For those of us born after 1959, trying to imagine what a World Series game in this town will feel like is like trying to imagine what peace on Earth feels like.
We understand the basic concept of peace, but is it my imagination, Mr. Numbskull-In-A-Lexus, or did you just cut me off in traffic?
The idea of a World Series in Chicago is so strange, so bizarre, so unreal that you’ll have to excuse the way our jaws seem to be permanently attached to our chests.
That’s the overriding emotion–that this can’t be happening because it simply doesn’t happen here. Doesn’t happen to us. Can’t happen to us.
There are more than a few generations of Chicago baseball fans who have been conditioned to believe that when the first ball of the season is rolled out, it automatically goes between someone’s legs.
What we’ll have to go on for Game 1 Saturday night, then, is mostly disbelief and guesswork.
And so we push on, wide-eyed and childlike, because half the fun of this thing is the anticipation of it (the other half is the White Sox winning it all).
OK, we picture the Cell in its Sunday best on Saturday, all gussied up in red-white-and-blue bunting. The last light of the day already will have drained from the sky, and a few of those big halogen lights will be waiting to be shattered by a baseball.
You wait 46 years for this, you expect a scene out of “The Natural.”
We imagine Mayor Daley lifting a leg to throw out a ceremonial first pitch and revealing a white sock under his slacks, a style suddenly chic and all the rage among . . . Chicago mayors. On the grass, Major League Baseball has painted a “World Series 2005” logo. That’s not graffiti or some sort of ’60s Technicolor flashback. It’s proof. It’s affirmation.
There are going to be strangers in the stands, because there always are at the World Series. There’s a reason tickets for all four Chicago games sold out in 18 minutes–there weren’t many tickets to sell. Friends of MLB will be at the game. So will friends of the Sox. Dignitaries. The rogue celebrity who doesn’t worship at Wrigley Field. CEOs who have gone from stocks fans to Sox fans, if ever so briefly. People who don’t know a whole lot about this team.
But we do.
We see both teams getting introduced one by one before the game starts. From the guys who wash the uniforms all the way to the managers, the two squads line up in V formation along the first- and third-base lines. We see cameras flashing as if a plague of lightning bugs were upon us. We see Sox manager Ozzie Guillen joking with somebody on the other team. Tighter than a drum inside but loose as a casino greeter on the outside. That’s Ozzie.
Baseball loves a production, so there will be parachutists dropping in or military jets flying over or some such thing. We’re the third-biggest city in the country, but watch how awed we are by the weight of the moment, the unreality of the scene, the corniness of it all. If they stuffed a few parade floats inside the Cell, the only complaint would be that Bill Veeck didn’t get one alongside Snoopy.
Can you feel the electricity of 40,000 people carrying around 46 years of expectations? It’s probably enough to power the city for a few days.
We look upon the Sox and see an important ingredient on display: camaraderie. These players like each other. Such a simple thing. Such a rare thing. The danger in pro baseball no longer is 25 guys taking 25 cabs after a game, as it used to be. It’s 25 guys wearing 25 sets of headphones in the clubhouse. This team is different that way. These players talk with one another, play cards, listen to Ozzie, get sick of listening to Ozzie and play more cards.
We see a band of outcasts, leftovers and carpet remnants lined up along the third-base line. A.J. Pierzynski, the heart, the soul, the incendiary device of this team. Scott Podsednik, the survivor. Carl Everett, the serial glarer. Jose Contreras and Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, the Cuban expatriates and Yankees rejects. And Guillen, the manager who let the players be themselves, maybe because he was so busy being himself. He makes everybody feel good, no small talent.
There has to be room somewhere for Frank Thomas, the hard-luck star, doesn’t there?
The exploding scoreboard will go off because it always does pregame, but this time it will have more meaning. It will have late-October meaning.
Contreras, more rock formation than man, will step on the rubber and go into his windup, with 1,000 points of light flashing around him. He’ll throw a 95-m.p.h. declarative sentence to the first batter: See if you can hit this.
Is this a dream?
No. It’s a World Series game in Chicago. Peace at last.
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rmorrissey@tribune.com
