A Cubs Fan's Canvas

Tim Souers: Cubs Blogger-Artist

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By Randy Richardson

There’s a painting on Tim Souers’ illustrated blog, cubby-blue.com, where all you see are a boy and a girl standing outside a door. The girl asks, “Dad? Are you okay?” and behind her the boy says, “You can’t just hide in the bathroom all day, dad.”

Off to the side of that painting it reads, "Mark Prior leaves the Brewer game in the second inning. They say it's his elbow. Baseball God give me strength."

"That really happened,” Souers says. It was during the 2004 baseball season, the second year in which Souers had been journaling in earnest about his beloved Cubs. There have been hundreds of postings since then to his humorous and illustrated blog, but that one remains his all-time favorite. Every one of Souers’ illustrations reveals a little about him but that one perhaps more than any other shows you just how deep his feelings about the Cubs go.

Souers is well-represented in Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year. Four of his illustrations – Ronny Cedeno Gets Caught Off Second, It’s Gonna Happen, The Capper, and Fan Interference – made their way into the book.

Fan Interference is Souers’ take on one of the most infamous moments in Cubs’ history, the play during Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS where a once anonymous fan became a household name and the object of scorn, to the extent that he reportedly received death threats and has since led a secluded life. That fan of course was Steve Bartman, whose only crime was doing what almost comes instinctively for any fan – reaching over the stands for a foul ball. No one knows for sure whether or not Moises Alou would have even caught that ball or if the Cubs would have gone on to win that game and go on to the World Series for the first time since 1945. The point is that they lost the game and didn’t go to the World Series and everyone seemed to want to point the blame at someone.

In Souers’ illustration, fingers are all pointed at the unfortunate fan wearing the Cubs cap and the headphones. He wrote in his journal at the time, “We all just need a little practice in championship games. Even fans.”

“One of the things you have the opportunity to do as an artist is illustrate what it feels like rather than just what it was,” Souers now says. “That painting, I thought, was exactly what it felt like pretty much from everybody’s point of view.”

A Cub fan from a long line of Cub fans, Souers credits his dad for his “Cub fan-ness” and his artistic mom for his artistic talents. The self-described “Air Force brat” spent much of his young life far from Chicago but he always remained close to the Cubs. He tells the story of when he moved to Chicago, to study for a semester at the American Academy of Art, and was on his way to an orientation at the Palmer House. “We got all the way into the Loop when my dad turned on the radio and a Cub game was about to start,” he says. “He just smiled and kept on driving, and we ended up at Wrigley. I still got into the Academy okay.”

Souers still waits on the penultimate dream of all Cubs fans – that elusive World Series championship. But he got a Cubs fan artist's dream fulfilled when the Cubs’ monthly magazine Vine Line began publishing his work. "I can’t tell you how cool that is," he says. "When that first started, [the editors of Vine Line] called and asked if I could come meet at their office. So I got to say, 'Uh, going to a meeting at Wrigley Field!' Of course, everybody thought I was sneaking out to a game."

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Want more Tim?

• Read "Five Minutes With Tim Souers"
• Visit his blog cubby-blue.com