"I felt the worst for the little kids, their eyes filled with innocent wonder as they waited happily in line for autographs and photo ops with their favorite players. You wanted to pull them aside and gently explain that there are less painful hobbies than following the Cubs, such as plunging knitting needles into your inner ear canal."
-ESPN columnist Gene Wojciechowski
February is a wasteland. College and NFL football are over, March Madness hasn't begun, the opening of the baseball season is two long cold months away. All is not dark and dreary, there are small points of life, the beginning of the college baseball season in which the Hogs have been ranked in pre-season polls as high as #8 in the country. There's also college basketball, but for Hog fans this seems to be more a study in the inability to maintain consistency than an enjoyable sporting event.
What stated this post was the article from which the above quote originates. I love baseball, every tiny intricacy of it is fascinating and exciting to me. I have learned to recognize that a triple is infinitely more exciting than a home run, that a 3-2 count sets off an infinite number of reactions that a 1-2 count never can. I love how a baseball field looks at night when lit up so the green surface and crisp white lines juxtapose with the fathomless darkness beyond the lights. This being said, baseball season is agonizing.
Cubs fans are the butt of jokes, the perpetual underdogs, the luckless losers from the Friendly Confines. Next year will mark 100 years without a World Series win. We, as Cubs fans, set ourselves up every year for what seems to be an inevitable fall. Oh, we tell ourselves "this year will be different" or "if Boston could do it maybe it's our turn" and by the All-Star break we're counting down the days until the football season starts.
Why do we do this to ourselves, you ask. I really don't know. I try to hold myself back, to keep from being swept up in the surges of optimism that accompany every off-season trade. I tell myself, "I'll get excited in June if they've earned my excitement" but in reality the long days of cold and dreary February work their way into my head every year. This morning, driving to work in freezing rain before the sun began to even consider rising I felt the beginnings of it. The little pang of longing for symmetrically placed perfectly white bases and knee socks. Slowly over the next month my stoic "wait and see" attitude with turn to cautious optimism. In March I'll be caught up in the excitement of the NCAA basketball playoffs and the caution will begin to waver. By April I'll be sitting at the edge of my seat, chewing my fingernails muttering the Cubs fan mantra...
This is the year.
This is the year.
This is the year....
What stated this post was the article from which the above quote originates. I love baseball, every tiny intricacy of it is fascinating and exciting to me. I have learned to recognize that a triple is infinitely more exciting than a home run, that a 3-2 count sets off an infinite number of reactions that a 1-2 count never can. I love how a baseball field looks at night when lit up so the green surface and crisp white lines juxtapose with the fathomless darkness beyond the lights. This being said, baseball season is agonizing.
Cubs fans are the butt of jokes, the perpetual underdogs, the luckless losers from the Friendly Confines. Next year will mark 100 years without a World Series win. We, as Cubs fans, set ourselves up every year for what seems to be an inevitable fall. Oh, we tell ourselves "this year will be different" or "if Boston could do it maybe it's our turn" and by the All-Star break we're counting down the days until the football season starts.
Why do we do this to ourselves, you ask. I really don't know. I try to hold myself back, to keep from being swept up in the surges of optimism that accompany every off-season trade. I tell myself, "I'll get excited in June if they've earned my excitement" but in reality the long days of cold and dreary February work their way into my head every year. This morning, driving to work in freezing rain before the sun began to even consider rising I felt the beginnings of it. The little pang of longing for symmetrically placed perfectly white bases and knee socks. Slowly over the next month my stoic "wait and see" attitude with turn to cautious optimism. In March I'll be caught up in the excitement of the NCAA basketball playoffs and the caution will begin to waver. By April I'll be sitting at the edge of my seat, chewing my fingernails muttering the Cubs fan mantra...
This is the year.
This is the year.
This is the year....
1 comment:
The Cubbies to me? ....
Mark Grace.
Good luck this season ...
you're gonna need it. ;)
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