Bartman!

I’ve watched the ESPN documentary, Catching Hell, about the Bartman game twice now.  It is quite well done and worth a look, especially if you are a follower of the Cubs or the Red Sox.  I suppose there is a rough comparison between the zealous fan base of each team, their long history of post-season futility and late season meltdowns, etc.  There are also parallels in the treatment of the scapegoats Buckner and Bartman.  However, to my mind, that is where the observation ends.

For one thing, Buckner was a player who made a physical error.  The game also was played in New York, not in Boston, so the fan reaction had much less impact on the outcome of the game or the series.  The blame that attached to Bill Buckner seems almost retrospective.  The Buckner error clearly cost the Red Sox the game, but, especially considering the rainout of the seventh game, the whole incident developed over a more extended time. 

In contrast, the Bartman incident took place in Chicago.  The reaction was immediate and visceral and peculiarly universal.  By that I mean pretty much everyone in the stands and all the participants in the game, both the Cubs and the Marlins, instantly recognized the utter and devastating significance of an apparently commonplace occurrence, the attempt of a fan to catch a foul ball near the field of play.  That is really the heart of the matter: we were just waiting for something bad to happen, we were not just fearing it, we were waiting for it and so was the team.

You have to ask yourself how this relatively routine event could have had such an impact and how, thinking back upon it, everyone realized right then and there the inevitable nature of that impact.  I’m not a psychologist by any stretch of the imagination, but the entire affair suggests a set of eerie speculations on the psychology of crowds and how deeply a form of negative energy can infect a group and the focus of that group’s attention.  For me, anyway, that is the most interesting aspect of the whole affair.

The following narrative is certainly anecdotal, but I very much remember the night of the Bartman incident.  I didn’t have tickets for the game, so I was watching at home with my wife.  I remember thinking to myself how well the game was going.  Mark Prior seemed to be in command.  The Cubs had built a three run lead going into the eighth inning.  What could go wrong?  Yet in the back of both our minds there lurked a nagging doubt.  It was almost too easy.

We lived only a few blocks from Wrigley Field then and we were debating when we should leave the house to walk over and join the celebration.  Something was holding us back.  We decided to watch the top of the eighth before going.  Then it happened.  My wife said it was all over.  I tried to argue that it was just a fluke, a bad break.  But I really knew deep down it was over and I was just not willing to admit it.

In retrospect, it seems as if the whole stadium and all of Cubs fandom and the team itself was waiting for something to go wrong.  All it took was a fluke to set it off.  Alou’s reaction to the play, the stomping up and down, the glove throwing, was totally out of proportion to the event itself.  How tightly wound does a team, a player, or a crowd have to be to provoke the cascade of events that followed?  And how intimately connected is this loop of tension to the actual outcome?

In a way, the ESPN documentary distorts the real-time flow of things.  I suppose this is inevitable given the desire to follow two threads of the story, the crowd reaction to Bartman’s interference and the Cubs collapse/Marlins rally that followed.  I had occasion to watch a replay of the inning itself on the Internet last week.  What you see there is how central the foul ball is to the inning, how obsessed the crowd and the Cubs become with the play and its aftermath.  The whole place loses its composure.  Most of the crowd is focused on abusing Bartman.  Even as the inning continues and the Cubs team goes into a tailspin, you can see the Cubs players looking up into the stands, pointing fingers, shaking their heads.  They have obviously lost their concentration.  Every subsequent pitch, every subsequent play adds to their frustration.  Once things have started snowballing, nothing can stop the momentum.

So, is there a Cubs curse?  I don’t think so, but there is an expectation of failure among the Cubs fan base, and that expectation carries over to the team.  No team plays tighter that the Cubs when the chips are down, and the continued history of failure must be a contributing psychological factor.  This feedback loop has become a part of the team’s tradition, almost a part of its definition, so much so that it is difficult to imagine the team’s personality without it.

My father was a lifelong Cubs fan.  Each year he would look forward to the start of the season with hope and enthusiasm.  He was convinced, however, that the team would ultimately fail.  Even in the magical season of 1969, he knew it would not last.  This syndrome was the case even though when he was a young man, in the twenties and thirties, the Cubs were a good team, filled with star players, perennial contenders who regularly went to the World Series even though they did not win it.

There are only three players left on the roster from the 2003 team, Aramis Ramirez, Kerry Wood, and Carlos Zambrano.  From a combination of free agency, injuries, and just weird circumstances, it is possible the Cubs will start 2012 without any of the holdovers.  For Cubs fans like myself, it’s not likely to make much difference.  In our hearts we know it is going to take some miracle to stop the slide.  We just don’t know what it could be and we just don’t believe it will happen.  We keep watching and hoping though, which probably makes it hurt all the more.

This post is also available at The Fan Manifesto.