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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 90^th 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.

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Deadball Poets Society

Stuart Shea: Author and Poet

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By Randy Richardson

Stuart and his wife, Cecilia Garibay, on a recent pub crawlStuart Shea traces the roots of his Cubs’ obsession to when he was eight years old, when his father would write out the highlights of the previous night’s game and leave them on the kitchen table for him to read before he went to work. Sometimes his father would even tape the radio highlights for him.

“You can’t buy that kind of emotional investment,” Shea says.

It is that emotional investment in the Cubs that has compelled Shea to write extensively about the team, including authoring Wrigley Field: The Unauthorized Biography and editing Wrigley Season Ticket 2007.

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Losing From the Sidelines

Don De Grazia: Author

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By Donald G. Evans

Uncle Ernie’s second-story Waveland Avenue window practically kissed Wrigley Field’s left-field foul pole, and Don De Grazia sat there watching the “circus atmosphere” around the ballpark. That was 2003. Don was living temporarily in a spare apartment his uncle had rented basically for Cubs parties. The Cubs were setting the stage, day-by-day, game-by-game, for another historic collapse.

“My impetus was to pore all those negative emotions into a story,” Don says. “I’d just devoted all those days, all those hours, to what?”

Don’s “Yard Dogs” is a kind of psychological study in fandom. Billy is a typically devoted Cubs fan who uses gambling to chain his fate to that of his favorite team. The narrator, a small-time bookie, in turn attaches his fate to Billy’s. The sports world food chain that results brings into question the ultimate worth of fandom. Is victory theirs or ours? How about defeat?

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Dogged Hopefulness

Christine Sneed: Writer and Teacher

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By Randy Richardson

You don’t have to be a Cubs fan to experience what it means to be a Cubs fan – the euphoria of when they win and the bitter despair of when they, inevitably, lose. You don’t even have to be human.

Christine Sneed isn’t a Cubs fan – heck, she’s not even a baseball fan. Yet growing up in a household of Cubs fans, she vicariously lived the life of a Cubs fan. And so did her family dogs.

“In my family, baseball season hasn’t truly arrived if there isn’t a dog in the house cowering under a bed,” begins her touching essay, Our Dog Days of Summer, which made its way into Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year.

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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.

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