By Donald G. Evans

The word Rookie is often used as a derogatory, as in “Rookie Mistake.” Rufus, my old assistant in Kennicott Park’s after school program, after swatting away an attempted shot, would chide the five-year-olds, “GET That OUT of HERE, ROOKIE!” Rookies are often subject to hazing rituals, ridicule and general lack of respect. Veterans sometimes insist the rookies carry their bags. Rookies are in the same lot as newbies, green horns, pledges and fresh meat. (Hey, prisons have Rookies, too, you know).

Yet here we are, pinning much of our hopes on not one but two Rookies. Geovany Soto, having played in only 18 games last season and 30 in all over parts of three seasons, qualifies, under the Major League Baseball definition, as a Rookie. He started two of three playoff losses to Arizona in last year’s post season, nudging veteran Henry Blanco off the roster and late-season acquisition Jason Kendall to the bench. He hit a home run. Soto, then, has some experience, but not enough to graduate.

Kosuke Fukodome, under MLB guidelines, is also a Rookie. Fukodome's nine years in Japan, his 192 home runs, his four home runs to help Japan win the first World Baseball Classic in 2006, the MVP award he won there that same year—none of it counts, Very tricky, these Rookie Guidelines. No college, minor league, international or overseas experiences entitles you to skip the year of indoctrination into The Bigs.

It is an indoctrination, but it’s also a test. In a full season of playing with the best, much can and will be learned about a player. The trajectory of a player’s career is determined largely on this first full season. Is he a starter? A scrub? Still developing? Good but not good enough that the team won’t go out and find somebody better?

Rookies generate perhaps more excitement than any other player because the road ahead is long and sparkling. If a Rookie, a kid, can arrive fully developed, then our team, Our Cubbies, might benefit from his illustrious talents for, literally, decades, to come. We hope that these Rookies will turn into All-Stars and, in turn, Hall of Famers.

Get out the checklist: Soto and Fukudome are All-Stars. Rookies and All-Stars. This happens rarely; in fact it has happened to the Cubs just three times before, most recently in 1955, when pitcher Sam “Toothpick” Jones made the squad. Other than that: catcher Toby Atwell in 1952 and Don Johnson in 1944.

Sam Jones no-hit the Pittsburgh Pirates 4-0 on May 12 in his “Rookie” season, becoming the first African American to accomplish the feat, but despite leading the league in strikeouts wound up losing 20 games for the 1955 Cubs (against 14 wins). Stan Musial once said Jones had the best curveball he’d ever seen, and indeed Jones led the league in strikeouts again in his second full season; he was 9-14. After just two years in Chicago, the Cubs traded Jones to the St. Louis Browns. He had a couple of real good years in the late 50s for the San Francisco Giants, including another All-Star season in 1959, but finished his career an average pitcher, winning 102 and losing 101 games.

Don Johnson hit .278 with two home runs and 71 RBI as a 31-year-old Rookie, and statistically that first full season was probably his peak. He did hit .302 the next season and scored 94 runs (10^th in the league) for the National League pennant winners (and would have been an All-Star again had the game not been cancelled due to the war), but his RBI total dropped to 58. After that he was a part-time player.

Toby Atwell’s best season was also as a Rookie, when he had career highs in batting average (.290), RBI (31), runs (36), hits (105), doubles (16) and games played (107). His Cubs career lasted just two seasons and his major league career only five.

Which brings up the point: great Rookies don’t always turn out great. The history of Cubs Rookies sadly mirrors the history of the franchise in general. Sparks that don’t turn to flames.

In 1989, the Cubs had the two most promising Rookies in the National League. Jerome Walton won the Rookie of the Year Award, and his fellow outfielder Dwight Smith was second in the voting. Walton hit .293 his Rookie season, including a 30-game hitting streak, and stole 24 bases; he was the best center fielder the Cubs had seen since, I don’t know, Rick Monday. His average fell to .263 the following year, fell again to .219 in 1991, and had plummeted to .127 by the time the Cubs got rid of him in 1992. He stole just 22 bases after that initial season, and he never again got a sniff of 30 straight games with a hit. Smith hit .324 in 1989, a year in which the Cubs won the National League East, but in four more seasons on the North Side he never approached that level of success again. He hit a low in 1991 with a .228 batting average, just three home runs and 24 RBI.

Kerry Wood struck out 20 Houston Astros on May 6, 1998 in what many baseball experts consider one of the all-time great pitching performances. The Astros managed just one scratch hit that day, in Wood’s third career win. He won the Rookie of the Year award in 1998 with a 13-6 record, despite spending the final month of the season on the disabled list. Wood’s sore elbow that season was just the beginning of arm problems that included Tommy John surgery in 1999, and partly because of that Wood never won more than 14 games. Though Wood has been resurrected as a closer this season, he has yet to graduate to the upper echelon of baseball’s great pitchers.

Mark Prior, often aligned with Wood because the two flame throwers came onto the scene at around the same time, struck out 147 batters in just more than 116 innings his Rookie year of 2002. Prior had his best season in 2003, going 18-6 with a 2.43 ERA and finishing third in the Cy Young voting in that almost season. But Prior missed the All-Star game that year with elbow problems, and was just 18-17 in three more injury-marred seasons and is now a part of the Cubs disappointing history.

Then there was Ken Hubbs. In 1962, he became the first second baseman to win the Gold Glove Award, and was voted Rookie of the Year. He was the best second baseman to come to the Cubs since Johnny Evers. But Hubbs was killed in a plane crash before the 1964 season.

That was around the same year Lou Brock was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals. Brock made his debut with the Cubs in 1961, and in his official Rookie Year of 1962 hit just .263 with 16 stolen bases in 23 attempts. The Cubs gave up on that raw talent, with different results than discarded raw talents like Corey Patterson, Hee-Seop, or Geremi Gonzalez.

Which brings up another point: poor or so-so rookie starts don’t always preclude future greatness. Sandberg was never a highly touted prospect; in fact, he was a throw-in as part of the Ivan DeJesus-for-Larry Bowa trade. In 1982, Ryne Sandberg’s rookie year, he started out 1-for-32, but recovered to put together a Hall-of-Fame career. Greg Maddux was the youngest player in baseball in1986, and debuted as a pinch runner in the 17^th inning against Houston before surrendering a game-winning home run in the 18^th. In his official Rookie Year of 1987, Maddux was a disappointing 6-14 with a 5.61 ERA; the next year began his streak of 17 straight seasons with at least 15 wins, a streak that encompassed four straight Cy Young awards. He, too, will be in the Hall of Fame.

The Cubs veterans mandate the team’s Rookies to dress ridiculously as part of their hazing. Last fall, after the Cubs clinched the National League Central title, rookies were required to walk from the ballpark in Cincinnati back to their hotel in female superhero attire. Carmen Pignatiello was Supergirl, Sam Fuld Batgirl, and Kevin Hart Wonder Woman. Mike Fontenot was in pigtails.

What will it be for Geovany Soto and Kosuke Fukudome? Little Bo Peep and Little Red Riding Hood? Blossom and Bubbles of the Powerpuff Girls?

And who will be Buttercup, the third Powerpuff Girl? Juan Mateo? Micah Hoffpauir? Is there another Sandberg or Maddux that will far surpass their early expectations?

The assumption is that these Great Rookies will be the future of the team, but too often those first hints of greatness are all you get. Jerome Walton, Dwight Smith, Ken Hubbs, Geremi Gonzalez…it’s a long list of players who never improved upon what they did that first year. There are so many obstacles in the way of greatness: injuries, plane crashes, lightning. Other players around the league figure things out about the Rookies, and sometimes the Rookies don’t reradjust. Confidence can be shaken. Circumstances might not be ideal.

Fukudome is 31, the same age as Don Johnson when he wowed the Wrigley crowds in his first season. Thirty-one is generally the prime of a baseball player’s life, maybe a little beyond. Soto never hit more than nine home runs or better than .273 in his first six minor league seasons, but emerged in 2007 as a would-be star. He’s still only 25.

It’s a Rookie Mistake to think a great first half of a first full season means much, but then again…sometimes it does. Billy Williams won the Rookie of the Year in 1961, and for the next 13 years was everything the Cubs hoped and thought he would be.

Here’s hoping our Rookies turn out more Williams than Walton.

Donald G. Evans, author of Wrigleyville sports gambling novel Good Money After Bad, is the Lovable Losers emcee. His stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, Pinyon Review, The Journal and Narrative Magazine, among others, and he will soon have a story appearing in the Xavier Review.

John Scheinfeld, the documentary filmmaker whose subjects have included Bette Midler, Andy Williams, and John Lennon, is working on a season-long project about the 2008 Chicago Cubs called We Believe. Much like we do at the Lovable Losers Literary Revues, John is trying to explore the relationship us fans have to our team rather than making a sports movie.

He is searching for Cubs artifacts to help in his filming, and asked if we might help him track some things down.

Here’s what he needs:

1. Interesting pieces of Cubs paraphernalia

2. Old photos of the Cubs playing--especially if there are family photos and oddities.

3. Film footage of yourself and family at Wrigley in the days when you could get away with that.

In other words, he’s not sure exactly what he wants, but something visual, rare and cool. If you have something like this, you probably know.

Losers: help out, if you can. There won’t be payment for the use of these items, unless it’s something Scheinfeld and crew are desperate to get their hands on, but they will give credit at the end of the film.

Contact us at the Web site and let us know what it is you have. We’ll find out whether or not the item is wanted, and then make the proper connections. Thanks in advance.

By Donald G. Evans

Rich Harden. I’m still getting used to this idea. I was in the car, listening to sports radio, when the announcement came. In Chicago, it was presented as a breaking news story, like we’d just won the war or scientists had discovered a cure for cancer. As I played with the AM tuner, nearly every station, sports-oriented or otherwise, carried details of the newly completed trade. Rich Harden.

Here’s what I knew about Rich Harden: he wasn’t Dan Haren. The two pitchers appeared on my baseball radar around the same time, and since they were both A’s with basically the same last name, give or take a “d”, I confused them. The A’s rarely orbit into my baseball hemisphere, so the Harden-Haren thing carried on quite a while. This was back around the time the Cubs were not winning the 2003 World Series.

Rich Harden. With a “d.” And a “Rich” instead of a “Dan.”

Sports radio personalities across the dial were giddy with the news. Fans from Bucktown to Bloomington called into shows to voice their opinions, all more or less slight revisions of: this guy’s great so long as he isn’t hurt, besides we gave up squat to get him. One caller did express disapproval of the trade, inspiring a sports show host to shout him down with an incredulous, venomous tirade.

None of that really gets at the source of my ambivalence. It’s just the fact: Rich Harden. One day he’s in A’s green and gold; the next day he’s in Cubbie blue. One day Matt Murton is standing in left field next to Reed Johnson, the next day Matt Murton’s gone. One day I’m eagerly awaiting Sean Gallagher’s next start; the next day I’m blowing him kisses.

When I was a kid, we played pickup games in Blackhawk Park, all day sometimes in the summer. If there were enough guys around, we’d field a whole team, but more often we’d play right field and pitcher’s hand out. We mostly played lob league. The way it worked, once we had enough guys we’d pick sides. Two captains would volunteer or be anointed to pick, then we’d throw the bat (fists and fingers) for first choice.

Picking sides was a momentous occasion. You wanted to be on a good team; you wanted to be on a team with your friends; you wanted to be on a team in which you believed. You wanted to play against a team of guys you could truly hate.

Roger Glisson was my best friend and also the best athlete our age in the neighborhood. It was the intersection between friendship and skill that you sought in a teammate. He was tall, lanky and strong; even as a 10-year-old veins popped out of his forearm. He had scars on his lip and over one eye, and a competitive fire that probably explained the scars.

You had to get Roger with the first pick.

Vince Santana would usually last until the second pick: he could run like the wind, had uncanny hand-eye coordination, could hit, and was a good, nice guy. We could pick up Phil Zmich in the middle rounds: he had some holes in his game but was a decent all-around player, lived down the block from Roger, and was one of the funniest guys around. We’d snag Ray Fabris, who walked to school with us every day and had surprising pop in his bat, late.

We didn’t always get everybody we wanted, and sometimes got guys we definitely did not want, but once sides were picked, late-arriving players excepted: that was it. These were Our Guys. Roger hitting a home run over the back park bench thrilled me nearly as much as though I’d done it myself. Vince turning a pop out into a home run filled me with admiration. Ray diving for a grounder sparked my pride. This was my team, and in order to love the whole you had to also love the parts.

Sometimes, during those long summer days, we’d get pounded. Maybe the other team had better players, maybe we were off and they were on, maybe luck factored into it. When the game ended, we’d hear the inevitable cry, “Same teams?” But that was us, not the conquerors. We wanted another shot, with Our Guys. We wanted to do better, with Our Guys. We wanted to dig deeper within ourselves, play better, do all we knew we were capable of, with Our Guys. We wanted to beat that punk Lennie and that burnout friend of Roger’s brother and, for different reasons, our friend Tommie Harrison, with Our Guys. We wanted to win a fair fight, and sometimes we would. With Our Guys.

Rich Harden. He is, based on Major League Baseball’s formula governing these things, one of Our Guys, but it doesn’t feel that way, not really. Not yet. The trade deadline has become a mockery of justice: excellent players get swapped for potentially excellent players, thus making (in the short term, anyway) good teams better and bad teams worse. Bye-bye middle class.

It’s a mad scramble. We launch guys like Greg Maddux, Jon Garland, and Alex Gonzalez, and we pick up guys like Cesar Izturis, Randall Simon, and Kenny Lofton. We lose a Paul Assenmacher; gain a Karl Rhodes. We get Rick Sutcliffe; we lose Joe Carter.

Ernie Broglio was acquired at the trade deadline.

Matt Karchner was going to be a nice addition to the bullpen during that 1998 run.

Do you remember how absolutely bonkers everybody was in 2004 when we got NOMAR?

Last year it was Jason Kendall—MY GOD! A catcher—FINALLY!

It’s an exciting process, don’t get me wrong. In a real rare case, like with Aramis Ramirez and Rick Sutcliffe, we get a guy who helps us in the short term and stays long enough to be considered a genuine Cub. Mostly, though: we’re just shuffling the deck.

We’re saying, “Pick new sides!” The chemical formula of the team has been altered, such that it wipes out what has gone before. While we might retain aspects of whatever it was that led us to where we are now, we’ll never recover that chemical formula whole. Not only now, but for years to come.

What would the Cubs have done with Lou Brock, Jon Garland or Joe Carter playing in Wrigley for virtually their entire careers? We’ll never know. What would have happened in 2004 had the Cubs NOT gotten Nomar? We’ll never know. Had Jason Kendall not been on last year’s playoff roster, might Geovany Soto have started Game 3 and perhaps made a difference? We’ll never know.

Rich Harden. Just last weekend, he lost to the White Sox and I didn’t care, one way or another. I was more concerned with Sean Gallagher and Sean Marshall and Rich Hill and Jon Lieber, all Our Guys who I felt, given the proper chance and a little luck, could get on a roll that ended with us in the World Series.

Rich Harden’s in Cubbie Blue now, and that makes me care a little. But there’s no history to my caring, no context. He’s a stranger. He might help, he might hurt, but either way it’s going to take some getting used to.

Donald G. Evans, author of Wrigleyville sports gambling novel Good Money After Bad, is the Lovable Losers emcee. His stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, Pinyon Review, The Journal and Narrative Magazine, among others, and he will soon have a story appearing in the Xavier Review.

Last year, on the cusp of the Cubs’ appearance in the playoffs, ComCast Sports announcer Dave Kaplan wanted to know if fans were committed to this team or too gun-shy from past failures to wear their hearts on their sleeves. Ted Norstrom, who was watching the broadcast, thought, “I’m all in,” and set about writing a CD about his beloved team.

Ted is from Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, just over the Illinois border, the son of former Wrigleyville denizens, and has lived through the disappointments of 1984, 1989, 1998, 2003 and, of course, last year. Ted, who played baseball all the way through childhood and high school, started writing songs in college and played in a band in the mid-90s. With his CD, Believe It, Achieve It: Music For Cubs Fans, Ted managed to combine his two great passions in life. With musical influences ranging from Jimmy Buffett to John Hiatt to Lyle Lovett, Ted has made a record that tells the story of Cubs fans and their addiction to a lovable losing team.

These are fun, sometimes funny, songs, catchy as pop tunes and endearing as timeless salutes to Our Team. Ted’s CD, ACHIEVE IT, BELIEVE IT is available on cdbaby.com and iTunes, as well as on his website www.musicforcubsfans.com.

In this video, filmed during the July 8, 2008 Lovable Losers Literary Revue at El Jardin in Chicago, Ted performs "Just One Bad Century," a song inspired by the website of the same name.

Just One Bad Century from Randy Richardson on Vimeo.

By Donald G. Evans

We hated them. I was too young to intellectualize the matter, and nobody else in the neighborhood had enough school to do so. We just hated them. There weren’t any on our street, none that ever went to the park, not even a single one at school. There were a bunch of them on the job, and at dinner Dad griped, “Don’t get me wrong; you get one by himself they’re nice enough people. But you put a group of ‘em together…” He held up a forkful of mashed potatoes and made a vague gesture we took to mean, “TROUBLE.”

At the annual church carnival, there’d be groups of them that would come after dark, and the inevitable trouble that ensued was part of the fun for the older guys in the neighborhood who liked to fight. Finally there was a stabbing and they stopped doing the carnival for a couple of years.

In retrospect, we obviously weren’t an enlightened neighborhood, but we were proud and the way it was was the way it had always been.

One moved next door.

We’d known for a while that the Fazzianos were leaving---Mr. Fazziano’s mom had died and they were keeping her house and selling their own. The block was in a bit of transition. In the past year three of my school friends had moved out to the suburbs, never to be seen from again. In those days, you moved to Wheaton or Westmont or Woodridge, you might as well have gone to Siberia—my friends never returned, and I never visited. Keep in mind, our annual family “vacation” was to Crystal Lake, which was an hour and a half drive, and twice (once when I was four and once when I was ten) we went to the Wisconsin Dells. Mom claims we went to Lamb’s Farm all the time, but I don’t remember that and neither do any of my brothers and sisters.

The time came. Mr. Fazziano got Dad and a few of the other dads to help him load the U-Haul, while Mom helped Mrs. Fazziano clean the house. Two days later, a beat-up Cadillac pulled up in front of our house. This Cadillac was covered in dust, the bumper rattled, the engine wheezed, and rust flecked off it like red confetti. With all the gray duct tape and cardboard and clothes hangers, it looked like a science project on how to avoid the auto parts store. A crack divided the front windshield in half.

Out of the Cadillac came one boy, then another, then another, a fourth boy. They all wore identical close-shaved haircuts we called “baldy cuts”; they all wore raggedy oversized gym shoes with the laces wrapped around the heels; they all had three-quarter length pants rolled up to their knees.

They all wore White Sox jerseys.

Our house went silent—probably the only time, other than maybe the middle of the night, that had ever happened. Two of the boys had loud red pinstriped jerseys, another one had the new navy jersey with a batter silhouetted over the Sox logo, and the oldest kid had a white jersey with CHICAGO written across the front in bold, modern font. Finally, the dad rolled out of the Cadillac—a big, round, sun-burned, paint-speckled man chomping an unlit cigar: he was covered, from head to toe, in White Sox gear. He had a bright red White Sox hat, a green shirt rolled over his shoulders, White Sox wristbands. The shirt…we couldn’t make it all out from the window, but it seemed to champion both the South Side Irish and the White Sox at the same time. He might as well have carried a billboard saying, “Go to Fuck!” which in time we would learn was one of his favorite expressions.

There were five of us kids peeking, along with Mom and Dad. It would have been quite the family portrait, all those shocked, horrified noses pressed against the dirty screen. Mom had baked brownies to welcome the new neighbors; Dad was planning to go over there and see if they needed a hand. Everything just went silent.

“Goddamn motherfucker!” Dad said first, though we were all thinking it.

The dad noticed us piled against our window and saluted us with his cigar, which might as well have been his middle finger.

This was 1977, and both the Cubs and the White Sox, by some miracle that hadn’t happened in any of our life times, were hovering near first place. We all knew, without being told, that we weren’t to play with the new neighbors, which would be tough, given that our houses were so close together our window-unit air conditioners nearly bumped halfway through our shared gangway.

At first a lot of the anger was directed at the Fazzianos, but eventually we got around to cursing the new neighbors, whoever they were and whatever they were called. While the dad unpacked the Cadillac trunk, the new neighbor kids chased each other around—up and down the sidewalk, across the street, between parked cars. It was like they owned the street already.

This was our new reality, and now we had to deal with it.

“I’m going out there,” Dad said. Mom touched his arm, said, “Don’t do this!”

Dad charged out the front door of our brick bungalow without buttoning his shirt or fastening his belt buckle. He got to the porch, cigarette behind his ear, hair disheveled, and glared. He held his glare until it was acknowledged. The new neighbor dad tipped his Sox cap and said, “Jesus fucking Christ! Stopped at a beef joint on the way over here. I get my hot dog: no fries. No fucking fries: that’s some balls. Why not be honest about it? They know and you know: if you’re getting the hot dog you’re getting the fries. You add it all up, this little hot dog gets close to where you coulda got a steak sandwich on the South Side.”

The new neighbor stood behind his open trunk, his head bobbing over it. “I’m Woody,” he ended.

A couple things here. One, this would become a theme—Mr. Woody complaining about the ridiculous prices on the North Side versus the South Side. He seemingly could not buy anything in our neighborhood, which was a blue-collar neighborhood, without making a big deal about what it cost, and citing a litany of places on the South Side where you could get the exact same thing at significantly cheaper prices. The implication seemed clear to all of us, especially given Mr. Woody’s tone, which managed to be both jovial and insulting at the same time: the South Side was better. Second, the Sox roster that summer included an aging, rotund knuckleballer named Wilbur Wood who everybody called Woody. Everybody called Mr. Woodruff Woody. Coincidence, or just a dark foreshadowing of things to come?

Dad nodded in such a way it could not have been interpreted as friendly. We were all still staring out the window, waiting for some sign—a blueprint, perhaps—on what to do, how to act. The new dad shuffled back to his trunk and that’s when we saw the license plate: NO1SOXFAN. As an afterthought, Mr. Woody, unflappable, looked at the window, yelled, “I get the grill going I’ll have yous all over.”

* * *

The 1977 Cubs had Ivan DeJesus and Manny Trillo up the middle, Bill Buckner at first, Bobby Murcer and Jerry Morales in the middle of the order, Big Daddy Rick Reuschel as an ace and Bruce Sutter as its closer. It was not a Hall of Fame cast, exactly, but there were enough good players having good enough years that by the time the Woodruffs moved next door the whole neighborhood was convinced this was our year. We were in first. None of us, to that point, gave much thought to the White Sox, except during the City Series. The Cubs were on WGN and the White Sox on Ch. 44. We didn’t get UHF in our house, and the same was true of most everybody else. I mean, you could get it a little, with a lot of fuzz, if you played endlessly with the rabbit ears on the top of the set, but basically it was futile.

The fact was, the White Sox were in first place, too.

The Woodruffs immediately hung a huge White Sox flag over their front porch, where most of the houses put their American flag or their Cubs flag. The four boys all had the same initials—DAW—and I constantly confused Dave for Donny for Danny for Doug. They all spouted off about Eric Soderholm being better than Ron Santo ever was; building Richie Zisk up to be a Hall of Famer; thanking us for Steve Stone, Don Kessinger and Oscar Gamble; going on and on about Ralph Garr, Jorge Orta and Chet Lemon. It seemed as though the DAW boys were not born into the Woodruff family so much as recruited, much like a gang. As White Sox operatives, they were informed, tough and relentless.

The Woodruffs did not rent a van or truck, but rather Mr. Woodruff made countless trips back and forth from the South to the North side in his falling-apart Cadillac. Nobody was outright mean to the Woodruffs and some of the neighbors were even civil, but it had to be clear to the Woodruffs that they were not wanted. Mr. Woodruff, though, was relentlessly jovial. He seemed unfazed by the neighborhood’s cool reception of he and his family, and continued right on telling his profanity-laced stories and laughing heartily at their conclusion.

Mom took her cues from Dad, and Dad outwardly hated the Woodruffs, so Mom kept her distance from cheery, beer-drinking Mrs. Woodruff. We took our cues from Mom, who was around all the time while Dad spent most of his time at the job or in the local gin mill or sitting with his white socks propped up on the ottoman in front of the TV set. Mom advised us to be nice to the new neighbors, though it was clear to both her and us that there was a line we weren’t to cross.

Danny wound up in Miss Imbergia’s class, and was also in the Robins reading group, and on top of that he sat right in front of me. It was that time at school when the weather had already turned, and everything around us screamed summer, but due to snow days and other nonsense I didn’t understand we were stuck in that stifling classroom months after everybody, including the teachers, it seemed, had ceased to care. The beautiful sunshine, on full parade through ancient, paint-sealed windows, taunted us through long, dreary sweaty days.

When we got together in our reading group, Danny, unlike the rest of us who muttered the words of our reader dutifully, read passages with flourish, like he really enjoyed it. All day long I tried to look past his bristly haircut to the front of the class, but I couldn’t help becoming interested in the frenzy of activities taking place on, in and around his desk. It was strict law in Miss Imbergia’s class that you focused on the lesson, but Danny was constantly lining up spitballs in the pencil groove, or making little army guys out of eraser heads, or pushing a triangular paper football from one end of the desk to the other. Then, at all the right moments, Danny would make things disappear and either answer Miss Imbergia’s question right or miss it in a way that seemed earnest and hopeful. He never got in trouble and it was clear Miss Imbergia, stern though she was, had a soft spot for the new kid.

At home, we never invited the DAW brothers to play softball behind the alley or Kick The Can on the street, and even though everybody cut through everybody else’s yards, with exceptions for The Barneys and their huge German Shepard and Mrs. Ragdale and her wasp spray, we never stepped foot in the Woodruff’s backyard. With the weather turning sultry, Mr. Woody spent every evening after work either out back barbecuing or on the front porch. Either way, the White Sox were on the radio, if they were playing, and the early summer buzz of the neighborhood was punctuated by the long, screeching epitaphs that emitted from Mr. Woody’s foul mouth and the sound of flesh slapping flesh in the unmistakable tones of high fives. The DAW brothers screamed along, too, and they also swore like adults, though not so much around Mr. and Mrs. Woody. On the playground, Danny swore all the time—his favorite phrase was “jagoff motherfucker,” said, ala Mr. Woody, in a tone both insulting and jovial—but had this uncanny adult radar that helped him clean up his language most reverently at all the right times.

As we scurried around our house and yard and alley and street, I found myself thinking about Danny, and sometimes sneaking peaks into his yard, which seemed full of life and fun in ways that I hadn’t quite experienced. What it was, partly, I think, was that Mr. Woody, tough as any other dad at times, seemed to treat his boys with a certain respect that the rest of us kids, second-class citizens all, were not allowed. Like, Mr. Woody would ask the DAW kids a question to which he did not know the answer, fully expecting or at least allowing for the possibility, that his sons knew more than him on that subject. Or when one of the DAW kids messed up, Mr. Woody was more inclined to tease rather than lecture, as adults did with friends they accepted despite their imperfections. I don’t know how I knew or thought all this, given the unofficial ban on all things related to our neighbors, but I did.

We were counting down the days until school let out when I got caught staring dreamily out the window. Mr. Imbergia asked me a math question but I’d lost my place in the text book, plus I hadn’t really done my homework, plus math wasn’t my thing to begin with, and she let me stumble around like a complete idiot before turning it into a lecture on focus to the whole class. All my classmates looked at me disapprovingly during the entire length and breadth of the speech, which seemed to spin endlessly into the sticky horizon. While this was happening, I noticed Danny shuffling something on his lap and as soon the coast was clear I inspected more closely to discover that he had baseball cards arranged on his lap in about six separate piles.

“Dad let me get two packs yesterday for going for cigars,” Danny said later at recess, while he waved to Mr. Schulze, the gym teacher, monitoring proceedings from a distance. “Three more jagoff cocksucking Cubs!”

I didn’t know then that this combination of bitterness and admiration I felt toward Danny amounted to envy, but I could feel his draw.

“Which ones?” I asked.

My baseball card collection was expansive, but I was really only interested in Cubs and stars, that year especially, and frankly Steve Ontiveros excited me more than Pete Rose any day of the week.

“Willie Hernandez, Mick Kelleher, Larry Biittner,” he ticked off.

I had Kelleher, but needed Hernandez and Biittner. “I got some Sox I can trade you,” I said.

“Who do you got?”

“Clay Carroll, Mike Squires, Richie Zisk…I’ll have to check, I’ve got more.”

This exchange seemed innocent enough, but in retrospect it was the first domino. We were logical trade partners not only for Cubs-Sox, but also National League-American League. We started bringing our cards to school, and our recess and lunch time bargaining sessions relieved, like a morphine drip, a little of the relentless pain of those last excruciating days. I organized the cards at night and invented trade scenarios, the possibilities endless since both me and Danny were buying up new packs at a decent rate and I never knew who he’d bring to the trading table next. Meanwhile, the Cubs were winning and I remember, with the fondness one later has for an old girlfriend, the speed at which I’d race home to watch the final innings of those day baseball games.

Meanwhile, the Sox kept winning, too, and I started to pay more attention, in part as research into the value of my bargaining chips. One night, Dad caught me fussing with the rabbit ears to get some kind of picture and he said, “What the hell are you trying to do?” I’d already seen enough: a backup infielder named Jack Brohammer had had a three-hit night, and I knew how Danny thought and knowing how Danny thought I knew, as I thumbed through my shoebox to find my Jack Brohammer card, that Jack Brohammer’s trade value might never be higher than tomorrow at recess.

“Nothing,” I said.

My card collection grew, and as it did so too, I suppose, did my friendship with Danny. The last day of school arrived, finally--a half day, no work, just a bunch of kids celebrating the end of something we all wanted to end, and the official beginning of summer. The outdoor public pools were filled, the beaches sweaty, there were rumors of cookouts and block parties, advertisements for neighborhood festivals and church carnivals, and plans were underway for our Crystal Lake “vacation.” Softball and little league seasons were off and running, big-release movies out in theatres, and the trajectory of the baseball season had angled vibrantly and spectacularly in an upwardly Chicago way. Our days now could be devoted to everything that seemed important.

I was more ambivalent than I should have been. I had wanted more than I’d ever wanted anything, for that school year to be over, but still there was a dead feeling I couldn’t explain. I suppose I knew there’d be little chance to interact with Danny, that though we lived right next door our baseball card trading sessions would necessarily end. I missed that already, and I missed, too, the exposure I’d had to a kid who seemed incredibly sly and genuinely nice at the same time, the time I’d spent with somebody who was a natural complement to my own personality, whatever that was.

The last day of school coincided with the City Series between the Cubs and White Sox, a one-game exhibition contest played, that year, at Comiskey Park, and in all the giddiness of that final half-day celebration, with kids laughing and cleaning blackboards and laughing some more and receiving rare praise from Miss Imbergia, Danny invited me to come with his family to the game and I accepted.

This impending event weighed on me immensely. There wasn’t much time for me to invent a plan and when I saw Danny around the house he, as well as Mr. Woody, took it for granted I was going. There was no conversation between Mr. Woody and Dad; Mr. Woody just took me at my word that I could and would take the last ticket. I’d started to play with Danny some during the day while Dad was at work, and there was a tacit understanding with Mom that it was okay so long as we wrapped it up well before Dad came home. Trading baseball cards had been our way in; soon we were picking each other as teammates for lob league games in the park, rattling our bikes over plywood and brick ramps in the alley, and conspiring to get fireworks for the Fourth of July.

I don’t remember all the details about how it happened that I got permission, except that I put off the awkward request until the night before and that I tried to think as Danny thought, since Danny had such a knack for easily turning things his way, and that I used my final good report card as leverage. The one tactic I’d thought up in those days leading to the conversation with Dad, one that I think worked, was deliberately and only referring to it as The Cubs Game and making no mention of the White Sox whatsoever. I wanted Dad to see it as his son taking advantage of the new neighbors, a son so beholden to the Cubs that he would put up with anything, even that.

Mr. Woody dressed in a Number 28 Wilbur Wood uniform. Not just the jersey: the whole uniform. He had the cap, the jersey, the pants, the stirrups. He had a paunch, just like the real Wilbur Wood. The only difference was that he wore gym shoes with the shoelaces tied around the heels instead of spikes. He looked, depending on your angle, like a Wilbur Wood impersonator or a player suited up for the game. Nobody, including Mr. Woody, found this that remarkable.

The car ride down to Comiskey was like a roller coaster ride. Nobody wore seat belts back then, and I don’t think car seats had been invented, and the four DAW brothers were piled into both the front and back seats, and they played a game, while we were driving, in which they tried to fight their way up or back. DAW bodies were slinging every which way and the danger as we sped down the Dan Ryan seemed intensified by the fact that we could see the highway zip below us through a big hole in the floorboard and, to a lesser extent maybe, that the interior was covered in about 80 percent fur.

I’d never heard of a tailgate party until we pulled into the lot. Mr. Woody, practically a professional griller, made brats, passed out beers and RCs, and talked to everybody around us or even just passing us. Everybody was his friend: that was the way it seemed. He laughed and he teased and he pretty much let the DAW brothers and me do whatever we wanted so long as we didn’t leave the parking lot.

I had a Cubs hat perched on my head. The teasing and cajoling intensified as we got closer to game time and as Mr. Woody got deeper into his cooler of Falstaff. I don’t know who started the movement to douse my hat in lighter fluid and throw it in with the burning charcoals, but I suspect it was one of those situations where Danny instigated the whole mess and got off scot-free. The moment it happened I was horrified, but everybody was so great about it, like a ritual hazing in a kind fraternity, that by the time the red “C” turned to ash I was no longer angry or sad, just resigned.

The fireworks! When that scoreboard exploded, and it did so three times, the raucous night sky, ablaze in red, blue and green, seemed like an embodiment of the perfect Chicago night. As the last colorful streaks of the last colorful explosion fizzled in the night sky, somebody from the tailgate party started a movement to replace my hat and before I really fully comprehended the magnitude of what was happening a navy blue White Sox hat lay askew on the top of my head.

At the end, the crowd swayed in unison, and I swayed along with them, singing, “Na, na, na, na, Na, na, na, na, Hey, Hey, Hey, Kiss Them Goodbye.”

The party continued all the way back across town. We were up to our chins in cotton candy and Cracker Jack, and I felt a part of it all, if only as the good-natured antagonist, and I swear I’d forgotten all about that White Sox hat that sat, still, on my head.

“What the GODDAMNED HELL!”

I immediately understood my error. Dad could not have been more disappointed or irate had I come home with a tattoo or an afro, or wearing gang colors. I think he could more easily have understood if I’d wanted to dress in drag. This, though…it was the ultimate insult to him and everything for which he stood, and the only recourse, in his mind, was to somehow reverse this blight on the family crest. He stormed over to the Woodruffs’ yard, where Mr. Woody, still dressed as Wilbur Wood, was guffawing amidst swirling cigar smoke, and said, “What have you done to my son?”

Mr. Woody chuckled, which was the wrong thing to do. I don’t remember it all, but the part that stands out is Dad and Mr. Woody wrestling but not throwing punches on the Woodruffs back lawn, and me, all this in the deep part of the night, watching from over the fence in our backyard, half-hoping Mr. Woody would win. They trampled a poinsettia plant and toppled a tomato plant, and finally a bag of peanuts, presumably left over from the game, fell to the ground, ruined, it seemed. Mr. Woody stood up, brushed dirt off his pinstriped pants, pulled up his stirrups, and said, “Go to fuck!” He picked up a peanut off the ground, deshelled it, tossed it in the air, then maneuvered his mouth below the descending legume, into which it landed. He announced, “You can stay and have some peanuts and beer or leave, but I’m not going two out of three falls with you.”

Nobody needed to tell me, as glow turned to haze in the pitch-black summer sky, that our neighbors were officially and absolutely the enemy. There would be times, over the ensuing months, when I managed to sneak a few minutes with Danny, but not many. He had a subscription to Sports Illustrated, and when he showed me the cover featuring both the Cubs and White Sox (the headline was, “Chi, oh my!”) it seemed, momentarily, like an olive branch or an omen or an overture, something that meant enemies could live in harmony; but it would never be so without the consent of my dad, and I would never get that.

The Cubs imploded, relinquishing first place in early August and free-falling all the way to .500 and a fourth-place finish. The White Sox clung to first until late August, when Milwaukee wrangled away the prize. I found myself sadden at both demises. It was the Yankees and Dodgers in the World Series, with predictable hero Reggie Jackie standing in the spot we’d dreamed would be occupied, depending on which side of our fence you lived, by Buckner or Zisk.

By the end of that summer, White Sox flight had fully infected the neighborhood. The moves – the Carbonellis went west, the Prichards north, and the Cincinellos east – were often blamed on bad schools or crime or small backyards, but it couldn’t have been a coincidence that in each case the families hated the Woodruffs and were convinced more like them were on the way. The theory was that the Woodruffs had greased the way for more White Sox lovers to congregate, and Dad fully bought into this theory, spouting off at dinner that the bastards always arrived in groups, that they were most comfortable around each other, and that once this happened property values would plummet. By the time we’d moved to Elmwood Park, where, I’d later learn, our neighbors included fringe Mafia players, the For Sale Sign had been posted on the Woodruffs lawn, making, I suppose, the move unnecessary, except that for Dad and others like Dad the plague had descended and the neighborhood would never again be safe from it.

I of course never saw Danny again, as I never saw any of my friends from the place I still consider the old neighborhood, and it would be another decade before I openly rooted again for the White Sox. I wonder, to this day, if Danny thinks about me as I sometimes think about him, and whether regret is possible in a world, childhood, in which all the bad decisions are made by others, and in which bad decisions are basically irreversible.

Donald G. Evans, author of Wrigleyville sports gambling novel Good Money After Bad, is the Lovable Losers emcee. His stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, Pinyon Review, The Journal and Narrative Magazine, among others, and he will soon have a story appearing in the Xavier Review.