All the Way

Someday if I can untangle my emotions from my thoughts I’ll write a post about how baseball is the closest thing I have anymore to a religion.

In the meantime, the Cubs are in the playoffs and have fielded certainly their best team in my lifetime. Hopes are high around Cubdom and winning it all would be beyond a religious experience. Unless you’re a Cub fan (or maybe a Red Sox fan, or god help me for saying this, a White Sox fan) you probably think I’m crazy.

But keep in mind the Cubs haven’t played in a World Series in 63 years. That’s not just my lifetime, but my parent’s too (they were newborns at the time). The Cubs haven’t won it all since 1908, when my late grandfather was a precocious young nine-year-old.

So forgive me if I got all teary eyed last night when I watched Cubs Forever during the section where all the old players were talking about what it would mean to win it all.

And forgive me if I teared up again listening to longtime Cub fan Eddie Vedder’s new song “All the Way”. Mr. Cub himself, Ernie Banks, asked him to write a song for Cubs fans and he recorded it live in August. You can buy it for a buck here direct from Pearl Jam, or you can listen to rougher version here for free. The lyrics capture a lot of what I mean when I call baseball a religion.

As I said, hopes are high that this could finally be the year, but I must say I’m afraid of a 5 game series against the Dodgers, and these computer simulations make me nervous and bring back my nightmares after the All-Star Game. But when I listen to this song, I can almost touch it, almost feel what it would be like to win it all, and for right now at least, it’s still possible and closer than it’s been in a long time.