A Sad "Opening Day"

In its Friday, March 28 edition, the Wall Street Journal ran a maudlin, misleading, error-filled piece of nostalgia, "Opening Day."  Its author, Stephen Moore, is a former big shot with the right-wing Club for Growth and now a member of the Journal's editorial board.  He proved to be an even worse baseball pundit than economist.

Moore gets all gooey over his high-school days in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he cut class to attend Chicago Cubs openers at Wrigley Field.  The guy strains his credibility right there, as multiple sources list his year of birth as 1960.  Moore therefore could have been no older than 9 when he started ditching school and going to opening day.  One would think an economist would have a better grasp of simple math and historical periods.  As a Chicago native who attended the some high school as Moore, I know times were safer back then, but I doubt he and his 3rd-grade buddies were riding the L to Chicago in the middle of a school day. The column, while helping perpetuate what sports columnist Norman Chad has called "some patent on sports misery," contains all of the lame chestnuts (minus the Billy Goat) about the Cubs and their 100 years of futility.  I've got news for you, Stephen; plenty of Chicagoans (and ex-Chicagoans to boot) could care less about the Lovable Losers and resent having them held up as some type of symbol for our city. Moore would have readers think there is only one baseball team in Chicago.  Its recent World Series victory notwithstanding, the Chicago White Sox sport a record almost as poor as the Cubs.  In fact, while the Cubs at least were playing in the World Series in the '20s, '30s and '40s, the White Sox have played in exactly two Fall Classics during the last 88 seasons, in 1959 and 2005.  Unlike what he claims for Cubs fans, we Sox fans, including my 96-year-old uncle who attended his first game in 1921, didn't find this "builds character" or consider the old Comiskey Park "the only one perfect place on the planet," as he calls the vastly overrated Wrigely Field.  It only made us wait for the next season. Continuing with the character-building issue, he makes a very noxious comparison of Cub fans to Poles who have their country invaded every 25 years.  Perhaps he should call a friend of mine, a native of Lodz, Poland.  He spent his teen-age years in Auschwitz, the only surviving member of his family, in an underground bunker machining parts for V-2 rockets.  Being a Cubs fan (or any kind of fan, for that matter) is hardly comparable to being a slave laborer unless, of course, you're a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.  The piece, as noted earlier, is loaded with errors.  The Journal has already issued two corrections, one of which he has the Cubs three games in first in August 1978 when they were nine games behind; great work with statistics, Stephen.  He also claims Steve Bartman reached over the wall in the 2003 NLCS (you can plainly see it, even if Moises Alou came clean right after the column was written) and refers to "frosted malts" rather than "Frosty Malts," which might sound trivial but everybody loved them.  And if the errors aren't enough, he writes longingly of his friends, Ronald Reagan and Robert Novak.In his October 6, 2003 column, Chad wrote what I think is one of the greatest sentences ever written in sports journalism.  "This Cubs stuff -- fueled by cow-fed, Chicago-born sportswriters, film actors and bon vivants -- is the most overworked, overblown, overplayed pop theme in the sports culture today."  It will only get worse this year, if Moore's work is any indication.Well, Stephen, I look at it this way.  I've seen Game 1 of two World Series in Chicago, both of them White Sox victories.  That's sufficient reward for putting up with yet another tedious and presumptuous gusher about the Cubs.  And one last thing.  Our next president, Barack Obama, is a White Sox fan.