The baseball season is a long, smooth-flowing river. That’s its great beauty and also its inherent advantage over other sports. There’s little doubt the teams that have risen to the top by the end of the regular season deserve to be there; the teams have all been tested over a great distance, and their ups and downs have evened out.
The Cubs and Cards played a set of home-and-home series the last two weekends, and the games were marked by high tension and feverish fan involvement. The players and managers seemed to take the games extraseriously, as tempers flared toward the end last weekend in Saint Louis. I caught the middle game at Wrigley Field the previous Saturday afternoon, and just walking to the ballpark one could feel a heightened expectation. It was reflected in the stands by the patches of red–worn of course by Cardinals rooters–that broke up the field of blue shirts and jackets favored by Cubs fans on a chilly afternoon, the wind blowing straight in off the lake. Saint Louis leadoff man Fernando Vina, an infamous Cubs killer who’s a Punch-and-Judy hitter against the rest of the league but slugs like Babe Ruth against Chicago, was booed right away for his grand-slam homer that had tipped the previous day’s 6-3 game to the Cards, though the Cubs’ Carlos Zambrano had otherwise outpitched Saint Louis ace Matt Morris. Yet when Scott Rolen homered to right on a 1-0 Kerry Wood fastball in the second, the Saint Louis fans cheered, and it took a moment for the stunned Cubs fans to remember there were enemies among them and begin booing vociferously.
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With Cubby blue now spoiling the monochrome red of the Cardinals fans at Busch Stadium, the Cards brought the Cubs back to earth. Chicago starter Matt Clement didn’t have it–maybe it’s time for him to grow back that Old Man of the Hills chin beard–and trailed Williams 5-4 in the middle innings. That’s when Clement opened the gates by throwing away a Williams bunt. A run came home on the error, and Vina, of course, slapped a run-scoring single to center to make it 7-4, which is how the game ended.
But they quickly settled back into the doldrums, losing consecutive home-and-home series to the Oakland Athletics and the Seattle Mariners. The Sox beat up on the lowly Baltimore Orioles last week, but when they traveled to Minnesota they again needed a good showing against their main rivals to save Manuel’s job.
Throughout the series, the Sox looked morose in the dugout: Ordonez befuddled, Wunsch with his head in his hands, Konerko just shaking his head in disbelief, Manuel stoic as ever. I was actually watching the Saturday game with the mute on and Lucinda Williams’s World Without Tears playing when the song called “Minneapolis” came on. It’s a breakup song–“I’ve been wasted, angry and sad / Since you left Minneapolis”–and it came off as a dirge for Manuel. Losing can cost a manager his job, and being swept by an archrival will sway even the most reluctant general manager. When the title song came on, a tune about enduring pain and anguish, I thought of a new set of lyrics: If we lived in a world without tears, who would root for the Cubs or the Sox?
