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By Donald G. Evans

Thomas Dyja was a recent Columbia University graduate in 1984 when the fateful ground ball squirmed under Leon Durham’s mitt, rolled into right field, and set in motion a disastrous collapse that ended with the San Diego Padres leading a World Series parade. A literary upstart from the North Side, Tom sat down to write an homage to that time.

“I was a 21-year-old English major set loose on the world,” he says. “I wrote it on an electric typewriter with no letter s.”

An odd confluence of influences inspired Tom’s approach and style to the piece: T.S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land his poem parodies, and Bleacher Bums, which was enjoying huge popularity about that time. The wit, intense historical detail and density of plot that would later become Tom’s trademark in the novels Play for a Kingdom (1997), Meet John Trow (2002) and The Moon in Our Hands (2004) were all there, but his reputation was not yet made.

The elegy went unpublished.

It wasn’t until nearly 25 years later that Tom placed The Wave Land on bardball.com, and the piece subsequently found a second home in Cubbie Blues. Tom became aware of bardball in part because he admired co-founder James Finn Garner’s work. “I thought, ‘What the hell, why write a new poem about the Cubs when you got one 20 years old that still works,’ ” Tom says.

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By Donald G. Evans

Skipping around the great Chicago Cubs Web site justonebadcentury.com, you bump into one after another hilarious bit. The Mustache Hall of Fame. Great Nicknames (a.k.a. the Mad Monk and Available Jones). Tales From A Bad Century. This Week in 1908. Celebrity Cubs Fans. And on and on. Great artwork is interspersed with crisp, comical prose, and the narrative, as it were, is unlike anything you find on the countless other Cubs sites, which tend to be interested largely in the same things as the major newspapers and sports radio shows—statistics, trade rumors, game reports, predictions and speculations. This is much more pop culture than team news.

Justonebadcentury.com is so packed with interesting content, I was surprised to learn it’s essentially a one-man show. Rick Kaempfer.

It was my fascination and admiration with the work of justonebadcentury.com that inspired me to contact Rick and see if he had any prose pieces that might fit Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year. While there are other very good Chicago Cubs sites out there, including Bleed Cubbie Blue, the Heckler and Cubbie-Blue, justonebadcentury.com most matched the sensibility I brought to the anthology project.

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By Donald G. Evans

Lin Brehmer's Fall Ball Broadcast (photo by Will Byington)It was late August 1984, and Lin Brehmer, then working at a radio station in Albany, New York had a decision. He could become part of a morning team at WLIR near New York City or move to Chicago to become the music director of the legendary WXRT. Program Director Norm Winer offered that rarest of incentives: come work with us and we’ll take you to see the Cubs play in the World Series.

Lin’s childhood, set firmly in those bittersweet days of Billy, Ron, Ernie and Fergie, had seemingly been an endless Long Island stickball game between the Cubs and the Yankees with his transplanted Oak Parkian friends David, Benjamin and Adam Keehn, all of whom were charter members of the Cleo James Fan Club.

He summoned his enormous reservoir of affection for the North Side team—and took the job.

“So I moved here under the worst of possible pretexts, to see the Cubs win the World Series,” Lin says.

Ever since, as Lin’s attachment to the Cubs has grown, he has, along with all us fans, waited. This is the genesis of his radio essay, Waiting, which is one of the two pieces Lin contributed to Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting for Next Year.

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By Randy Richardson

There’s a painting on Tim Souers’ illustrated blog, cubby-blue.com, where all you see are a boy and a girl standing outside a door. The girl asks, “Dad? Are you okay?” and behind her the boy says, “You can’t just hide in the bathroom all day, dad.”

Off to the side of that painting it reads, "Mark Prior leaves the Brewer game in the second inning. They say it's his elbow. Baseball God give me strength."

"That really happened,” Souers says. It was during the 2004 baseball season, the second year in which Souers had been journaling in earnest about his beloved Cubs. There have been hundreds of postings since then to his humorous and illustrated blog, but that one remains his all-time favorite. Every one of Souers’ illustrations reveals a little about him but that one perhaps more than any other shows you just how deep his feelings about the Cubs go.

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By Donald G. Evans

It was 1989, and Julia Borcherts was working as a construction project manager for a steel fabricator out of Rockford. She managed ironworkers, a notoriously macho sect of a notoriously macho world, and Julia would often be subject to ignorant stereotypes, dangerous pranks, and the usual hooting. Around that same time, Julia’s daughter Theresa, then nine, fell in love with the Chicago Cubs. So Julia, to humor her daughter and also because she too became enamored with the Cubs, escaped the man’s world of steel for…baseball.

“We were coming to games from Rockford, so we would have to be on the road by like 7:30 because [Theresa] wanted to get autographs,” Julia says.

Memories of that year were the foundation for Julia’s story “The Year of the Hawk,” one of the most ambitious fictional explorations of the North Side team in Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year.

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By Donald G. Evans

Chris Christensen with baseball artwork by R. Kenton NelsonAs Chris Christensen pored through research material for an article about baseball teams with soul and without, he stumbled across some interesting bits and pieces related to he famous Merkle’s Boner incident. He had previously written an Elysian Fields article on the 90^th anniversary of the incident, but now found some strange coincidences that added up to a pattern concerning the fates of the primaries involved in that defining point in Cubs history.

“I tend to not believe in Fate,” Chris says. “In general, I’m pretty much a nonbeliever in almost anything. But I’m not an absolutist; I leave room. There was something there.”

Chris dug deeper into his research and ultimately produced an essay called, “Merkle Haunts Moises.” It was first published in Elysian Fields in the summer of 2008, and we chose to reuse the piece in the Cubbie Blues anthology. While most of the material in the anthology is original, this essay was a perfect fit: it gave an overview of those critical Cubs moments of the last 100 years and introduced a curse that was unique and scholarly.

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By Randy Richardson

Stuart and his wife, Cecilia Garibay, on a recent pub crawlStuart Shea traces the roots of his Cubs’ obsession to when he was eight years old, when his father would write out the highlights of the previous night’s game and leave them on the kitchen table for him to read before he went to work. Sometimes his father would even tape the radio highlights for him.

“You can’t buy that kind of emotional investment,” Shea says.

It is that emotional investment in the Cubs that has compelled Shea to write extensively about the team, including authoring Wrigley Field: The Unauthorized Biography and editing Wrigley Season Ticket 2007.

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By Donald G. Evans

Uncle Ernie’s second-story Waveland Avenue window practically kissed Wrigley Field’s left-field foul pole, and Don De Grazia sat there watching the “circus atmosphere” around the ballpark. That was 2003. Don was living temporarily in a spare apartment his uncle had rented basically for Cubs parties. The Cubs were setting the stage, day-by-day, game-by-game, for another historic collapse.

“My impetus was to pore all those negative emotions into a story,” Don says. “I’d just devoted all those days, all those hours, to what?”

Don’s “Yard Dogs” is a kind of psychological study in fandom. Billy is a typically devoted Cubs fan who uses gambling to chain his fate to that of his favorite team. The narrator, a small-time bookie, in turn attaches his fate to Billy’s. The sports world food chain that results brings into question the ultimate worth of fandom. Is victory theirs or ours? How about defeat?

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By Randy Richardson

You don’t have to be a Cubs fan to experience what it means to be a Cubs fan – the euphoria of when they win and the bitter despair of when they, inevitably, lose. You don’t even have to be human.

Christine Sneed isn’t a Cubs fan – heck, she’s not even a baseball fan. Yet growing up in a household of Cubs fans, she vicariously lived the life of a Cubs fan. And so did her family dogs.

“In my family, baseball season hasn’t truly arrived if there isn’t a dog in the house cowering under a bed,” begins her touching essay, Our Dog Days of Summer, which made its way into Cubbie Blues: 100 Years of Waiting Till Next Year.

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By Randy Richardson

Jonathan Eig isn’t a Cubs fan; he’s a Yankees fan.

So how does a fan of the Bronx Bombers, a legendary team with a long tradition of winning, find himself writing for an anthology about a dubious team with a long tradition of losing?

Eig, a senior special writer for the Wall Street Journal and former executive editor of Chicago magazine who is best known for writing biographies of two of baseball’s greatest and most revered players, Lou Gehrig and Jackie Robinson, looked for inspiration from his journalistic hero, the late great Chicago columnist Mike Royko.