LUDIC LOG

I live in Chicago. And I'm not rooting for the Chicago Cubs.

In fact, I hate the Chicago Cubs. I hate them with an intensity that rivals my love for the Chicago White Sox. A good day, for me, is when the White Sox win; a great day is when the White Sox win and the Cubs lose.

Unfortunately, the Cubs haven't been doing a lot of losing lately, and the White Sox aren't doing any winning at all. The time for winning is past for the south siders; their season is over. And the north siders, matched up as I write this against a horribly overmatched Florida Marlins team, seem very likely to become the first Chicago team in 44 years to go to the World Series. If this takes place, the Chicago White Sox will become the Major League Baseball team that has gone the longest without winning a pennant, a dubious honor no White Sox fan is eager to accept. If my nightmare comes true and the Cubs actually win the World Series, the White Sox will acheive an even more worthless title: the team that has gone the longest without a World Series victory.

This might come as a surprise to devotees of the Boston Red Sox. Red Sox fans, inheritors of the same geocentric arrogance as their rivals in New York, don't seem to realize that there's another team that's had an even longer dry spell in the post-season than the Carmines. Indeed, looking at the eagerness the media gives a potential Cubs-Red Sox World Series (a possibilty happily in the process of being derailed by the New York Yankees), you would think they're the most hapless losers of all time. This, indeed, is one of the reasons for the bitterness of White Sox fans so commented on by north siders: we can't even get credit for losing. While the Red Sox -- fortunately at the hub of East Coast big-market media dominance -- invent a colorful curse to explain their losing ways and elevate their agony to an artform, and the Cubs -- felicitously owned by a huge multimedia conglomerate -- craft a curse of their own and turn losing into something lovable, we as White Sox fans have no such recourse. Suffering from small-market obscurity in a big-market city, our seemingly endless futility goes uncommented-on by pundits, poets and prognosticators; locked into a crushing realism, we invent no whimsical mysticism to explain our failure; neither masochists nor moonpies, we don't think losing is cute or charming or lovable or character-building. We think it sucks, and we suck in silence.

What's particularly galling -- what, for a White Sox fan, makes living in Chicago right here and right now makes every living moment a needle-prick of humiliation -- is the smug cheeriness of Cubs fans. Cubs fans, you see, don't seem to even realize that there's a rivalry, an enmity, a hatred between the teams. Cubs fans are surprised that Sox fans hate them, and they will often respond that they don't hate the Sox. How could they, after all? They're barely even aware the Sox exist. Though they're 102 years old, the Sox are treated as if they're a minor league team that set up shop at 35th and Shields. Some Cubs fans even wish us well when we're competing; "I'm happy as long as a Chicago team is doing well," they'll say -- something a Sox fan wouldn't say in a million years. And that's what's so hideous: Cubs fans, failing to understand that hating your rivals is as much a part of baseball as loving your own, seem to believe that we, the Sox fans, naturally must be rooting for the Cubs. "Hey, how about those Cubbies!", they'll say, obviously expecting us to be happy for a post-season victory by the Baby Bears. When met with a hearty "Fuck the Cubbies", they seem shocked -- or not even shocked; perplexed. It's as if they don't understand the notion of wishing ill on your enemies. Wrapped up in the asinine mystique of losing, accustomed to post-season competition, and arrogantly unaware of the rooting interests of others, they actually expect the Sox fan to drop his lifelong detestation of the north side squad just because they're doing well. This is the arrogance of power and success: Cubs fans figure that since they like the team, everyone else must too. Any attempt to reason with them -- for example, by noting that Red Sox fans don't suddenly start rooting for the Yankees just because the Yankees go to the World Series -- is met by a vacuous excursus on how great a Cubs-Red Sox series would be.

Rooting for the Chicago White Sox isn't often rewarding. Our owner is one of the worst in baseball; our ballpark is unfairly condemned by people who have never been there; our players are often chokers, and the rest of the time their brilliance goes unappreciated because of the lack of national interest in the team; and our team hasn't been to the World Series since 1959, and hasn't won since 1917. But rooting for the Cubs -- which everyone apparently expects us to do now that they're doing well -- is the worst option imaginable. Rooting for the Cubs is like rooting for a rich, priveleged, arrogant college jock who fails all his classes, coasts through life, and never accomplishes anything, and everyone loves him anyway. And rooting for the Cubs when they're winning is like that jock demanding everyone praise him when he manages to get a B+ on a history test once in four semesters.

So, baseball fans: yes, I'm from Chicago, but no, I'm not a Cubs fan. And no, Cubs fans, I'm not inclined to root for your team just because they've made it so far, and I don't give a fuck if you'd return the favor if the situation were reversed. I hope the Cubs lose. I hope they don't go to the World Series, but if they do, I hope they're beaten in four straight. I hope they don't score a single time, and that they lose each game by at least ten runs. And I hope that the bus to the airport crashes on the way back to Chicago, and that every Cub player breaks a limb and can't play next year, so the team has to field all AA guys in 2004. I hope this sends them into a spiral of humiliation and defeat and that leads to them finishing in last place for the next hundred seasons. It's nothing personal; it's just business. Go ahead and talk all the shit you want; your team has played very well, and you've earned the right to plenty of smack-talk. But don't ever think for a minute, for even a second, that we're rooting for them.