 50s, who said, “Before you earn the right to rap any sort of joint, you have to love it a little bit.” Of his beloved Cubs, Goodman had license to sing, from a rooftop overlooking Wrigley Field, of “the home of the brave, the land of the free, and the doormat of the National League.”
For outsiders, celebrating Mets fans among them, it is entirely too easy to mock the Cubs who, for five score and seven years, have gone without a championship—squirming in public in what could be spelled “wriggley” field. Carl Sandburg’s description of his hometown, “the city of the big shoulders,” calls to mind a symbolic Cub-at-the-bat, appropriately proportioned with a broad, ample resting place for his Louisville Slugger while watching another imminently hittable pitch go by.
One is tempted to think of Cubs hitters as somehow lacking courage. Chicken in the car and the car won’t go, that’s how you spell….
Their last National League pennant was in 1945–and only then while most of Major League Baseball’s best players were off fighting in World War II. Their past is freighted with curses and omens, and such meatheaded experiments as the College of Coaches, an eight-man committee mandated by owner P.K. Wrigley that functioned (sort of) in place of a manager from 1961 into the 1965 season, a span when the Cubs never finished higher than seventh in the league.
The only lesson there, a form of double-play combination for Old Man Wrigley: He who Tinkers with a franchise for Ever hasn’t a Chance.
So here was singer/songwriter Goodman, a man with whom Mets fans—who have endured their own lengthy diamond travails—should be able to identify. Author of “City of New Orleans,” a 1970s hit covered by Arlo Guthrie, Goodman grew up a Cub devotee in suburban Park Ridge, Ill., where he was a Maine East High School classmate of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Clinton, it happens, is among the members of the Emil Verban Memorial Society, which is nothing more than a collection of roughly 200 loyal Cubs fans, their organization named for a plodding Cubs player who hit (if “hit” is the right word) .095 in 1950.
President Ronald Reagan, an Illinois native who briefly did radio play-by-play for Cubs games in his salad days, was part of the Verban Society, along with TV personalities Bryant Gumbel and Bruce Morton, golfer Ray Floyd, actor Tom Bosley and conservative columnist George Will.
Plus, of course, the club included Goodman, who also wrote a strangely optimistic anthem, “Go, Cubs, Go,” with the refrain, “The Cubs are gonna win today.” It has been reported that Goodman only created that song out of spite, after the team’s general manager in the early 1980s, Dallas Green, proclaimed “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request” too depressing.
It is only depressing to know that Goodman died so young, sad to know he won’t be giving us more sly lyrics like these, in which he lamented how the Cubs…
made me a criminal, that’s what they did; they stole my youth from me. I’d forsake my teachers to sit in the bleachers in flagrant truancy. One thing led to another, and soon I discovered alcohol, gambling, dope. Football. Hockey. And lacrosse.
But what do you expect when you raise a young boy’s hopes and just crush ‘em like so many paper beer cups? Year after year after year. After year after year after year after year after year…..
Before we are surrounded by the noisy passion of Mets fans during the upcoming World Series, then, listen to this: