Damn Cubbies

Jonathan Eig: Biographer and Journalist

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By Randy Richardson

Jonathan Eig isn’t a Cubs fan; he’s a Yankees fan.

So how does a fan of the Bronx Bombers, a legendary team with a long tradition of winning, find himself writing for an anthology about a dubious team with a long tradition of losing?

Eig, a senior special writer for the Wall Street Journal and former executive editor of Chicago magazine who is best known for writing biographies of two of baseball’s greatest and most revered players, Lou Gehrig and Jackie Robinson, looked for inspiration from his journalistic hero, the late great Chicago columnist Mike Royko.

For three decades, Royko chronicled his beloved Cubs on the pages of Chicago’s newspapers – all the ups and the downs (way more of the latter than the former) – and he became the voice of all Cubs fans.

Eig turns the tables and takes Royko’s voice for Nothing But a Bologna Sandwich, an imagined encounter between Royko and Bud Selig during Jackie Robinson’s first game at Wrigley Field. Eig had done the historical research for the piece in writing his latest biography, Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. But he still needed to channel his inner Royko.

"I went back and read a ton of old Royko columns and tried to see if I could adopt his voice," he says. "It’s not that hard, actually, if you drink heavily and chain-smoke and try to swagger while you type."

The piece is historically accurate in the sense that both Selig and Royko claim to have attended that Sunday, May 18, 1947, game. "When Bud Selig told me he attended Robinson’s first game at Wrigley, it occurred to me right away that Royko claimed he was there, too, and, long before I thought about writing a fictional work, I thought about what might have happened had the two met. Of course, I’m not sure I really believe Royko. His column was a little too good, if you know what I mean."

Eig's Gehrig biography, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, won the Casey Award for best baseball book in 2005. Although he is known mostly for writing non-fiction, Eig is a closet fiction writer, too. "Actually, I write a lot of fiction, it’s just that none of it is fit for print. Maybe this will give me my big break, and I’ll finally find a publisher for my novel, Romancing Hack Wilson, or maybe it will prove to be my cup of coffee."

Eig's versatility as a writer is also in evidence in Dayenu, Or It Would Have Been Enough, a prayer he wrote for the Lovable Losers Literary Revue that found its way into the anthology. Dayenu, Eig explains, "is a song sung at Passover, in which we thank God for all he did for the Jews as they fled Egypt. Dayenu, roughly translated, means, 'It would have been enough.' The song has a nice, rolling quality to it, you know, like: If He had slain the first born of Egypt, it would have been enough…. If He had drowned our oppressors, it would have been enough.' And so on. Cheery stuff. The Cubs are very Jewish in that way. Their suffering is so deeply ingrained that we are thankful for even the bitterest of blessings—as embodied by Kerry Wood, to give you just one example."

Eig is taking a break from writing about baseball to pen a book about Al Capone. However, he says, "It will include one scene prominently featuring a baseball bat."

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Want more Jonathan?

• Read "Five Minutes with Jonathan Eig"
• Visit his website