Baptist Bombers and Broken Curses
Baptist Bombers and Broken Curses
By Matthew Duffus
The Baptists played baseball every evening the fall the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. A clarification: they play baseball every fall, but that one was different. My five-year-old and I sat on the hill skirting deepest centerfield and watched as young men in khakis and button-downs mingled with their female counterparts, all in their requisite long skirts and blouses. The teams were coed, practically the only thing about their tiny college other than the coffee shop that seemed to be so. The men took classes in Pauline Epistles and Eschatology while the women were more likely to study Sacred Music and Christian Education. Even the few overlapping disciplines had separate graduation requirements for men and women. But this didn’t matter when turning a double play. No one tried to break one up with a hard slide, but dust still rose from the palm of the first basewoman’s glove when she dug an errant throw out of the dirt.
My daughter has never cared for competitive sports. She enjoys kicking a soccer ball against our dilapidated shed, knocking boards off the collapsing doors, or shooting baskets on the equally distressed court in our backyard. But she doesn’t want to play on a team, for that introduces the idea of winners and losers. As far as I could tell, the Baptists didn’t keep score either. Instead, they played until dusk overtook the field, when flyballs grew dangerous in their shadowy trajectories and homework beckoned. Those Greek passages weren’t going to translate themselves. We remained with a dozen other nightly observers, almost as late, waiting until the last minute to rush back across the street and into our home just as my wife was preparing bath time.
An hour or two later, once my daughter was soundly asleep and my wife was preparing for bed herself, I’d put in my earbuds and listen to the radio broadcast of the Cubs’ march through the playoffs. We’d given up cable so long ago that I never considered paying for a month or six weeks in order to watch the games. Part of me knew that we could be on the hook for weeks of television bereft of the Cubs, who seemed more likely to make an early exit than go all the way. Still, I wore the t-shirt I’d purchased the previous season, with Reverse the Curse emblazoned across its chest. They hadn’t done so that year, sent packing in the NLCS courtesy of a sweep by the New York Mets.
Even though I was barely in my forties by 2016, I’d been hardened by past experience, so I half-listened to the 2016 Divisional Series against the Giants while completing household chores. The Giants had beaten the Cubs during my first taste of playoff disappointment, in 1989. That year, I’d gritted my teeth every time Andre Dawson swung at a bad pitch, groaned when ace reliever Lester Lancaster gave up a clutch homerun to Matt Williams. After the final out of Game Five, I went to my room and laid on my bed, tears of frustration, not sadness, welling in my eyes. I seemed to know better, even at fourteen, than to believe in the Cubs. But why couldn’t they have won more than a single game? A week later, I would be convinced that the Bay Area earthquake was God’s punishment for the Giants’ victory. I doubt our Baptist neighbors would approve of such a teenaged pronouncement.
I continued listening distractedly as the Cubs proceeded, once again, to the NLCS. The Dodgers were a formidable team, and no matter how confident Cubs manager Joe Maddon and his young ballclub seemed, I knew better. I’d learned my lesson once and for all in 2003. Every Cubs fan knows what I’m referring to, the epic Steve Bartman–induced collapse that seemed to guarantee once and for all that the Curse would never be lifted. That year, like 2016, I didn’t have cable, and my soon-to-be-wife had done her best to narrate what was going on over the phone. “Oh… Umm… Moises Alou is going crazy about something?” Nevertheless, even as I girded myself for black cats and fan interference, the Cubs kept rolling in 2016, defeating the Dodgers without resorting to a Game Seven. Unbelievably, they were on to the World Series.
The night of Game One, I sat next to my daughter on the hill as the sun dipped beneath the trees to the west. “One more batter,” the catcher called, and the outfielders backed up toward the scrub at the edge of the outfield. This was the college’s lone athletic field, part diamond, part soccer pitch, and without lines denoting fair and foul, the closest thing it had to a fence was the poison ivy–covered incline that gradually gave way to grass on our side. The last batter stepped forward. Having removed his button-down Oxford, his white undershirt shone in the fading light. He brushed his blond hair away from his forehead and dug in. Like most of the players, male or female, he looked comfortable with a bat in his hand. But unlike the others, when he took practice swings, I swore I could feel the breeze 250 feet away. He whacked the second pitch farther than anyone yet, the ball sailing over the soccer goal and bouncing once on the grass before dropping into the poison ivy. As much as I wanted to envision him as Anthony Rizzo or NL MVP Kris Bryant, I couldn’t help picturing him in a Cleveland Indians uniform as he rounded the bases. It didn’t matter that all of the World Series games would end long past my typical bedtime. They would have filled my dreams if I had gone to sleep, and not in a good way; no matter how well the Cubs performed, I would have pictured moonshots like this one. Lester Lancaster all over again.
My daughter, who was attracted to the games due to the presence of Big Kids and for fear of missing out on something exciting happening right across the street from her house, yawned at the home run. She was restless now, knowing at any moment I would tell her it was time to head home. I did just that as the outfielders convened and decided the ball was a lost cause. No one wanted to risk contracting poison ivy for a baseball.
I’d like to say that 2016 felt different from all the previous years, but when the Cubs fell behind Cleveland three games to one, I was pleased by my complacency. As Game Five began, I continued grading the reading journals I’d been going over since my daughter had gone to bed. I thought, briefly, of that blond batsman on the field across the street, the Baptist Bomber, who kept hitting tape-measure shots. It had gotten to the point that even the infielders backed up onto the grass. The kid could have bunted himself around the bases, they were so far back. When Jose Ramirez hit his own solo shot in the second inning for Cleveland, I felt pretty certain that I knew which team was destined to end its drought.
That is, until Kris Bryant and his teammates came up in the fourth and started rolling. Homerun, double, single, single. The Cubs kept hitting, sending runners around the bases and taking the lead. Maybe this wouldn’t be the season’s last game at Wrigley after all. The Cubs wouldn’t match that output for the rest of the game, but thanks to pitchers Jon Lester and Aroldis Chapman, they didn’t have to. They won, 3-2, and all of a sudden, that cursèd optimism wedged its way into my otherwise placid interior.
It would get worse over the next two games, both Cubs wins. Could they really come back from being down three-to-one? As a teambuilding shirt I’d received years ago read, Yes, You Can! Even after the Cubs surrendered their lead late in Game Seven, I had nearly divine faith in their eventual victory. Rain delay? I’ll wait. Extra innings? Bring them on! When I heard the play-by-play radio announcer describe the final out, a ground ball to third that Kris Bryant fielded cleanly and threw to first base for what at any other moment in Cubs’ history would have been a routine play, I fell back on the pillows on my bed and let out a breath. It felt less like relief at the Cubs having broken The Curse than the point when the inevitable finally occurred, as though I’d been watching a boulder picking up speed on its way down a hill, knowing all along that nothing would keep it from crushing everything at the bottom. The Cubs were no longer Sisyphean losers. They were a wrecking crew.
The following night, my daughter and I watched the Baptists play for the last time. They ended their makeshift season without fanfare, playing as they always had. By the following year, my then-six-year-old would have aged out of her interest in watching their games. She’d be too busy with the tribulations and minor dramas of first grade, too exhausted from a full day of learning, to do much more than unwind by the time dinner was over. The Cubs would begin their gradual slide back toward the middle of the pack. Pundits have criticized the owners and front office personnel for not taking greater advantage of their young stars and stringing together a few more championships. But based on the surprising decline in production from their now big-name players, it seems as though these players had converged in that one moment to do something special. For much of that season, reporters remarked on how relaxed they all were. Maybe they knew they were the boulder, and no matter what team was in their way, they’d flatten them at the bottom of the hill.
Matthew Duffus’s writing has appeared recently in The Review of Uncontemporary Literature, The Smart Set, and Main Street Rag. He is the author of the novel Swapping Purples for Yellows, the collection Dunbar’s Folly and Other Stories, and the poetry chapbook Problems of the Soul and Otherwise.
Read Card Fever, Matthew’s previous essay for The Twin Bill.
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