I'm a Stranger Here Myself Read Online Free PDF

it takes—losing seventeen games in a row, letting easy balls go through their legs, crashing comically into each other in the outfield—you can be certain the Cubs will manage it.
    They have been doing this, reliably and efficiently, for over half a century. They haven’t been in a World Series since 1945. Stalin had good years more recently than that. This heartwarming annual failure by the Cubs is almost the only thing in baseball that hasn’t changed in my lifetime, and I appreciate that very much.
    It’s not easy being a baseball fan because baseball fans are a hopelessly sentimental bunch, and there is no room for sentiment in something as wildly lucrative as an American sport. For anyone from outside America, one of the most remarkable aspects of American sports is how casually franchises abandon their loyal fans and move to a new city. In English soccer, it would be unthinkable for, say, Manchester United to move to London or Everton to find a new home in Portsmouth, or anyone to go anywhere really, but here that sort of thing happens all the time, sometimes more than once. The Braves began life in Boston, then moved to Milwaukee, then moved to Atlanta. The A’s started in Philadelphia, then switched to Kansas City, then pushed on to Oakland.
    Meanwhile, the Major Leagues have repeatedly expanded to where they have reached the point where it is deucedly hard, for me at any rate, to keep track of it all. Of the thirty teams in Major League baseball, just eleven are where they were when I was a kid. There are teams out there now that I know nothing about. Without looking at the standings, I couldn’t tell you whether the Arizona Diamondbacks are in the National League or the American League. That’s a terrifying confession for someone who loves the game.
    Even when teams stay put, they don’t actually stay put. I mean by this that they are constantly tearing down old stadiums to build new ones. Call me eccentric, call me fastidious, but I truly believe that baseball should only be watched in an old stadium. It used to be that every big American city had a venerable ballpark. Generally these were dank and creaky, but they had character. You would get splinters from the seats, the soles of your shoes would congeal to the floor from all the years of sticky stuff that had been spilled during exciting moments, and your view would inevitably be obscured by a cast-iron column supporting the roof. But that was all part of the glory.
    Only four of these old parks are left, and two of them— Yankee Stadium in New York and Fenway Park in Boston— are under threat. I won’t say that Fenway’s relative nearness was the decisive consideration in our settling in New Hampshire, but it was certainly a factor. Now the owners want to tear it down and build a new stadium.
    In fairness it must be said that the new ballparks of the 1990s, as opposed to the multipurpose arenas built in the previous thirty years, do strive to keep the character and intimacy of the old ballparks—sometimes even improve on them—but they have one inescapable, irremediable flaw. They are new. They have no history, no connection with a glorious and continuous past. No matter how scrupulous a new Fenway they build, it won’t be the place where Ted Williams batted. It won’t make your feet stick. It won’t echo in the same way. It won’t smell funny. It won’t be Fenway.
    I keep saying that I won’t go to the new park when they finally raze Fenway, but I know I’m lying because I am hopelessly addicted to the game. All of which increases my almost boundless respect and admiration for the hapless Chicago Cubs. To their credit, the Cubs have never threatened to leave Chicago and continue to play at Wrigley Field. They even still play mostly day games—the way God intended baseball to be played. A day game at Wrigley Field is one of the great American experiences.
    And here’s the problem. Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the