How it Looks in the Mind's Eye

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

--A. Barlett Giamatti, former President of both Yale and the National League. This is the first paragraph of his 1977 essay The Green Fields of the Mind, recalling the Red Sox collapse of 1975.

* * *It happened again after the Cubs took a slim lead: as I watched Rich Harden pitch, I was not thinking about whether the Cubs would win the game; I was thinking about whether they will win the World Series. I can’t be the only one, right? We’ve reached that point now, haven’t we, where every game feels bigger than one game, at least at some point during the contest, as our mind drifts, searching for signals and signs, omens foreshadowing the future of our team, the 2008 Chicago Cubs?

Maybe it’s just me, anyway, but I can’t help myself. I can’t stay in the present. (continue...)

Friday Afternoon Meanderings

I haven't been able to watch the games this week. Today, though, I'm taking a break to watch the game and let my mind wander through everything Cubs. Here, then, is a collection of mid-April meanderings jotted as I watch.

Editor's Note: If you watch the games on DVR or something, and you subscribe to Agony & Ivy's RSS or Atom feed, don't read any more until later! There's spoilers.

On the offensive t-shirts
So, has everyone heard about the t-shirts being sold outside Wrigley Field by now? (continue...)

An Unprecedented New Yorker Cover

My jaw literally dropped when I picked up my weekend mail this evening, and saw the cover of the latest issue of the New Yorker. The title is "Lost and Found" by Mark Ulriksen. Here's the image (with its source pulling the image directly from the "About Us" page of the New Yorker website for this issue):
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Already Familiar

We're four games in, and this season already feels familiar because the Cubs are suffering from the same problems they've been fighting for the last several years. Too many at-bats have featured batters not working counts--let alone taking walks-- and guys are swinging on pitcher's pitches. As for the pitchers and defense, the Cubs have made some crucial errors, and have given up some crucial walks and hit batsmen. Toss in a few questionable managerial decisions and what we've got are a couple of games in which the Cubs were not only outplayed, but did not do the little things well enough to give themselves the best chance to win.

As a result, the Cubs have lost two winnable games, and have now taken the first lead in the race to the bottom at 1-3 instead of 3-1, or 2-2.

Too early to get concerned? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that there are 158 more games and the Cubs best players have not yet come close to hitting their stride. But no, in the sense that these are the things they should have been working on all spring because they've plagued the Cubs for seasons now. (continue...)

Our Year

The crowd was vocal. Because the subject here was baseball and the stadium was full of scholars—and historians—and soon enough I found myself engaged in learned debate with all these ... strangers, these ... guys.

--Mason Marzac in Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out,” Act Two.
* * *
Saturday night around eleven o’clock I went to one of my stacks of books and pulled out my copy of “Take Me Out,” a play by Richard Greenberg. I bought the script about a year ago after the Zach Scott Theater here in Austin performed it. I thought the play was not only excellent but of exceptional literary quality, so I ordered a copy from Amazon or somewhere to add to my library, where baseball literature does its best to counterbalance the stuffier law books that look as heavy as they are. (continue...)

On The Naming Rights to Wrigley Field

If the question is whether the owner of Wrigley Field should sell its naming rights to a sponsor, there is no correct answer.

However, approaching it from any given perspective, it feels like there is a correct answer—sometimes yes, sometimes no, and sometimes the answer feels very strong. Unless we have some form of analysis to identify the proper perspective—and we don’t, besides each person choosing her own—this means we’re asking the wrong question.

The right question is much deeper. It encompasses the inherent tension between baseball as business and baseball as sport, as pastime, as tradition. It encompasses the tension between our past and our present, our legacy and our policy. It encompasses the tensions in our country’s changing culture, especially regarding technology, media, and advertising. (continue...)