About three-quarters of the way through Rich Cohen’s new book The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse comes an epic clash of baseball philosophies and worldviews.
It was not always thus, Cohen reminds us. In the beginning, the Cubs (previously the White Stockings, Colts, Spuds, and Microbes) were one of the best teams in Major League Baseball, winners of three consecutive National League pennants, possessors of a deadly efficient infield and a star pitcher who’d learned how to use his mangled left hand to throw a wicked curveball. But then things took a turn. Or, if you are a fatalist like Cohen, intimations of the curse began to emerge, even before that fateful day in 1945.
Through the years, in the wake of many catastrophes, Cohen continues to hear variations on this idea from nearly every Cub he talks to. Joe Girardi, who won three World Series with the Yankees, tells him about the power of looking at photos of past victory celebrations in the clubhouse every day as you put on your pinstripes. At Wrigley, historically there were no victory pictures, only portraits of might-have-beens. Pitcher Kevin Tapani theorizes that Cubness is something you catch, like a cold, after your immunity is compromised by too many lovable loser stories.
So where does that leave fans like Cohen, who have spent their lives loving the old Cubs against their better judgment, and maybe even loving the curse in some weird twisted way? The last third of Story of a Curse is a full recap of the 2016 season, during which we learn that the Cubs won game five of the World Series thanks to the efforts of actor Chris Pratt, who Cohen was interviewing for Vanity Fair and who was so moved by Cohen’s devotion to the Cubs that he knelt and said a prayer for the team and its long-suffering fans. Game seven gets a chapter all its own: the improbable late-inning two-run homer by Indians outfielder Rajai Davis, the bottom-of-the-ninth face-off between Aroldis Chapman and Jason Kipnis, and the tenth-inning rain delay, during which Jason Heyward gave the team an impassioned pep talk, are all more like a collection of bad sports-movie cliches than actual life. “That team is cursed,” Cohen’s wife concludes when he calls her in the middle of the tenth inning for emotional support. “We’ve just seen the strength of the curse and how good the Cubs have to be to overcome it. It’s like watching someone fight off bird flu.”
