Today, as many of you have hopefully already realized after putting in a full-day selling insurance, helping people help people at your logistics job, or simply lying on your 3 piece sofa going hard at a box of Triscuits,today is October 14th. Some of you fashion virtuosos may know the fourteenth day in the tenth month as the birthday of designer Ralph Lauren (happy 71 Ralphie). More likely, if you read this blog, you realize that it is Stacy Kiebler's 31st today and you sent her an email wishing her a happy birthday that reeked of desperation and abstinence. Or, you could have simply opted to send Usher a "Oh myyyyyyyyyyy, gosh, you're 32!?!?!" tweet and called it a Thursday. However, what most of you didn't wake up and associate with 10/14 is that it was the date that Steve Bartman cast the inveterate shadow over the left field foul line at Wrigley Field. Bartman (swear to god I first typed 'batman') reaffirmed to everyone that the combination of a green turtleneck and a Walkman can get you killed in public, and also forever gave us a reason to remember Moises Alou besides the fact that he openly admitted to urinating on the appendages at the end of his arms. Thinking about Bartman, and then thinking about where the Cubs franchise is at right now might make you lose the Nacho Chessiers and 4 'fun size' Snickers you had for lunch. But 7 years removed from the incident, if we have any grip on reality at all, we realize that blaming Bartman this whole time made us look like we were using scapegoating as a defense mechanism like a bunch of woebegone, pre-teen misfits.
I'm not saying Bartman wasn't in the wrong. I can't sit here and type that if Bartman doesn't flounder over that foul, fly-ball that things would've been different. That's just a wish right? A presumption if you will, which is the one things that Cubs fans do best. We say things like "If it wern't fa dat mohr-on f*%#2-in up dat flyball, we woulda bin in da series" or "Sorian-oh man, always hoppin around like a BUM, that guy's got a rag-ahmmmmmmmm, what a piece of s*^#, how much do we pay dat shmuck?" It's almost as if Bartman was predestined to be one of God's most pathetic creatures--a Cub fan. The kind of guy who actually believes that ballplayers like Terry Mulholland and Aaron Miles can be a part of 'next year'. The people who wave their W flag below the stars and stripes some 75 times a year (rough estimate of next year) and raise their child's baseball career on the imprecise insight of Ron Santo.
All that October 14, 2003 and the allegations of Steve Bartman as public enemy did was cement in time another date that people will bear in mind about the Cubs choking like when Karin Kinsella when she fell off the Field of Dreams bleachers. People outside the city don't remember Alex Gonzalez booting that ground-ball that would have ended the inning had he turned a routine double play, or they forget that we sent Prior and Wood (32-17 combined in '03) to the mound in consecutive games only needing one win and came up short, or that they were up 5-3 at one point during game 7. It's all wash, all we think about is Bartman. A 35 year old Notre Dame High School graduate who refused a $25,000 purse and refused to autograph a picture of himself for the National Sports Collectors Convention. God knows he needed the money, and god knows Chicago needs the Cubs.
Now I'm done. Rack me
Frost
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