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The Family Room by Michelle Martin

June 8, 2008

True blue?

It was a Friday night at a minor league ball park — the Steelyard, to be exact, home of the Gary Railcats, defending champions of the Northern Independent League.

And it was 9 p.m. and it was raining.

When I suggested it might be time to head home, Frank, outfitted in a nifty Railcats batting practice hat, didn’t want to go anywhere.

“It’s stopping,” he said. “They’re going to keep playing.”

Caroline just kept reading one of the seven books she brought with her. She likes sports well enough — she pledges loyalty to the White Sox and the Bears, and she likes playing basketball — but ask her to spend more than about 15 minutes watching a game, and she starts looking for reading material.

Frank, on the other hand, will watch just about any game, anywhere. He’ll have a rooting interest before it starts (never mind that he’d never heard of the Railcats until the day before the game, when we told him a family friend had invited us) and he’ll want to stay until the last out, the last whistle, the closing buzzer, or, in hockey, the last punch.

If he’s at home, he’ll play along, setting up a game between, say, the Cubs and Astros on his sister’s Nintendo DS, while the same two teams go at it on the TV. The only difference is that when he plays, the Cubs almost always win.

He’s the only first-grader I know who grabs the newspaper at breakfast. He likes to check the standings, and then the calendar to find out when there is a game on broadcast TV. He’s already started lobbying for cable.

His allegiances so far have been intense but short-lived, often limited by the length of a season: the Blackhawks, then the Chicago Wolves and Pittsburgh Penguins, now the Cubs.

Loyalty, we think, is a good thing. So is hope. But when does loyalty turn into an inability to remove the blinders from your eyes? When does hope turn into denial? Some Cub fans are clear-eyed about their predicament: they know what they’re getting into each season; they just can’t break the habit. Others really think every year might just be the year.

Those of us who root for the White Sox see Cub fans’ misplaced loyalty to perpetual losers as an affectation, more a loyalty to a stadium than to a sport.

This is the second year of Cub fandom for Frank, despite my best efforts to keep his attention on the South Side. He tells me he’s part of a group trying to convert a first-grade classmate from the White Sox to the Cubs.

I can’t help but enjoy wartching him watch the games, even when he switches sides in the middle, which he’s been known to do — although not, so far, to the Cubs.

He brought home a worksheet from school that asked what he learned this year. His answer was “to draw self-portraits.” Asked another thing he learned, he wrote, “to read.” Asked what he hoped to learn next year, he wrote, “to find out who the best player on the Cubs is.”

And who knows? Maybe this will be their year. The Cubs had the best record in baseball on June 1 for the first time since 1908. For Frank’s sake, I hope so.

As long as they’re not playing against the White Sox. If they are, we can go cheer on the Railcats together.

Martin is assistant editor of the Catholic New World. Contact her at [email protected].