IT WAS a blow softened only by the fact that so many had come before: In the eighth inning of the sixth game of the National League Championship Series, a fan deflected a foul ball from the glove of Chicago Cubs outfielder Moises Alou, denying his team the second out of the inning. What followed was a depressingly familiar chain of events that finally relieved the Cubs of their World Series aspirations -- a walk, a wild pitch and an awful error helped the Florida Marlins to an eight-run inning and an 8-3 victory. On Wednesday, the Marlins won the decisive seventh game, and the Cubs were left, yet again, to wait until next year.
In order to understand the Cubs' collapse last week, it is necessary to understand the peculiar psychology of Cubs fans and to ask why the most benighted team in history looks so often to history for its salvation.
To walk through Wrigley Field on game day is to be met by generations of Cubs fans, bound together by decades of dashed hopes. Between pitches on Wednesday, the television cameras sought out the oldest of these fans, as if to highlight their disappointment. But their faces were marked less by anguish than by calm resignation, for Cubs fans are martyrs to destiny. The historical charm of the Cubs and their ballpark leads fans to believe that fate smiles upon their team, even as it deals them decades of cruel blows. And the Cubs' penchant for near misses and luckless losses convinces them that victory is always in the offing, held just out of reach by some higher power that will soon reward their loyalty with a World Series championship. Each lost chance means still greater miracles to come and so, every April, Cubs fans deliver themselves Job-like into the hands of a fate that scorns them.
This season, the Cubs seemed poised to break free of destiny and take fate into their own hands. Under the leadership of their new manager, Dusty Baker, the Cubs acquired a stable of talented players and an activist mindset that seemed conducive to the defiance of destiny. Speaking to the Chicago Sun-Times before Tuesday's game, Baker refuted the notion that fate, and specifically the Billy Goat curse of 1945, lies behind the Cubs' misfortune.
"I was watching a game the other night and in between innings, this goat kept running across the screen," Baker said of the goat graphic employed by Fox Sports to promote the series. "I thought that was the craziest thing I had seen in my life. Or is this curse of the goat stronger than the curse of the Babe? That's crazy. Pay no attention to it, or laugh at it. That's the two choices you've got."
And until that tragic eighth inning, the Cubs did indeed laugh off their demons. Avoiding their usual end-of-summer meltdown, the Cubs won 19 games in September, beating out the Houston Astros in a race for the Central Division championship. And in the first week of October, the Cubs won their first postseason series since 1908, defeating the Atlanta Braves in the five game divisional series. Fans, too, took part in the Cubs' newfound agency, trading hopes and prayers for a sense of self-confidence previously unknown to the friendly confines.
But years of tragic losses have left the Cubs mental prisoners of fate, and it took but a single inning's misfortune to shatter their feelings of empowerment. The Cubs' eighth inning collapse revived the talk of curses that had lain dormant throughout the season and sent the team and its fans scurrying back into the arms of destiny. In advance of Wednesday's Game 7, a group of Cubs fans performed an elaborate ritual designed to reverse the curse of the Billy Goat. The Cubs' first and second basemen shaved the goatees they had worn all season, in a superstitious departure from the cursed past. Gone from the stands were banners reading "In Dusty We Trusty," replaced by the new slogan, "It's Dustiny."
But destiny has crowned the Cubs only with infamy, and whatever magic there is at Wrigley Field works only against its occupants. Such is the sad state of the team and the central paradox of its fans: Despised by fate, the Cubs cannot win except by their skill alone, yet every setback brings new appeals to providence. Through some misguided sense of cosmic justice, the Cubs believe that a general history of bad luck entitles them to good luck in any particular outing and so the team and its fans give themselves up to destiny again and again, without reflection or hesitation. If the Cubs are truly desirous of success, they should renounce destiny, instead of claiming a special place in a supernatural order that conspires only to foil their ambitions.
For one brilliant month, the Cubs did just that, forsaking chance and entrusting the season to their abilities alone. But such is the nature of the team and its fans that a poor inning in an important game could not be but a bump on the road to victory. It was, instead, the critical moment when a team, a crowd and a city on the brink of glory made the foolish decision to admit destiny back into their affairs.
(Alec Solotorovsky is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at asolotorovsky@cavalierdaily.com.)
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