The End is....Near?

Spring training is over. The real baseball season started this week. As a suburban New Yorker transplanted to suburban Chicago, I've remained a dispassionate observer of local sports teams for a good many years now. (Well, O.K., I do admit to getting excited about the Blackhawks...) When the White Sox won the World Series in 2005, I watched the playoffs and the series with a somewhat indifferent attitude. Oh, that's nice, I thought. Chicago fans get to have a championship team for a change. That other Chicago team, the perennial “Wait until next year” Cubs, have had six postseason appearances since I've lived in Illinois (and I've been here a long time...), two of which had them within reach of a National League pennant before they snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory. The last World Series win for the Chicago Cubs? The year was 1908, 108 years ago. The last pennant win for the Cubs got them an appearance in the 1945 World Series where they came oh so close before the Detroit Tigers took the series four games to three. That's 71 years for a pennant drought.

It was during the infamous NLCS Bartman series of 2003 I first became aware of the disastrous fate that awaits the world if the Chicago Cubs should win the pennant. Not the World Series, mind you, just the National League pennant. During that NLCS series I read a newspaper article about a play being performed by a small theater group in downtown Chicago. The play was based on a short story written by mystical baseball writer W. P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe Comes to Iowa, the short story the movie Field of Dreams was based on (“Build it and he will come...”). The theater group had taken another of Kinsella's short stories, The Last Pennant Before Armageddon, and turned it into a play.  The title was both ominous and intriguing, so intriguing I tracked the story down on interlibrary loan and checked it out for myself.*

The Last Pennant Before Armageddon tells the story of Al Tiller, a fictitious aging manager of the Chicago Cubs who has a dream in which desperate Cubs fans sit before a classic Old Testament depiction of God, pleading on behalf of their team:

“Please, God, we'd like you to arrange for the Chicago Cubs to win the pennant this year.”

Night after night, Al has a variation of this dream, peopled by different fans – men, women, both unknown and famous Chicagoans. ** God listens silently in the first five dreams, finally addressing the petitioners in the sixth dream:

“I appreciate your interest,” God said. “I want to assure you that I hold the Chicago Cubs in highest esteem. I have listened to your entreaties and considered the matter carefully from all angles. I am aware of how long it has been since the Cubs have won a pennant. I think you should know that when the Cubs next win the National League Championship it will be the last pennant before Armageddon...”

The biblical significance of this pronouncement is not lost on Al Tiller, and he spends the rest of this nineteen page story anxiously pondering the potential consequences of his decision-making as Cubs manager, his personal code of honour and the place of God's sovereignty in the midst of baseball and world affairs. The story ends in the bottom of the ninth inning of the final game of the National League Championship, the score tied 2-2, with Al's pitcher starting to fade and the radio in the dugout broadcasting the quickly escalating conflict in the Indian Ocean as the United States and the Soviet Union prepare to go to war over Sri Lanka...

***

Cubs fans have high hopes for their team this year, even higher than their usual optimistic early season pipe dreams. The 2015 season was a very good season, and expectations are that 2016 will be even better, maybe the best in 71 years...or 108 years. Now, I don't really believe that if the end is near for the Cubs pennant drought, the end is near for the rest of us as well. I believe God loves and esteems Cubs players, their management and their fans as His individual creations, but I don't really believe He esteems one team over another. (If He did, He'd probably be a Mets fan...) And as bad as Kim Jong Un, ISIS, global warming, GMOs, and the scary assortment of this year's potential presidential candidates bode for our future, Armageddon is not necessarily on the horizon. As I write this, the Cubs are in L.A., beating the Angels 6-0 in the bottom of the seventh inning in the opening game of the season. Here in Chicagoland, it's closing in on midnight. I think I'll call it a night and go to bed. It's too early in the season to worry...yet. Sweet...dreams?

*It can be found in the collection of W. P. Kinsella short stories entitled The Thrill of the Grass.

**Shockingly, die-hard White Sox fan Richard J. Daley appears before God in one dream - Richard J, not Richard M. W. P. Kinsella published this story in 1984, five years before Richard M. came into power, and back when the Cubs World Series drought was a mere 77 years in the making.

Front of the tee shirt: What did Jesus say to the Cubs?

Back of the tee shirt: “Don't do anything until I get back.”