Maybe Tomorrow
What my dad taught me about winning (and waiting)
It was seven years ago tonight, game two of the World Series. The Chicago Cubs defeated the Cleveland Indians, tying the series 1-1.
It was the first time the Cubs had won a World Series game since 1945. Their last Series win was in 1908.
Imagine that: The last time the Cubs were World Series champs, cars were still called horseless carriages. Adolf Hitler still thought he’d become a painter. There was no such thing as penicillin. If you got polio, you were kind of screwed. A 13-year-old Babe Ruth had only recently gotten pubic hair.
I was there that night, in Cleveland’s Progressive Field. I watched the whole thing unfold right in front of me, close enough to the field to get baptized by Kyle Schwarber sweat (which we called Schweat). And somehow, miraculously, I didn’t spend the entire game crying my eyes out.
It was rare restraint for me. I’d been crying, or at least welling up, after even the most routine plays during the 2016 postseason. If the Cubs so much as drew a walk, it was like I was drunk-watching Field of Dreams at 2 a.m.
I wasn’t weepy because I love baseball that much. (I do.) I cried because my dad didn’t live long enough to see his beloved team finally win a World Series.
I’m not the only one. Across Chicago, it was a tsunami of happy tears. I’d watched several postseason games in bars around the city, and it invariably ended with cry-fiving strangers.
Cry-fiving, a word I’ve just invented, is an amalgam of the classic sports victory high-five and uncontrollable weeping caused by realizing your feelings about baseball are wrapped up in your very complicated relationship with your dad.
But the tears didn’t come. Something had changed. It was probably because I was too focused on Charlie, my (then) 5-year-old son, who had jumped onto his seat and started howling with maniacal glee the moment he heard the crack of wood hitting cowhide.
“Cubs win! Cubs win!” he shouted.
Okay, so he hadn’t grasped the subtleties of the game yet. But he knew that the Cubs, our team, had more points on the scoreboard, and they were doing more running on the field than the “bad guy” team, and that was enough to get him excited.
My first Cubs game was in the spring of 1977, when I was just 8 years old.
Our entire family took a six-hour road trip, in a turd-brown Chevy Caprice station wagon, from our small, isolated Michigan town to the frightening, crime-infested metropolis of Chicago, solely to see a game at Wrigley Field.
Our excitement was short-lived. We watched the Cubs lose and lose hard to the Cardinals. The final score was 21–3. It was an amazing game in that the Cubs were amazingly bad. On a scale of formidable competitors, they were somewhere between the Washington Generals and Paris in 1940.
After the carnage, as we wandered out of Wrigley and back to our car, Mark and I grumbled about the baseball steamrolling we’d just witnessed. But Dad was beaming.
“We’ll get ‘em tomorrow,” he said.
A few years later, we moved to the suburbs of Chicago, and the Cubs became my dad’s favorite team. We went to Wrigley Field so often, the hot dog vendors knew him by first name.
He knew where the secret (free) street parking was. By the time I was 15, I’d watched the Cubs play, and usually lose, from every possible vantage at Wrigley.
My dad didn’t have the best stress-coping skills in life. But when he was sitting in Wrigley, nursing a beer and watching his beloved Cubs get spanked into submission yet again, he had the peaceful expression of a Buddhist monk.
“Maybe tomorrow,” he’d say with a shrug every time the Cubs lost.
Mark and I rebelled. Rooting for the Cubs in Chicago during the ’80s and ’90s didn’t make sense, especially with teams like the Bulls and the Bears giving us geographical self-esteem. I came around in my 30s. I realized what my dad saw in the Cubs. If you’ve been a fan of this team for long enough, you reach a certain Zen understanding about failure. You realize it’s enough just to sit in the bleachers on a warm summer day, drinking $10 beer and enjoying the slow-paced, predictable rhythms of a baseball game.
I used to mock my dad when he said things like, “Maybe tomorrow.” But then I became an adult, and I went to Wrigley Field every weekend in the summer and repeated those same words, as comforting as the Lord’s Prayer.
“Maybe tomorrow.” Probably not, but maybe.
And then tomorrow came.
I somehow talked my way into tickets to the World Series in 2016. And I was insistent that Charlie come along. He’d been to a few Cubs games before, but he was far too young to care about anything beyond the snacks. Now he was five, and more intrigued by what was happening on the field.
The gravitas of this moment was not lost on me. His first real baseball memory could be the Chicago Cubs at the World Series. He wouldn’t remember a world when the Cubs didn’t at least have a chance. It gave me goosebumps.
“You smell like poop,” my son shrieked, as a batter for the other team struck out.
“Excuse me?” I asked, glaring at him.
“Relax, Daddy. It’s a gaaame.”
We were surrounded by Indians fans who were, for the most part, kind. They complimented Charlie on his hand-drawn “Cubs Destroy You” banner. One of them even taught him the correct way to trash-talk.
“Always say ‘That’s bullshit’ if your batter strikes out,” a guy in full Indians regalia told my son.
“That’s bullshit,” my son barked, relishing how this word made his dad’s shoulders tighten.
Somewhere around the top of the sixth inning, it was looking grim for the Indians. They were down 0-5, and the home team fans weren’t as delighted anymore by my son’s antics.
But Charlie was oblivious to the growing tension. He climbed onto his seat to hurl more taunts at the field.
“You’re my butt!” he shouted to nobody in particular.
A few rows behind us, a thoroughly soused and red-faced Indians fan started throwing Cracker Jacks at Charlie. “Sit down, little Cub,” he slur-shouted.
Charlie was stunned. Among his many “firsts” that night, it was his first assault by a disgruntled baseball rival.
Charlie said nothing. I don’t think he knew how to respond. I wanted to unleash a string of expletives towards the intoxicated sore loser. But I bit my lip and waited to see what my son would do.
Charlie looked at the sea of sour faces. Nobody smiled back at him this time. They were scowling, their hands deep in jacket pockets, waiting for this nightmare to be over.
Charlie reached for his box of Swedish Fish, pulled out a handful, and offered one to the guy behind us who’d taught him the word bullshit.
“Here,” he said, waving the red candy in front of the man’s face until he noticed it. “Take one. They’re yummy.”
The man waved him away, but Charlie was persistent.
“Thanks, little guy,” he said, taking the mangled gummy and shoving it into his mouth.
Charlie patted him on the arm and said, “It’s okay. Maybe they’ll be better tomorrow.”
That’s when I started crying.
Want to make me weep over a baseball game? Show me a kid who’s never known a Cubs losing streak, echoing a grandfather who never stopped believing in the losingest team in baseball, reminding a frustrated fan of the other team what it means to be hopeful.
I think my dad would be proud. Confused, too. Very, very confused. “The Cubs did what now?” But proud nonetheless.