By Randy Richardson

The first one, a Youth-Small, was a blue so faded it looked almost gray. The red felt C hung literally by a thread. The bill, cracked dramatically in the center, obscured all the freckles of my tiny 8-year-old face.

In many ways, that frayed Cubs cap became my identity, as would the ones that followed it. Most everyone thought I slept in it, and I liked that they saw me that way. It was who I was, an island unto myself, different from all the others around me who wore black and white, the colors of the White Sox.

That cap. I wore it everywhere in the small world I knew, a square mile radius comprising Mrs. Crafton’s third-grade class at Willowview Elementary, the Dairy Queen, and the Ben Franklin five and dime, the latter two occupying space in a shopping plaza separated from my home by only a fence, making it all too easy to blow a weekly newsboy’s salary on soft-serve ice cream, penny candy and baseball cards.

The year I became a Cubs fan was the year that would define them for the rest of the years I’ve been a Cubs fan. It was 1969, and the Cubs, led by greats Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Fergie Jenkins and Ron Santo, seemed destined to grab that World Series ring that had eluded them for the sixty-one years that preceded it.

Destiny. A predetermined course of events considered as something beyond human power or control. Yet it's such a fragile conviction. Tip it ever so slightly and one's destiny can become another's. A black cat. A billy goat. An over-zealous fan. Anything, at any time, can alter one's destiny.

Most everything I knew about baseball I learned from baseball cards. A 1966 Topps Rookie Star card paired Cubs outfield prospects Byron Browne and Don Young. I didn’t know anything about either of them other than what I saw on that card and in that picture, Young looks like a young Mickey Mantle. It’s just his face, but he has that strong jawline and handsome brow with a farmboy innocence and searching eyes that make you think that this is not your average, ordinary, everyday big leaguer. Much different than the image of Young in his 1970 card, where he appears skinny and bespectacled. Young was one of those can’t-miss prospects when he made his big league debut at the end of the 1965 season, at the tender age of 19. But he had to wait four more years until he’d get his first real shot.

Destiny called in June of 1969 when the Cubs traded center fielder Adolfo Phillips for utility outfielder Paul Popovich. Don Young, now 23, was getting his second chance to be that Rookie Star. In fulfilling his destiny, he would, in turn, fulfill the Cubs' destiny. It was supposed to be a storybook ending, and I couldn't flip the pages on it fast enough. When I camped under sky-high pop-ups I’d thrown myself, I’d announce, in a voice that in my head sounded like Jack Brickhouse, that Don Young was calling for the catch.

In my backyard, Don Young always caught the ball. That wasn’t the way it happened for the real 23-year-old rookie on July 8. A shallow pop up lost in the sun for an instant. A towering drive is caught but rolls out of the glove when he bangs against the outfield wall. Two miscues. That’s all the opening the New York Mets needed to come back with three runs in the 9 ^th inning to beat the Cubs 4-3, cutting Chicago’s lead in the National League East to four games and causing a little rip to form on the C of my cap.

It would take the Mets two more months before their destiny would eclipse the Cubs'. By that time, Don Young's position in center field was being played by another rookie, Oscar Gamble. The Mets would go on to capture the National League pennant and finally the World Series crown. The button on the top of my cap hung precariously at the end of my first season as a Cubs fan. Don Young would never play another major league game. Three hundred seven career at bats. Career batting average: .218.

The Cubs always seem to have a can't-miss prospect waiting in the wings. When one falters, there's always another one to replace him. They represent hope, a future that is brighter than the past, something that Cubs fans can never seem to resist. No matter how many times their hopes have been dashed.

I traded my tattered 1969 cap for a plastic helmet, better to protect myself against further cracks in my already bruised psyche. The year was 1973, the Slowazoic Era in Cubs baseball. Jose Cardenal led the team in stolen bases that year with nineteen. Don Kessinger’s six steals ranked second. Matt Alexander, a second round draft pick in 1969, was a late-season call up and made Cardenal look like he was wearing lead shoes. When I played running bases, I saw myself as Alexander, a jackrabbit that could outrun any baseball. The Cubs, however, couldn’t see past Alexander’s batting average, which for two years hovered around the Mendoza line. His Cubs' career lasted all of two seasons. His major league career amazingly stretched seven more years, but he was used almost exclusively as a pinch-running specialist, something that it took the Oakland A’s to see in him. In nine years, he picked up the bat only 162 times while stealing 103 bases. Career batting average: .214.

With the departure of Alexander in 1975 came the arrival with much hope of Joe "Tarzan" Wallis. Joe Wallis, you had me at "Ah-ah-ah-AHHH, ah AHH, ahahahahahhhhh!" I bought into Joe Wallis, hook, line and loincloth. How could you not believe that a player with a nickname like his was not going to come swinging in Wrigley vines and rescue the Cubs from themselves. He'd reportedly earned the nickname because of his fondness for diving off motel roofs into swimming pools. Unfortunately, it was his career that took a dive. He was everything that a young die-hard wanted in a ballplayer. Except that he couldn't hit. Or field. Oh, the false allure of an awesome nickname. By the time he was traded to the Cleveland Indians for Mike Vail during the 1978 season, a crack developed in my plastic helmet. Wallis played five seasons in the majors, collecting 886 at bats and a bushy, untamed beard that made him look more like Bigfoot than Tarzan. Career batting average: 244.

When Scot Thompson made his debut with the Cubs on September 3, 1978, I'd forsaken Cubs caps. Eight years of losing went into the closet. In 1979, Thompson's rookie year, he hit .289 with 2 home runs and 29 RBI. It was enough to convince me that maybe this time it wasn't all just hype. They do that sometimes, these can't-miss prospects, they have these shining moments when you get a glimpse of the players they're supposed to be. But don't be deceived. It's nothing more than a trick on the eyes, a mirage that we see only because we are so thirsty for it.

Four years later, on April 29, 1983, manager Lee Elia calls on Thompson to pinch-hit with two outs in the ninth inning, Keith Moreland on base and the Cubs down a run to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Cubs, at the time, had a dismal 5-14 record. Cubs fans were growing restless in a season not even a month old and when reliever Lee Smith uncorked a wild pitch in the eighth inning that allowed the Los Angeles Dodgers to score the go-ahead run, they showered him with boos. This was Thompson's chance to revive a flagging career, to reverse his fortunes and at the same time reverse the Cubs'. But we all knew that wasn't going to happen before it happened. The boos hit especially hard when he struck out to end the game and dropped the Cubs to 5-15.

"Fuck those fuckin' fans who come out here and say they're Cub fans that are supposed to be behind you, rippin' every fuckin' thing you do." Elia ripped into the fans in a three-minute f-bomb laced tirade after the game. Maybe Elia knew what it was like, he'd been there as a player, a two-year big league career split between the Cubs and the White Sox. Career batting average: .203. What he wasn't was a Cubs fan, or he would have understood why sometimes all you can do to ease the pain is boo. In eight seasons, including five with the Cubs, Thompson hit five home runs and drove in 110 runs.

On June 1, 1988 the Cubs selected second baseman Ty Griffin from Georgia Tech in the first round of the amateur draft. A star for the U.S. Olympic team in Seoul, Griffin never got higher than Class AA. He apparently was unable to adjust to wood bats.

Earl Cunningham, a first-round pick by the Cubs in 1989, played for 11 years but never made the big leagues.

Lance Dickson, chosen in the first round of the amateur draft (23 ^rd overall) by the Cubs in 1990, made the majors in that same year but injuries kept the breaking ball pitcher from ever making it back.

Every year there’s a new symbol of Cubs’ futility, a can’t-miss prospect who couldn't be less aptly named because, it always turns out, he can miss. He can miss every major league pitch, every hanging curve. He’ll hold the bat when a fastball is thrown down the middle of the plate but can’t resist one up in his eyes.

Gary Scott and Kevin Orie, touted as the heirs apparent to Ron Santo, both were supposed to put an end to the seemingly never-ending parade of players starting the season at third base. Between 1991 and 1992, Scott went to the plate 175 times. Career batting average: .160. Orie fared only slightly better. After a promising rookie season in 1997, when he batted .275 and hit 8 home runs in 114 games, his average the following year had plunged mid-season to .181 and the Cubs unceremoniously traded him to the Florida Marlins. He would eventually return to the Cubs four years later but would play in only 13 more games. Career average: .249.

I believed all the hype, spent every penny on their rookie cards thinking like an insider-trader who’d one day hit the jackpot, and I cheered them on opening day. And predictably booed them at season's end.

I’ve got a stack of Brooks Kieschnick rookie cards in my closet, packed in a bin stowed underneath my underwear drawer, still in their protective plastic sleeves, as if somehow they’ll magically be worth something some day. Topps. Bowman. Upper Deck. Scooped them up at trade shows, deluding myself that the Baseball America National Player of the year and Cubs 1 ^st round pick of the 1993 amateur draft was different from all the others that came before him. But the Cubs, once again, misjudged. The former All-American pitcher was drafted as a hitter, but, it turned out, he couldn’t hit major league pitching. The Cubs gave up on him after two years and 119 at bats. Kieschnick’s career would end up stretching out over six seasons, but only because the Milwaukee Brewers revived it by converting him to what he was in college: a pitcher. Kieschnick retired in 2006. Career earned run average: 4.59. Career batting average: .248.

Now it is my son Tyler wearing the Youth-Small that is something like the one I started with in 1969, yet somehow completely different. His is dirty white with blue pinstripes and an adjustable plastic band in the back. I have a Cubs hat much like his that rarely is removed from the hook on which it hangs in my closet at home.

Maybe it is time that I take it off that hook.

It is April and the wind is blowing in from Lake Michigan, and my teeth are chattering and my toes are popsicles, and I’m sitting in section 400 in Wrigley Field's upper deck. I’m wearing a crisp off-white One Size Fits All, the maroon red C stitched into an unblemished white felt circle. The brim is pre-bent, the button on top bright red and tightly sewn.

This is not rational; it’s delusional. I’m ignoring one hundred years of overwhelming, irrefutable evidence and somehow reached the illogical conclusion that this is the year, that next year is finally here. We are a fraternity of fans unlike any other, bound not by winning, but by losing. We are the ultimate hopeless romantics, believing in fairy tales and Felix Pie. We are the die-hards.

It’s the bottom of the ninth. There are two outs, the Cubs are down 3-2 to the Cards with runners on third and second and first base open. Daryle Ward, one of baseball’s premier pinch hitters, is on deck. Cards’ ace closer Jason Isringhausen is on the mound. Felix Pie, the Cubs’ can’t miss prospect, is in the batter’s box with a full count. I, a long-suffering Cubs fan, know what’s coming. It’s inevitable. I see it before it happens, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it from happening.

“Don’t swing, Pie,” I murmur to myself. “Please don’t swing.” Now I pray to the baseball lords. One of these days they have to hear me, right?

Isringhausen winds up and unleashes a blazing fastball high and inside. Swish. The ump gives the signal to make it official. Strike three.

“He just swung at ball four,” I mutter to the ether. “He swung at friggin’ ball four.”

An over-served, over-exuberant Cards' fan jumps in the air and 16 ounces of Bud Light rains down. On top of my Cubs hat.

Randy Richardson, author of Wrigleyville murder-mystery Lost In The Ivy, is a Regular Loser. He is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine and his work has recently been anthologized in Chicken Soup for the Father and Son Soul and Humor for the Boomer's Heart. He serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association.