The Cubs in ‘08: It could be, it might be…

Is this the year for the Chicago Cubs? As the all-star break wraps up, one of the big questions in baseball is whether the Cubs can end their 100-year drought and win the World Series.

To add atmosphere to the frenzied speculation, I present a relic from a quarter century ago.

Cubs cap, circa 1984

I bought this mesh-back cap in 1984 on my first (and so far, only) visit to Wrigley Field. A couple of Chicago-area buddies and I bought standing-room tickets for the privilege of watching from the back of the lower deck seats, behind home plate.

It was the full Wrigley experience that Saturday afternoon as the Cubs played the Philadelphia Phillies. It was the first National League ballgame I ever attended. Mike Schmidt, the Phils’ slugging third baseman, belted a home run into the bleachers. Cubs fans scornfully rejected it by throwing the ball back onto the field. At the seventh-inning stretch, a tottering Harry Caray — “Cub fan, Bud man” — led the crowd in singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

I lived just over a year in Illinois, long enough to absorb the intensity of the Cubs’ rivalry with the St. Louis Cardinals. My first Cubs hat was a wool one, but it was just a bit too tight and I eventually tossed it or lost it. So when I had the chance to buy a new cap at Wrigley a few years later, I jumped at it.

Mesh-backed caps flourished in the late 1970s and early 1980s, ultimately fading away. The first mesh hat I had was almost certainly intended as a fishing cap, but I wore it daily to the pick-up baseball league I played in as a kid in the mid-1960s. The red cap had a crown made entirely of mesh. My teammates called it (and occasionally me) “fly trap” because I learned how to trap flies with it on the bench and on batting helmets.

This Cubs cap is my only remaining mesh-backed cap, although there may be a few stashed somewhere that I’m forgetting. The cap brings back good memories of the Ryne Sandberg/Lee Smith/Rick Sutcliffe era. If the Cubs make it to the series — and I’m not trying to jinx them — I’ll definitely be rooting for them.

The Tris Speaker Baseball League cap

For those of us who grew up in Cleveland Heights and University Heights, Ohio, the intertwined “T” and “S” logo of the Tris Speaker Baseball League is a powerful icon. Everyone who played wore the same red and black wool cap.

Here, my Adam’s apple jutting prominently and skinny belt sagging,  I’m wearing my first uniform in 1968. I played for the Red Sox in the Junior American division, and we were one of the top teams. The league in the 1960s manifest the first stirrings of the “don’t hurt the kids’ self-esteem” fad that was to flourish two or three decades later. No official standings or statistics were kept (although I recorded every victory, loss, at bat and error in a small spiral-bound diary). The league’s idea was not to let the players get too big a head for winning or be wounded too much for losing. The season was rife with rumors that top players from the best teams would be traded to the lesser teams to balance things out, although no one was traded to or from our team.

I suspect the caps were uniform throughout the league to save money, but they were nice hats with a partial leather sweat band in front and elastic in the back to accommodate all head sizes.  We had to raise money to pay for the uniforms, and for many years a springtime ritual in Cleveland was for players in uniform to go knocking door to door and ask for donations into a canister emblazoned with the Tris Speaker logo. If you contributed, you’d receive a TS decal to affix in a door window so other players would know not to come begging.

There wasn’t a game when I didn’t dirty my uniform by sliding or sprawling in the dirt. My mother complained about always having to wash it, but I suspect doing so was a labor of love for her, knowing how much I loved to play.

I can’t swear that I thought so at the time, but I’ve long realized the significance of playing on the Red Sox in suburban Cleveland in a league named for the Hall of Fame outfielder who split his best years between the BoSox and Indians. Alas, the CH-UH recreational baseball league appears no longer to be named for the Gray Eagle. I can find no trace of the name on the Cleveland Heights municipal Web site.

I played one year in the junior divison as an infielder and pitcher, and made the all-star team. The next spring at tryouts, I made a spectacular diving catch at shortstop and knew right then that I’d clinched a spot in the senior division. I didn’t realize I was in for two straight years of misery, getting put on a team where the manager’s son played my position, shortstop. The first year I mostly sat the bench and played the late innings, much of it in the outfield. The second year wasn’t any different.

Forty years later, I still think back how much hinged on spearing that one line drive. If that ball were hit to me again today, I’d still go after it. That’s the only way to play the game.