Baseball Players Get Older, and So Do We

When the Cubs beat the Cardinals in the 2015 Division Series, my family went to The View the night before Notre Dame beat USC and belittled my brother’s St. Louis-raised friend for three straight hours. When the Cubs opened the 2016 World Series in Cleveland, I took the train into Chicago to watch with friends at a bar. When the Cubs raised their championship banner in April of 2017, I opened the 1908-logo-adorned bottle of wine my parents had given me for Christmas and set the night aside to watch on my new couch in my new TV in my first post-college apartment, up in Minneapolis.

I sat on that couch again on Thursday, and watched the game again on that TV. They aren’t new anymore. They aren’t in Minneapolis anymore.

I worked a little during the early innings. I grabbed fifteen minutes of sleep during the middle innings. I watched intently each time the Cubs came to the plate after Alec Mills left the game, hoping to see Anthony Rizzo or Kris Bryant pinch hit, hoping for what I assumed, for Bryant, would be that final ovation and final tip of the helmet, and could conceivably be the same for Rizzo, though I doubted it would happen. I didn’t pay especial attention to Javier Báez. I thought Javy Báez would remain a Cub.

I’ve always been a little internally reserved about myself as a Cubs fan. They were my first favorite team—I’d hop down the first baseline in the sideyard like Sammy Sosa—but Tim Wakefield’s knuckleball in Hardball 5 on the family desktop and Nomar Garciaparra wearing the number five when I was five years old pulled me into the Red Sox, making the Cubs officially, in my childhood mind, my second-favorite team.

It wasn’t unusual in my family to drift away from the hometowners. My dad grew up on a farm out near Sioux Falls, becoming a Packers fan and, thanks to Willie Mays, a Giants fan, and so we were taught to not like the Bears and to do what we wanted with baseball. My oldest brother, Michael, liked the Orioles and Cal Ripken. My middle brother, Will, liked Cleveland and Jim Thome. I liked the Red Sox and Nomar, and later just the Red Sox, until I made the realization early in high school that I’d likely be going to college out of state, likely going to college somewhere alongside actual New Englanders, and that the Red Sox had morphed into something different from what I’d loved as a little kid so, what better time to make a change towards home? I had a geographic birthright to Cubs fandom. I’d consumed far more Cubs baseball than any other brand of baseball, listening on the radio to Pat & Ron countless times with my dad on the way to and from ballgames of my own, or in the yard or on the driveway while WGN crackled through a dusty speaker on his workbench in the garage. I remembered watching Corey Patterson blow out his knee on the TV in the family room. I remembered being told all about Gary Gaetti pitching the morning after Gary Gaetti pitched. Will had used a Sports Illustrated CD to get the proper address and helped me send fan mail to Sosa, Mark Grace, and Mickey Morandini before I could really even write. And so, like Michael had moved on from the Orioles when he went off to college, I transitioned mentally away from the Red Sox and fully onto the Cubs right around the beginning of the 2010 season, a year-plus before Báez would be drafted, the first stone in what would become probably the greatest era in the history of the Chicago Cubs.

Surrounded, then, by firmer, longer-tenured Cubs fans than myself, and with Will devoting himself more fully to heartbreaking teams from Cleveland than to perhaps anything in life until he met his wife (he was the one of us who never pivoted, though my impression is that he harbors some Cubs sympathies, likely again thanks to Pat & Ron), I was always conscious that I had less right to emotion with the Cubs than so many others did with their teams. I was conscious of that again Thursday night, after the news had broken postgame of Rizzo’s trade. I was conscious of that again on Friday evening, when Báez and Bryant had been dealt too—when the era had come to a feared but unexpected end.

We were going to a minor league game up in Round Rock with my wife’s work, and I had to run an errand down southeast of the city, so I took the toll road around and up to Round Rock and met her and her friends at a bar near the park. I got there at something like 6:15. The Cubs game started at something like 6:10. Pulling in, I caught the first few batters through my phone by way of Pat & Ron—a different Ron than the one from the radio on Dad’s workbench, but the one I’d been listening to for the whole of this era, and with that first name, a tie back to the childhood days. The era was over. The mood was somber. But the Cubs played on, and Pat & Ron remained, timeless and ageless as baseball itself, two familiar voices on the radio broadcasting a familiar but differently-outfitted game.

It was a quiet night at the park—we sat on the grass behind the home bullpen, where I had a good look at former Cub Tyson Miller as he warmed up and entered the game. We were, nearly exactly, a thousand miles away from Wrigley Field, where Miller had hoped to shine. He was not at Wrigley Field. He was playing in a suburb in front of a couple thousand suburban fans. He trying to break through, with no guarantee he will or would break through. Last year, he made two appearances for a major league division champion. This year, he’s pitching in Round Rock. Baseball’s ruthless, and it teases, and staying at the ceiling is as hard as reaching it. Back in 2016, that night with friends in Chicago, Michael had asked the, “But what are the Cubs if they’ve won a World Series?” question, pointing out that the identity would be lost, and I said something about how then we’d want them to keep doing it, to do it again and again and again, to win so many World Series that the Cubs became synonymous with dominance rather than torture. I thought that was possible. It seemed possible. The team had won 103 games. Three of its four best players that year were 26 and younger. Prospect after prospect had debuted and become an All-Star. More were said to be on the way.

There’s a thing about life in which the span of possibilities narrows as you get older. That night in Chicago, my life’s possibilities were wide, and so were those of the Cubs. That night in Minneapolis the next spring, things were a bit narrower—I’d begun work in a perpendicular-to-any-path-I-desired job, the Cubs were not quite favorites to repeat. On Friday, the window was narrower still; with five more years of running into life’s barriers and my own barriers behind me; with five seasons of not-quite and nearly and oh-goodness and “maybe?” and ultimately “no” answering the question of whether these Cubs could be a legitimate, honest-to-goodness dynasty the way those 90’s Yankees were. And the windows were narrower still for the players in question. Báez is a bit of an anomaly in this sense—he peaked in 2018, with some postseason heroics highlighting a work-in-progress 2016. But he, like Bryant and Rizzo, is not what he was hoped to be, what he looked capable of being. All three fell a little flat, or to put it more realistically, wound up somewhere in the middle or the lower half of their respective windows of possibility rather than at the top.

Pulling out of the stadium and driving back home down the interstate, my mind returned to those guys, the people, and the emotion of the week and weekend for them. And it returned to all the Cubs fans more Cubs fans than me, and I thought of one in particular, one who’d reposted a video of World Series highlights he’d made in 2016, and I turned on the song from the video and I listened to it through a couple times and then I muted the stereo, and I drove down the interstate in silence, and I cycled through the years the era had covered—Opening Day in 2014, watching in a Physics class where I was hopelessly outmatched; a spring series against the Cardinals in 2015 on TV in my dorm room when the Cubs were severely outmatched; an interleague game in Minneapolis that summer, with Kyle Schwarber in the midst of a loud entrance to the majors; the dramatics of that fall, spread across half a dozen spots in South Bend and Chicago; the excitement and dominance of that next spring, finishing college while the AM radio came into focus as it got dark; the thrill of that next summer, catching updates as I drove around the country; the sensation of that next fall, living back in Illinois for a few final months before exiting adolescence; and then so many games on internet radio in Minneapolis at work in the afternoons and evenings, and on TV in Minneapolis when I’d left the cubicle behind, and on the radio in southern Wisconsin as the Cubs couldn’t hold off the Brewers and I drove home from a traveling weekend in the mist, and on the radio again here in Austin during Lyft ride after Lyft ride after Lyft ride, and on the radio again here in Austin during hundreds and hundreds of pandemic-era Uber Eats deliveries, and then this year so often quietly on the computer in the afternoon while the puppy slept.

It’s hard for the era to be over. There are a surplus of reasons for this—sadnesses against sadnesses, from the personal to the interpersonal to silly little things like wishing it had worked out to go to Arlington and Houston for games in 2019. But one of the core reasons within all of these is one rather constant within the human experience—the passage of time is often accompanied by sadness. It’s often sad when time passes. It’s often sad when eras end. We like the new era often enough, but that doesn’t ease the sadness, because the prior one is still ending, which means one more stage of life is over, which means one more portion of death is complete. Anthony Rizzo is a Yankee. Kris Bryant is a Giant. Javier Báez is a Met. They’re young, still—decades of life ahead of them, seasons of baseball before their eyes—but they’re older than they were. And that’s hard. It’s hard that they’re older. Because it reminds us: So are we.