I recently read “The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse” by Rich Cohen. Below are the quotes I found most interesting. If you like them, buy the book here.
“What you want is always out of reach. Sometimes it’s miles out of reach, sometimes you can almost touch it. If you do touch it, you will realize, after a week or two, that it’s not really what you want, that what you really want is still out of reach.” (3)
“Being a Cubs fan has created my cast of mind. I am not unhappy; I am fatalistic. I know how to live in the moment. I know how to enjoy what I can while I can because I know that disaster is coming.” (7)
“A Cubs fan will have a diminished life determined by low expectations. Look at me. I know I am going to succeed. Yo know why? Because I’m a Yankees fan. We win and expert to win. But a Cubs fan knows he will lose. He’s sitting there, waiting for it to happen. He’ll settle for less as a result. His team has taught him that all human endeavor ends in failure. That team will screw up your life.” (8)
“A good player is prized, but a good player with a great story is beloved.” (29)
“He had the good cheer and the infuriating wisdom of the self-made man.” (52)
“The Cubs faced the Tigers in the World Series. Asked to predict the outcome, the Chicago sportswriter Warren Brown said, “Neither team is good enough to win it.” (83)
“Yankee stadium, thought unsightly, was made beautiful by winning, whereas Wrigley Field, though beautiful, was disfigured by loss.” (95)
“You always have a choice. I choose to be hopeful.” (105)
“Whatever you look for [in life], you find. If you look for a curse, you’ll be cursed.” (127)
“I sat in a TV studio, staring at a black screen, listening on headphones as six guys in another studio called me an idiot. Which I am. I’d only suggest that everyone else is an idiot too. We’re all idiots.” (170)
“Gonzalez, a Gold Glove infielder who’d turned that play dozens of times, should have been the goat, but the fans had already fixed on one of their own – on themselves. It was self-hate, psychosis: They expected to lose, even needed to lose to make sense of their suffering. Because we blamed ourselves, because deep down we knew we deserved it, we needed a fan to take the blame for all fans – a scapegoat.” (172)
“You can read all the articles and books in the world, and it still won’t help you understand what you have to do to make a team better. Nothing prepares you for doing it but doing it. So I [Ricketts] came in with eyes open and tried to learn as much as I could in the first couple of years.” (182)
“You have to build a team that’s not just good enough to get to the postseason but good enough to get there again and again. Because once you’re in, it’s luck.” (183)
“Number one, he doesn’t have to be defensive because he’s had such success. Number two is, if you know why you make a decision, you can know which assumption fell through if it goes wrong. You can say, ‘This is what we assumed would happen, this is what actually happened.’” (185)
“It helps explain why Theo was able to defeat not one but two historic curses. Because what’s a curse? It’s a story. How do you change a story? You write a better one.” (187)
“You are busy making sure next year’s team has a chance. It means lack of long-term planning, focus on the short term, focus on the optics. The Red Sox were like that too: always focused on the next day’s sports section. It’s hard to execute any sort of plan when the focus is on everything except what defines a healthy baseball operation.” (188)
“IF you have a chance to win the World Series but don’t take that final step because it doesn’t add up, that’s bullshit and not fair. If you don’t make that investment, that can put dents in trust and wreck the culture that you’ve been so careful to build. We went around and asked a lot of our players. They all wanted to go for it.” (213)
Like the quotes? Buy the book here.
