By Matt Veto, mveto@qconline.com
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Choke.
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Have you come to grips with that word yet? Because there is no other way to describe the Chicago Cubs showing in the NLDS.
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The Dodgers are good — probably better than expected. But I have an awfully hard time believing that they were that much better than the Cubs. The Dodgers outscored the Cubs 20-6. Alfonso Soriano, Aramis Ramirez and Kosuke Fukudome — millions of dollars worth of talent — combined to go 4-for-35.
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It’s the kind of showing that makes “next year” really hard to swallow, and it makes it seem really far away.
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Last season, right around this time of year, under pretty much exactly the same circumstances, I wrote on the VetoPower blog that “next year” had a truly real feel to it this time. The Cubs were back in 2008 with more experience and even better talent.
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Adding to it, they brought in a top-notch pitcher (Rich Harden) and reclaimed another (Ryan Dempster). We knew that Derrek Lee and Ramirez were coming back and Ryan Theriot was improving. We didn’t know just how good Geovany Soto was going to be, but all signs pointed to a successful Cubs season.
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And it was.
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But it doesn’t feel like it.
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Some said that anything short of a Cubs World Series win would be a failure. Considering just how hard it is to win a World Series, and for that matter, get to the World Series, I don’t quite buy into that logic.
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I will say that the Cubs certainly let a lot of people down. I realize now why my father, a Cubs fan, has taken only cautious interest in the team since the early 1980s. Growing up, I always wondered how he could possible do anything other than plant himself in front of the T.V. when the game was on.
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“They’ll break your heart every time,” he’d tell my brothers and me.
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Ah, but he was just a pessimist, right?
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Turns out he has simply had more time to build up the scar tissue that a Cubs fan must endure.
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The scars from this season will toughen me. The scars from 2003 still haunt me.
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On one hand I feel privileged to have lived through six Cubs playoff appearances. On the other hand I feel saddened by the thought that thousands families across the nation were holding onto hope that this would be the year the Cubs would win for their “biggest Cubs fans,” an aging father or grandfather — mother or grandmother — someone who for 70, 80 or 90 years has squeezed every last drop of hope out of this team.
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Chicago Cubs baseball is a binding tradition. It’s family.
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We are drawn together by that hope, and have certainly not been spoiled by victory.
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This week, perfect strangers wearing Cubs hats and shirts will spot each other in crowds and give a subtle nod of understanding as they make their way to work on buses and L-trains, on sidewalks and street corners.
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We understand and share pain, and have adapted to it coping with it. If any true fan knows how to handle defeat, it’s a Cubs fan. And, in some ways, that’s a noble quality to have.
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But 101 years of pain? When does it become considered torture?
