Literary Criticism: Cubs Nation

If I didn’t already have a headache this morning when I started reading the last 40 pages of Cubs Nation by Gene Wojciechowski, I would have gotten one soon enough. It’s Wojciechowski’s game by game account of the 2004 season, and it’s well written. We all just wish there would have been a different ending. It was painful to relive those blown games and sideshow theatrics. We’d just as soon forget losing 4 out 5 down the stretch in September, and Sosa skipping out early, and the fallout of Steve Stone & Chip Caray.



My argument concerning the book, however, is that in the end Wojciechowski could have done something to alleviate some of that pain by answering a simple question: Why bother? Why spend so much time following this team? Was it worth it?

He takes it as a given that the Cubs story is worth it for its own sake. I happen to agree, as much with my heart as my head, but still in both, even in 2004. It’s just that the book ends so abruptly that I’m left wondering how the season changed him, and whether it was worth it for him as a writer and a man, not just as a fan, to spend an entire season living near Wrigley Field and literally living among the Cubs.

Why no final chapter? He never gives us enough of his own narrative. I can understand the sportswriter or journalist in him not wanting to become the story, but it’s what the story he’s telling wants. Baseball is at its most powerful when you remember – or imagine – how a moment in a game was for someone who was there, or watching it from afar. “I was there that night that...” or “I remember the game where... I was watching it with your uncle at...” – these are the stories that immerse us in baseball more deeply, because after all, baseball is a storyteller’s sport. Hearing about Mazeroski’s homerun is only half as interesting as hearing about how Mazeroski’s homerun was for my father when he was in college. Despite creating some of that intimacy with the reader, Wojciechowski never goes that final step to tell us how those moments were for him.

The funny thing about this book is that it’s the non-initiates to Cubs Nation who ought to read it, to learn about all the different methods and levels to which we connect to our team. But inevitably it’s the initiates who are the ones to read it. It works for us: we get an inside look at some of the behind the scenes things from which we’re otherwise excluded – things like the guy parking players cars, or the scouts, and all across the board. It’s not those parts that drive the book, however. It’s the stories, unlike our own and yet like our own, stories of fans like us that inspire camaraderie. Those are the stories that would work to help the non-initiates understand a little bit about how this Cub Fan thing works. Baseball, to Cub fans, is personal.

This is a good insider’s look at the season, but the best moments are outsider moments. For example, the heart wrenching details of the kid who got shot outside the Cubby Bear while trying to break up a road rage fight. Or the remembering of Mike Royko. That’s when the pages fly past.

In fact, Wojciechowski would have done well to take a lesson from Royko’s brilliant column about Jackie Robinson’s first game in Wrigley Field. (Scroll halfway down; it’s the second column of 3, and believe me that it’s worth reading the whole thing.)

Here’s how that column begins:

All that Saturday, the wise men of the neighborhood, who sat in chairs on the sidewalk outside the tavern, had talked about what it would do to baseball.

     I hung around and listened because baseball was about the most important thing in the world, and if anything was going to ruin it, I was worried.

     Most of the things they said, I didn't understand, although it all sounded terrible. But could one man bring such ruin?

     They said he could and would. And the next day he was going to be in Wrigley Field for the first time, on the same diamond as Hack, Nicholson, Cavarretta, Schmitz, Pafko, and all my other idols.

     I had to see Jackie Robinson, the man who was going to somehow wreck everything. So the next day, another kid and I started walking to the ballpark early.

     We always walked to save the streetcar fare. It was five or six miles, but I felt about baseball the way Abe Lincoln felt about education.

Cubs Nation is a series of brief columns, some just a couple hundred words, some nearly a thousand. Each game, Wojciechowski chooses one element of Cubs Nation to explore, from the sportsbook manager out in Vegas who takes Cub fan wagers every year to Jim Hendry himself. Of course, getting the mix is what Wojciechowski wanted to do, and with insider access to the clubhouse and so forth I can understand why he tended that direction more than the other, focusing on players and behind the scenes workers, rather than whoever it was who might have sat in seat 7 one game, down past first base.

The problem for me is that I don’t want insider reports for the most part. I think we get too much of that stuff. Sure, it’s kind of cool that we find out which guys sit around and brood after a loss and which guys hit the buffet table, but the paradox is that the closer view we get, the farther we are from the players. Those guys traverse a different world than ours, and it’s not entirely healthy for us to spend so much time looking at theirs rather than living in ours. Note that I say too much time; sometimes it’s worthwhile looking in, like when we read about how Ron Santo really takes every loss home with him as he leaves the park, virtually bleeding. And it’s great that the unsung workers get their due for working their jobs with nobility and skill and pride. But, that doesn’t drive the story.

I started out keeping notes of my observations, but I stopped because this isn’t the sort of book where something you notice early on will provide a clue to interpreting the story later. There are some common elements, like how everyone notices how the tenor of the culture changed after 2003, with high expectations. But before too long I stopped because there just wasn't much that stood out after a while.

A minor criticism is that Wojciechowski tends towards to overuse the similes and metaphors, at least to my taste. Ernie Banks “could make a Buckingham Palace guard smile.” Paul Rathje’s relic computer is “bigger than a set of Samonsite luggage.” “Right field at Wrigley is like Cindy Crawford’s birthmark; you won’t find it anywhere else.” The cash registers at the Billy Goat tavern “are straight out of It’s a Wonderful Life.” Stylistically, Wojciechowski drops an awful lot of lines like those, letting everything become clear by comparison rather than description. Sometimes it works, but after a while it gets to be too much flair and fluff. At times I was begging for him to set the scene more fully.

But driving the whole thing, of course, are the games, and for those of us who watched nearly every inning of 2004, stirring up those memories was less than pleasant. Injuries and more injuries; blown saves; Sosa’s bombastic attitude; whining; and in the end, losses in games that they ought to have won – these are the moments Wojciechowski had to work with. It was a disheartening season, and knowing that there are 162 wide-ranging hearts all suffering together hardly softens the wound.

In the end, this is not a book I’ll read over. That’s sort of my measure: the books I really love, the ones that become a part of me, I always return to every few years. This will not join them. It was worth reading – once – because there are some great individual stories and some clever quips, and because after all it’s about Cubs baseball. And a few passages do stand out. Maybe I’ll read it again one day when I’m older and want to remember what it was to be 23 and living in Chicago during the 2004 season. Even then, though, I’ll be filling in the gaps on my own with my personal memories. If Wojciechowski had given us a final chapter filling in those gaps as it was for him, maybe then he’d have really had a story worth telling even if the season itself was disappointing. I have no doubt that the story is there; I just wish he would have shared it with us.