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Friday, December 19, 2008 at 11:06PM Chris Christensen: A Baseball Historian Unearths the Real Cubs' Curse
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By Donald G. Evans
Chris Christensen with baseball artwork by R. Kenton NelsonAs Chris Christensen pored through research material for an article about baseball teams with soul and without, he stumbled across some interesting bits and pieces related to he famous Merkle’s Boner incident. He had previously written an Elysian Fields article on the 90th anniversary of the incident, but now found some strange coincidences that added up to a pattern concerning the fates of the primaries involved in that defining point in Cubs history.
“I tend to not believe in Fate,” Chris says. “In general, I’m pretty much a nonbeliever in almost anything. But I’m not an absolutist; I leave room. There was something there.”
Chris dug deeper into his research and ultimately produced an essay called, “Merkle Haunts Moises.” It was first published in Elysian Fields in the summer of 2008, and we chose to reuse the piece in the Cubbie Blues anthology. While most of the material in the anthology is original, this essay was a perfect fit: it gave an overview of those critical Cubs moments of the last 100 years and introduced a curse that was unique and scholarly.
The essay is a carnival of Cubs history, resurrecting old icons like Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, Frank Chance, Stan Hack and Mark Koenig, right through Leon Durham, Mark Prior, Alex Gonzalez, Alou, Carlos Zambrano and Lou Piniella.
“I love the game so much, particularly the history,” Chris says. “That’s why I like writing about it.”
Chris began writing about baseball more than 30 years ago, after having an epiphany in a Portland bar. Chris is in the habit of arriving to appointments early, and on this night he was ahead of schedule for a dinner engagement with friends. He picked up a New Yorker magazine out of a pile, and happened upon a Roger Angell piece. Angell, of course, is one of the most prominent and respected chroniclers of the game, but was at the beginning of his storied career when Chris first read him.
“I didn’t realize there was literary writing about baseball,” Chris says. “Roger Angell opened up a world I never knew existed.”
It is that literary quality that makes Chris’ work particularly compelling. While it is scholarly, the essay has a narrative quality that makes it much more entertaining and readable than your average academic piece. Chris published his first baseball pieces in the Oregonian and Willamette Week. Much of his subsequent baseball writing has been included in the first-rate quarterly literary journal Elysian Fields.
Having grown up in Cedar Rapids, Chris wasn’t a Cub fan, per say, but because of the geographic proximity to Chicago he did like the team. More importantly, Chris was fascinated with early Cubs history in the reading he did to accompany his new passion for writing about baseball. “The Cubs were very prominent in the early days, the dead ball era,” Chris says. “I kind of liked that era.”
Chris generally makes an outline, and then goes through pages of notes he’s gathered from research material such as books and periodicals. He marks up his notes to indicate a tentative order, and then starts writing. He polishes each sentence as he goes.
For this particular essay, Chris needed to sift through the material to determine how much was organically related to his thesis and how much was forced to fit the thesis. After a discussion with EFQ editor Tom Goldstein, Chris eliminated a passage on strange Cubs occurrences that happened on September 23, the date of Merkle’s Boner. “I had gone through the computer and checked what had happened on September 23,” Chris says. “I found eight or 10 strange things. But Tom pointed out that there were many dates [in the subsequent 100 years] in which nothing unusual had happened.”
After eliminating that passage, Tom felt the rest was “pretty organic.”
Of course, the essay would have been instantly obsolete were the Cubs to win it all in 2008. That it didn’t happen perhaps strengthens Chris’ original curse theory.
“I thought they were going to do well myself,” Chris says. “I was a little afraid of Tampa Bay. I really thought they had a shot.”
Chris used to attend a lot of games, especially when he lived in downtown Portland and managed an apartment building four blocks from the Civic Stadium, home of the Triple A Portland Beavers, who are the only remaining original team in the Pacific Coast League. He would sometimes slip into games free around the eighth inning and enjoy the final two frames. But he goes less often now, partly because, as a baseball purist, he is put off by the modern atmosphere that includes loud rock bass beats and constant “side shows.”
Chris works now as courier. He picks up bloods samples from animal clinics for delivery at a laboratory in Portland. “I love the job and the people in the clinics,” Chris says. “Plus I can drive and think about baseball and writing.”
Chris’ wife Bobbie is instrumental in his writing process. She helps him edit and improve his political pieces and generally serves as his partner in literature, as she is in life. “Bobbie has a great deal to do with my writing and overcoming my lack of confidence to write,” Chris says. “I love her dearly.”
As for that original article idea that led to Chris’ Merkle essay…do the Cubs have soul?
“The Cubs definitely have soul,” Chris says. “One of the criteria was suffering.”
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