A PITY THAT ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE didn’t wait 15 years or so, after baseball had been invented, to visit America. Much impressed as the penetrating Frenchman was by what he termed America’s penchant for “voluntary associations,” he would have been at first utterly baffled by that looniest of all loony American voluntary associations, that of being a baseball fan, especially a fan of a particular team.
What makes this so loony is that in so many instances fans are more loyal to their local teams than are the players on these same teams. Grown men (and, increasingly, women), otherwise prudent in the conduct of their lives, have been sent into mild depression by the plummeting fortunes of the baseball teams they cheer for. I have a cousin who, having developed ulcers in his twenties, was beseeched by his physician to cease listening to broadcasts of Cubs games.
I’m a Cubs fan myself, but not a diehard one. I get angry instead of depressed by the team’s mismanagement and general bumbling. I don’t take their defeats to bed, and I certainly don’t take them to a psychotherapist. In those glum seasons when they have been out of the running as early as June–and this past year provided such a season–I have deserted them and mentally slipped across town to follow the Chicago White Sox.
Could Tocqueville have been made to understand the mystery of the decision, made by American boys when very young, to care about either the National or American League, one or the other but not both equally? I cannot pierce the mystery myself; all I know is that once the decision is made–National or American–it is locked in for life. The advent of the designated hitter in the American League has made those National Leaguers among us all the more confident in the rightness–and purity–of our original decision.
Yet, as a sensible fair-weather fan, I have set all this aside this year to follow and come much to admire the Chicago White Sox, a bit of disloyalty that has paid off nicely, now that the team is in the World Series. This decision has been made a bit more complicated by the fact that in Chicago, fans of the two teams tend heartily to despise one another, though it’s evident that Sox fans dislike Cubs fans more intensely than the other way round. There is even a class element to the rivalry, which Tocqueville, with his nose for social hierarchy, would have picked up quickly. The Cubs fans tend to be more middle class (or “stupid yuppies,” in Sox fan parlance), the White Sox more trade-union, working-class. A White Sox victory isn’t enough to please most of their fans; pleasure arrives only if, on the same day on the other side of town, the Cubs also lose.
The current White Sox have an appealingly working-class feel about them. They field a team that seems like nothing so much as Reagan Democrats. The two team leaders are Paul Konerko, a power-hitting and intelligent first baseman, and A.J. Pierzynski, the catcher and the kind of take-no-prisoners battler who is eminently dislikable unless he happens to be on your team, in which case you adore him. The lead-off man, a brilliant base stealer and bunter, is named Podsednik. They have a centerfielder who rides motorcycles in the off-season; a Japanese second baseman with no English; and two Cuban pitchers, both former Yankees, whom, it is rumored, George Steinbrenner offered to trade Fidel Castro Guantanamo to obtain.
Best of all is the team’s manager, Ozzie Guillen, a Venezuelan of 41 and a former White Sox shortstop, who regularly brings off the astonishing trick of being witty without quite being intelligible. He is the anti-Tony La Russa, a noncomputer manager, who makes most of his decisions based not on statistics but on instinct, and his instinct this past season has rarely been wrong.
The White Sox play small ball, which means they feature base stealing, bunting, strategic sacrifices: Get ’em on, move ’em along, get ’em in. Because of the team’s strong pitching, not all that many runs are needed to win games. The team has won a high percentage of one-run games. Such was the White Sox’s resilience in the first half of the season, if they were two runs behind in the seventh, you could assume a victory.
Since a World Series comes up in Chicago roughly once every 50 years, I probably ought to make an effort–which really means I ought to break down and spend the insane $1,000 ticket-brokers’ price–to attend at least one game. A shame, though, I can’t bring Tocqueville along. (“Ah, Monsieur Epstein, this World Serious, it provides an excellent chance to study up close many American moeurs, n’est-ce pas?”) He might find the game a little confusing at first. But the guy was a quick study, and, my bet is, by the fifth inning he’d have mastered everything about it, including the infield-fly rule.
– Joseph Epstein
