Over the last few days, I recalled a post (even though there have been several, I'm sure) where I call God a Cubs fan and tried to explain His influence over the franchise. I still think He is somewhat involved (like He is with everything else in the universe anyway), but I don't think I either gave the right reasons, or any reasons at all. It didn't hit me until Chris, Pat and I went to a Cubs-Twins game two weekends ago. I recall my roommate Steven giving me crap about not being a Twins fan (good-natured of course) even though he isn't one himself. When we got back from the game, there was a message waiting for me on the whiteboard: Twins 3, Cubs 0. Told ya! I erased it and wrote: Cubs season attendance: 3 million; Twins season attendance: 1 million. Then it hit me like a parable, almost. The way I put the revelation together with my knowledge of the team to date went like this:
There is a baseball team that has been around for a long time. They play in one of the oldest stadiums, with a grandstand, bleachers, and bathrooms so out-of-date and in need of massive rebuilding. Even the concrete from underneath the upper deck is in grave danger of crumbling and collapsing. And the team itself is even worse. Its players either underachieve, misdevelop, or injure themselves. They always hire third-class minor league and major league coaches, and fire them as quickly. The front office is like a servant owner that never pays his servants' wages or ensures their well-being. The end result is a team that never wins anything, often finishes last behind all the other teams, and occasionally offers promise of excellency, only to eventually show the cracks in its assembly and revert back to mediocrity. Even those followers of such a hapless will sometimes show their frustration and throw trash onto the playing field as a symbol of such frustration.
But possibly the biggest thing of all, is that the tickets to a ballgame at such a park is among the highest costs of any ballgame on earth. And given human nature's impatience over such abomination, why waste time and money to watch them lose over and over again? There is a miracle among the century-old dung that resides at the false idolatry shrine. But it is a misconstrued miracle. People go to the games solely on two things: 1.) to get a beer, and 2.) to hope that their beloved team will win a World Series.
I come here to you today to tell you differently. The miracle behind the Chicago Cubs does not lie in the World Series that they will win someday. It in fact has nothing to do with winning or losing, period. The point of the Chicago Cubs' existence is to show that even in the darkest of times, people will still show up to the games for three times the price of a ticket to a Twins game, regardless of the quality of the Cubs team that's playing on the field. Some might argue that this "homage" is idolatry, and that there are bigger matters than baseball. I argue that it is only idolatry if one actually worships any part of or all of the whole Cubs experience. And baseball is but one of many such temptations: movies, American Idol, the whole pop culture in general, and those things are in more danger of being idolized than the Cubs.
That's why I wrote the season attendance numbers on the board in response to the trash-talk-writing. It was to illustrate that no matter what the Cubs do, there will always be enough people who A.) care about the team, and B.) pay enough money to show up to enough games to ensure that the team will continue and not be contracted, like the Twins almost were four years ago. That's the miracle I'm talking about, and one that unfortunately more people don't quite grasp.
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