October surprise
Cardinals and Cubs. In the playoffs. The same year. That has never happened before, let alone a head-to-head series between the two. And yet, we have it all starting tomorrow. The winner doesn’t advance to the World Series. That’s the only way it could be better. But maybe next year, right? Because the Cubs are only going to get better, we’re told, because of their many young stars. (Statistically, the Cardinals are actually younger.)You know, I don’t want to call Cubs fans dumb, and there is no other historical precedent for this one way or the other, but they have to be the only fan base that could be deprived of a World Championship for more than a century and yet still be persuaded by the team that the team is succeeding one year ahead of schedule.
Cardinals/Cubs is a fantastically-unique rivalry-- in the dynamics of its lopsidedness. Yankees/Red Sox is so blatantly a big brother/little brother relationship. New York is the great big city and its Yankees have their 27 World Series titles to contrast the Red Sox’ infamous 86-year drought. But now that the Red Sox have ended the drought with three World Titles in a decade, you would think it would be more exciting, but George Steinbrenner is dead, the Red Sox stink, and we're all bored of it.
Chicago is more than triple the population of St. Louis. Makes them the big brother, right? But wow, what a doormat baseball team the Cubs have been. The big brother, in this case, might try to bully, but he's so unsuccessful in life. A raging alcoholic, maybe. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how difficult it is to go 107 years without a championship in Major League Baseball. For roughly half of those years, there were only 16 franchises. Throughout, the Cubs have also had almost every financial resource available to them at a given time-- large city, unique ballpark that’s also a cash cow, national television reach. Considering, I think the loyalty of the fan base gets overstated. The Cubs haven’t always boasted the attendance they’ve enjoyed for most of the last three decades. The 1908 champion Cubs outdrew the Cubs teams of the early ‘60s. The team didn't draw a million fans at Wrigley Field in any season from 1953 through 1967. Last year they averaged only 32,000 fans a game in the smallest stadium in the league, but one that holds 40,000. The Cardinals haven't averaged so few since 1997, and did I mention the population difference?
It’s all a strange feeling for Cardinals fans, especially here in the hinterlands of the fan base. A trip to the National League Divisional Series is familiar enough-- 12 times in the last 16 years, thank you-- but this year we have Cubs fans as an added audience. Weird. More so, I’m sure, for their side. They normally think of this as football season. That’s also why I’m convinced that Cubs fans don’t really “suffer.” Suffering is getting close and losing, not switching your interest to football on Labor Day weekend. Any time I hear somebody in the Midwest refer to this time of year reflexively as football season, I know I’m talking to somebody that's not necessarily a Cubs fan, but conditioned by the fact that the two baseball teams housed in the Midwest’s largest city never make the playoffs. Putting aside then even the well-played narrative of “the Curse,” it’s good for baseball anytime the Cubs are in the playoffs.
Also in this topsy-turvy world, if they win the long-awaited crown this year, they’ll make history in a second way by becoming the first third place team to do it. Sorry about those Pirates.
posted by CM @ 6:41 AM
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