A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (17 page)

A twenty-six-year-old computer consultant, a former high school second baseman, a youth baseball coach, and a besotted Cub fan, he was listening to the game through headphones. He was sitting in aisle 4, row 8, seat 113, a few feet from the wall. Except now, as the ball descended, he was not sitting. He was doing what fans reflexively do: standing and reaching for the ball, which was coming down
tantalizingly close to him. It was falling into the stands, not onto the field of play, which is why the umpires correctly ruled that what Bartman did was not fan interference. If he had reached out of the stands, he would have interfered with Alou, so the batter would have been out and the Cubs would have been four outs from the World Series.
The relevant rule reads: “Spectator interference occurs when a spectator reaches out of the stands, or goes on the playing field, and touches a live ball.” Bartman touched the ball. Alou, reaching into the stands, did not touch it. He made a gesture of angry frustration, slamming his fist into his glove, then trotted back to his position.

If Alou had not vented his frustration, the crowd probably would have turned its attention back to the game. But the gesture changed the crowd and Bartman’s life. The crowd became a mob and Bartman became a pariah, and nearly a victim of violence. Neither team’s manager questioned the umpire’s call on the foul ball. I was sitting upstairs, behind home plate, with Cubs president Andy MacPhail. He glanced at a replay on a television in his box and murmured two words: “Good call.” Then things turned ugly, on the field and even more so in the stands.

The Cubs unraveled. The Marlin batter, who had been given a second life when Alou didn’t catch the foul ball, was walked. The next batter singled, driving in the runner on second. The following batter hit what certainly could have been, and probably should have been, a double-play grounder to the Cubs’ shortstop, Alex Gonzalez. A fine defensive player, he led all National League shortstops in
fielding in 2003, and if he had fielded the grounder cleanly the inning would probably have been over, leaving the Cubs three outs from the World Series. But he bobbled it, getting neither the runner at second nor the batter-runner at first. The situation was now three men on, one out, and bad karma rising.

The Cubs were still ahead 3–1. The game was proceeding to a climax, but the attention of many in the ballpark was focused not on the field but on the young man who, it is important to remember, was just one person among many who had reached for the descending foul ball. The fan who’d plucked the ball from Wrigley’s concrete floor was not Bartman. But there were more than a dozen television cameras at this postseason game, and replays showed that the hands that had deflected the ball away from Alou belonged to the fellow wearing a green turtleneck and headphones.

Catching Hell
, ESPN’s documentary on this event, clearly records a spectator’s voice saying, “Good job, asshole.” Then another: “Somebody hit that cocksucker! Hit him!” In the Marlins’ dugout, third baseman Mike Lowell remembers a teammate saying about Bartman, “Let’s make him famous, you know, make this a turning point.” In a few moments the score was 3–3. But instead of exhorting the Cubs to stop the bleeding, much of the crowd, including the large throng gathered on Waveland Avenue outside the left-field bleachers, was chanting, “Asshole! Asshole! Asshole!” Then the chant turned to “Fuck you! Fuck you!”

Soon beer was being thrown on Bartman, and pizza
and pretzels. Before the third out of the disastrous eighth inning was recorded, the Marlins led, 8–3. That was the final score. The crowd continued to scream and throw debris at Bartman as security guards struggled to get him to safety. A famous fan said to a reporter, “If someone ever convicts that guy of a crime, he’ll never get a pardon out of this governor.” This was Rod Blagojevich, who eight years later was convicted of corruption and sentenced to fourteen years in prison.

Security personnel removed Bartman’s glasses, headphones, and Cubs hat and dressed him in the white jacket worn by Wrigley Field safety services. Nevertheless, a fan outside the ballpark recognized Bartman, so a security officer who lived in the neighborhood took Bartman to her home. Later he was put in a van and driven to the hotel where he and two friends, who had been seated with him in the ballpark, had rented a room for their planned celebration of the victory that sent the Cubs to the World Series.

The next day, the
Chicago Sun-Times
published Bartman’s name, the fact that he lived with his parents in the town of Northbrook, and the place where he worked. He released a statement apologizing “from the bottom of this Cub fan’s broken heart.” As far as is known, he has never returned to Wrigley Field.

If the next night the Cubs had won Game 7, Bartman would be a mere footnote in baseball history—the answer to a trivia question. But the Marlins scored three runs in the first inning of that game. The Cubs regained the lead
after Alex Gonzalez doubled off the center-field wall and pitcher Kerry Wood drove him in with a home run. Moises Alou also hit a two-run home run. But the Cubs lost, 9–6.

The fan who scooped up the ball that blighted Bartman’s life sold it in 2003 for $106,600. It was destroyed in a ceremony at Harry Caray’s restaurant. Bartman was offered serious money—hundreds of thousands of dollars—to appear in commercials or make public appearances, but he never took a dime or any other benefit in exchange for telling his story.

Near the conclusion of
Catching Hell
, the narrator says, “As time passes, the city is haunted more by what it did to Bartman than what Bartman did to Chicago. There are many who say the city should forgive Bartman, but it’s really up to Bartman to forgive Chicago.” A former major leaguer who had some fine years with the Cubs spoke some sympathetic words for Bartman: “To get crucified the way he did was mind-boggling. He didn’t do anything, he didn’t do anything different. You take a major league baseball player and sat him in that seat, he’d have done the same thing that Bartman did. I mean I would have done it.” So said Bill Buckner.

As I slowly inched my way down a congested Wrigley Field ramp after the final out of the Bartman game, a fan recognized me and shouted, “We’ll get them tomorrow night, Mr. Will!” I replied, “Not a chance!” I had seen this movie before.

In 1984, the Cubs had advanced to the postseason for the first time since 1945. There were just two divisions in
each league in 1984, and the division winners faced each other in a best-of-five play-off to determine who would meet in the World Series. The Cubs played the Padres. The first two games were in Wrigley Field, and the Cubs won both. As I left the park after the second game, with the Cubs heading to San Diego and needing to win just one game, I was walking next to Don Drysdale, the Dodgers’ Hall of Fame pitcher who had been one of the broadcasters for the national telecast that day. He said to me, “Now, Will, do you Cub fans believe?” I said to him, “Every Cub fan knows it will be the Padres in five.” The Cubs lost all three games in San Diego. They lost the last one because an unchallenging ground ball went through the legs of Cubs first baseman Leon Durham. This was two years before, in Game 6 of the Mets–Red Sox World Series, the Red Sox lost a chance to win their first World Series since 1918 because a softly hit ground ball went through the legs of former Cubs first baseman Bill Buckner.

In
Chicago: City on the Make
, Nelson Algren perfected the city’s tough-guy tone of voice. The place “isn’t so much a city as it is a vasty way station where three and a half million bipeds swarm.” Yes, but. “Yet once you come to be part of this particular patch, you’ll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may find lovelier
lovelies. But never a lovely so real.” Wrigley Field’s loveliness is a function of how real it is, of its practicality.

Here, however, is an unlovely thought: Perhaps Wrigley Field should be decorated with a large warning akin to those that appear on packages of, and advertisements for, cigarettes. If the government were really
comprehensively
concerned with our potentially injurious choices, the big red sign that looms over Wrigley Field’s home plate gates would read, “The Surgeon General has determined that this is a gateway to neurological difficulties.” So say the contributors to a naughty book published in 2008,
Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans
. It is a collection of essays by doctors and others knowledgeable about neuroscience and brain disorders associated with giving one’s allegiance to a team that last won a World Series exactly one hundred years before the book was published.

In a
New Yorker
cartoon depicting a man and a woman seated on a restaurant banquette, the man says, “OK, Cynthia, I’ll tell you my hopes and dreams, my joys and my passions. But be forewarned—they all concern a particular sports team.” The sometimes terrible truth is that being a sports fan is a physical phenomenon as well as a psychological condition. Without dogpaddling too far out into the deep philosophic water of the mind-body distinction, let us just say this: The world is divided between the many persons who say, “I have a body,” and the few who say, “I am a body.” I think that the more science teaches about the brain, the more reasons we have for thinking that the few speak correctly. They are supported by what
neuroscience knows about being a sports fan, which involves observable—thanks to brain-imaging technology—alterations of brain matter.

Group memberships—in families, tribes, neighborhoods, cities, nations, religions—are common and powerful as components of identities. They are so common and powerful that they must be in some sense natural. We seem to be hardwired for such allegiances. Presumably they are adaptive aspects of the evolution of human beings as social creatures. But how does the group identity of Cub fans help them flourish? By giving them brain calisthenics.

This is the good news, and there is precious little of it in
Your Brain on Cubs
. It seems that “given the complex situations and thinking that Cub fans have had to engage in,” their “frontal lobes are consistently activated” as they consider their thought-provoking affiliation.
So says Jordan Grafman, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, in suburban Washington, D.C. His thesis is the fruit of scientific education leavened by hard experience. He was born and raised in Chicago, so he knows whereof he speaks when he speaks, as he does delicately, about the “paradox” of being a Cub fan even though baseball is supposed to provide
relief
from life’s problems. Grafman has been to the most pleasant of purgatories, Wrigley Field, and he has returned with good news.

Yes, rooting for the Cubs is a minority taste. How could it be otherwise? It is, after all, a lifelong tutorial in deferred gratification. But, Grafman says, “there is some evidence
that being in the majority (everyone loves a winner) reduces reflective thinking.” Rooting for a steady, consistent loser makes one thoughtful. Or perhaps neurotic. Which, on Chicago’s North Side, may be a distinction without a difference. “The scientific literature,” Grafman writes, “suggests that fans of losing teams turn out to be better decision-makers and deal better with divergent thought, as opposed to the unreflective fans of winning teams.”

Relative to the brains of other animals, human brains have disproportionately large prefrontal cortexes. Hence the human knack for planning, reasoning, and experiencing subtle variations of feelings. Grafman tells us that when a fan’s team wins, “the brain’s reward system, including the ventral brain stem and basil ganglia,” pumps dopamine into the brain, which gives—or perhaps
is
—the experience of intense pleasure. Narcotics do that, too. So, are fans of winning teams in danger of addiction? Perhaps. If so, are Cub fans fortunate because of their misfortune? No.

Kelli Whitlock Burton, a science writer, and Hillary R. Rodman, an associate professor of psychology at Emory University, cite studies of activities in the portion of the brain that registers depression, sadness, grief, and euphoria, the first three of which are pertinent to Wrigley Field patrons. Burton and Rodman note that drug addiction can cause changes in neural sensitivity and structure, and they wonder whether a Cub fan “has subtle and long-lasting changes in his or her brain reward circuitry, comparable to a kind of addiction.” They also say that the “limbic structure called the amygdala, deep within the temporal lobe,
shows abnormally high activity in depressed patients.” Studies of “induced sadness”—for example, the brain activity of a person grieving about the end of a romantic relationship—might tell us something about a brain on Cubs. Furthermore, when rats are made to experience “acute and persistent defeat,” there are observable physiological effects: Certain nerve cells undergo long-lasting changes in their ability to respond electrically to stimuli.

Burton and Rodman report that scientists are identifying “the chemical bases of long-lasting brain changes after social defeat, with the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is also heavily implicated in clinical depression, among the substances most clearly involved.” In sports fans, as in players, a team’s success or failure can cause hormonal changes, particularly in the production of testosterone. One implication of this might be that Cub fans, in a kind of Darwinian natural de-selection, have trouble reproducing.