Trying to get worked up for Cubs-Brewers
Posted: Monday, July 28, 2008 8:34 AM
I know this is a big series beginning today between Chicago and Milwaukee, as big as any baseball has seen this year. And I’m trying to get worked up about it, I really am. But my brain refuses to hear “Cubs” and “Brewers” in the same sentence without telling me to yawn.
I’ll be paying attention anyway. It is, as the Brewers announce on their website, a “showdown,” and by tonight I’ll have convinced my brain that it’s worth watching. Just the same, I know I’ve never in my life thought of a Cubs-Brewers series as crucial.
It’s like getting all worked up over an NFL showdown between the Arizona Cardinals and the Cleveland Browns, or a playoff-preview NBA game between the Clippers and the Grizzlies. Even if the game is genuinely important and the teams actually good, your subconscious keeps telling you these are loser franchises. They’ve never been important in your lifetime, and if you remember one being good at one time, the other wasn’t good with it. You’re conditioned not to care.
It works the other way, too. The Red Sox and Yankees could be fighting for last place and you’d still get up for the game. It’s the same for the Lakers and Celtics, Notre Dame and USC, Michigan and Ohio State, Florida and Florida State and all the other traditional rivalries. Whether the teams are good at that moment or not, you remember all the times they were good and the game had championship implications. And if you don’t remember those times, the writers and talk-show guys will spend the days before the game telling you why it’s the biggest rivalry since Cain and Abel.
There are no such stories to recall about the Brewers and Cubs. Usually, when the Brewers host the Cubs, it’s little more than a road trip for Cubs fans. Milwaukee’s just 90 miles away, and there was never any problem getting tickets to Brewers’ games.
So this idea of the Cubs playing in Milwaukee and the stadium being packed and there being more fans for the home team than for the visitors and the whole nation watching takes some getting used to.
Last year, the Brew Crew led the NL Central by 8 ½ games, but there was a sense they weren’t real, and the season would bear that out. This year, it’s different. Milwaukee has Ben Sheets and C.C. Sabathia leading the rotation now, and that’s as good a one-two punch as there is. There’s just one game separating them, and regardless of the outcome of this series, both teams figure to make the playoffs.
This is wonderful for Milwaukee, which could stand to have a winner in town after years and years of unremitting mediocrity. And it’s wonderful for baseball, which can always use another good story line.
And it’s refreshing for baseball fans to be forced to digest new concepts, including this one that says the Cubs and the Brewers may just be the class of the National League.
