Coming Home

It's Opening Day. It's always a good day.

“[Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall all alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

I think about this quote from Bart Giamatti a lot, and how it kind of makes hockey, with all of its obvious faults, the better friend? Like, it's easier to be a companion in the summer, outside, when everyone's in a better mood. But hockey...hockey sits next to you in the dark of winter, in the dingy bar, when you're down and out, and even if it's not the best person, it's there when you need companionship more.

But anyway, that's not why I'm here. It's Opening Day. Everyone feels good about Opening Day. I'm feeling better about it than I have in a while. Why? Because this summer, I'm coming home. That's right, there's a new Cubs hat in the house (if only just a workout hat at the moment). I'm on the bandwagon again. I tried baseball as just an observer. It has its perks, but it's just not the same.

Why? Well, for the first time since 2020, and maybe earlier, it feels like the Cubs actually want to win the World Series, instead of, "Hey, if it happens, great! Otherwise, whatevs!" Signing Alex Bregman, trading for Edward Cabrera, the Crow-Armstrong extension (though it probably could have been longer if it had been for more, but that's tomorrow's problem), suggest a team that's finally willing to throw its weight around a bit. No one dwarfs their division the way the Cubs do in the NL Central, and at least for one summer, they're going to act like it.

Does that mean the Cubs will actually get one over on the Brewers? Did we trade baseball inferiority for our Bears triumph? There's no getting a handle on the Brewers. They'll produce two or three new relievers who strike out a third of the hitters they see for no discernible reason. They'll rehab Kyle Harrison into the starter the Giants and Red Sox both concluded he could never be. It's just what they'll do and it'll suck and it'll be infuriating.

But this is where the offense dries up. Yelich finally gets old, and his inability to actually pull the ball comes home to roost. Chourio already has a hand injury, and those tend to linger. They'll bark a lot about how they don't do things like everyone else, where contact and speed reign supreme. That can work for a season, but not buying it again. Maybe William Contreras hits for power again, but they'll need more than that.

However it goes, one can't ignore the urge to savor baseball in 2026, with no guarantee there will be baseball in 2027. Even partial baseball in 2027 would do some pretty big damage to the sport. I don't think we'll get there, because there's too much riding on MLB's next TV deals for them to sacrifice any part of the 2027 season. But we can never be totally sure how stupid and greedy these owner assholes will get. These guys are never afraid to blow off their toes for the $1 in front of them instead of the $5 that's farther down the road.

It's a balance now, with the expanded playoffs draining the MLB season of some drama and stakes, with the charm of baseball being that it's there. It's always there. Every day. Which is what people really love about it. It's so easily found, left on the shelf for a day, a week, however long, and then you come back to it and it's still there. Teams basically being guaranteed playoff spots, essentially, removes some heat from it all, and the there feels more just there. But I suppose the threat of it not being there next summer makes this summer's there feel more vital.

But today is about thinking about that feeling of a warm day, at about 4pm, hitting the bus or train back home from Wrigley, looking around at all the schlubs who had to work that day but you didn't. Sitting in the upper deck and looking out toward the lake as the breeze passes over your beer, and all the complications of every day seem that much farther away. The sounds of the game that still cut through the humdrum of the stadium, the same way they have for over 100 years now. Hey, it'll even be warm today! Until it hails live squirrels or whatever the forecast is.

Let's go Cubs.