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You might think life is hard enough without being a Chicago White Sox fan. There's another way to look at it. The poet A. E. Housman tells of King Mithridates, who survived all the many venomous attempts on his life by incrementally dosing himself with poisons. I have survived to report that rooting for the White Sox similarly immunizes one against life's vicissitudes. Could this rugged wisdom explain why so many college professors are baseball fans? Probably not, since its darkness has affinities with the congenital pessimism of conservatives, and most academics say they are liberals. Yet our traditional national pastime's magnetic pull on professors—not to mention their resistance to any dean's suggestion to try anything new—makes one wonder.
What if we used professorial baseball loyalties as a Rorschach test? Think of a professor who hails from Nebraska or Alabama and in adulthood roots for the New York Yankees or the Los Angeles Dodgers. This person is so used to a winning college football team as to fall right in with a winning baseball team, and rooting for the overdog does not build character. Such a one, like the stereotypical conservative, is likely to be soft on big corporations, too.
It's quite another story with those who play rotisserie-league baseball. This is a parlor game. Participants mix and match players from any and all major-league rosters in search of their baseball Dream Team. Thus do they deny existing reality and fulfill their utopian urges. Utopians always imagine that they are in charge and not among those who need the perfecting touch of superior spirits. Rotisserie-league owners (the title of choice) follow sports pages, not baseball. They chart statistics. This is bean-counting in pristine form, and its only conceivable good is as career preparation for government work.
A non-Chicagoan who roots for the Cubs is probably a liberal. Assuming devotion to a team legendary for its ineptitude signifies a desire to identify with an underdog, which is the right thing to do. Artificially induced empathy is better than no empathy at all. But these nonnatives should search their souls to see if they are real Cubs fans or just garden-variety masochists. Either way, they really set me off.
As everyone knows, the Sox are the second team in the Second City. It has always been that way and still is. The World's Greatest Newspaper bought the Cubs, not the Sox; and until this season the tv station bearing its initials carried every Cubs game. The Sox get on only when the Cubs aren't playing. The Sox had to build a new ballpark to avoid being shipped to Saint Petersburg (Florida, but it might as well have been Russia). Since the Sox have historically been every bit as futile as the Cubs and have lower status, I call on all honest liberals everywhere to reconsider their baseball allegiance.
As a Chicago boy, I know what it means to be a real home-team fan. In recent years, I have come to believe, as the Sox ads say, that good guys—or girls, too, now—wear black. This belief may depend on a memory of past Sox uniforms, which alternately looked like clown outfits or pajamas. On the uniform front, the Sox are finally one up on the Cubs, whose uniforms were always—I admit it—adequate. And what's so great about Wrigley Field's ivy-covered brick walls? Players still get hurt running into them.
I became a Sox fan as soon as I was old enough to stay awake while lying in the dark on the living-room floor with Dad listening to the dulcet tones (that's what everyone called them) of Sox announcer Bob Elson. This father-son bonding was unavailable to fans of the Cubs, who back then played only day games (in God's own daylight, their fans said, and they had us there, though they never knew how unearthly bright the green grass of Comiskey Park under a black sky looked to a kid sitting next to his dad). Growing up before the rebellious sixties, I never once thought to quit cheering for the team my dad cheered for. One does not question laws of nature.
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