What's the world coming to?
Wednesday afternoon. This article made me so sad. It's a baseball game, folks! I don't care how long it's been since your team went to the World Series, that does not justify intimidating someone to the point that they have to be escorted from the stands by guards and are too afraid to show up to work. I'm sure a Cubs fan would just say that is because I'm a namby pamby southern California baseball fan, but that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
Let me say that I am a huge baseball fan. I didn't leave after they went on strike, I didn't leave after one of my teams (the Padres) went from first in the NL to worst in a single year, and I never stopped hoping for something great from my other team (the Angels) even after all of their many disappointments.
It was on my 19th birthday, in 1986, that I experienced the greatest pain (and learned the greatest lesson) of all, though: One strike away from putting the Angels in the World Series for the first time in the history of the club, Donnie Moore allowed a Dave Henderson home run in Game Five of the 1986 ALCS. Henderson's game-winning sacrifice fly off Moore then turned the series in favor of victorious Boston. And it all happened on my birthday. Plans for World Series celebrations to come turned to bitter tears and the end of my naive belief in the benevolence of the baseball gods. Did we turn on Donnie Moore? Did we chase him down and add our scorn to the misery he was already feeling? Heck, no! As a matter of fact, when I heard that he'd committed suicide a few years later, I was shocked and stricken. I said then what I'd like to say to Cubs fans everywhere now: It's a game. A wonderful, fabulous, magnificent game, to be sure, but, still and all, a game. No one will die if the Cubs don't make it to the Series this year. The sun will come up tomorrow morning and sparkle on the lake and the skyscrapers along Michigan Avenue and you will still live in one of the most vibrant cities in the world. Best of all, when February rolls around, pitchers and catchers will report to Spring Training, and everyone gets another chance to live their dreams, prove their worth, and break "the Curse".
Of course, it's a whole lot easier for me to be philosophical now that my Angels broke their own little mini curselet by winning the 2002 World Series, but that's beside the point!
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