Here’s a little story in Awful Announcing about The Joy of Baseball podcast.
The first thing I need to do is apologize to all of Chicago and Bears fans all around the world. I am TRULY sorry. None of you deserved this.
As you might know, I am quitting the Cleveland Browns until they get rid of He Who Shall Not Be Named and start acting like a team that cares even a little bit about the fans and the city of Cleveland. I don’t expect any of that to happen anytime soon. Last week, in honor of our pup Westley, I watched them one last time. They lost emphatically. It felt like a proper goodbye.
And I decided that each week this year, I would try on a team for size. I’m looking for a team that fits my eye, a fan base that feels like family, a story that I can lose myself in. I’m looking at this the way I look at new fiction. I read the first couple of pages in the bookstore, and if it engages me enough, I buy it. I take it home and put it on the table beside my bed. If it engages me enough, I’ll move it to the top of the pile and start reading it before I go to sleep. If it engages me enough, I’ll keep reading until I can’t keep my eyes open.
And, finally, if it engages me enough, I’ll pick it up and read it the next day … and the next … and the next until I finish it.
Books, I must admit, are discarded all along the way. I don’t feel good about that, but there’s only so much time, and there are too many books, and for a book to survive all the way to the finish line, it has to get inside me.
I’m looking for a team that can get inside me.
And — I’m so sorry about this, Chicago — I started with the Bears against Minnesota.
Well, they seemed to me the most promising candidate.
Why? Well, lots of reasons. I love Chicago. I have so many great friends who are Bears fans. I am drawn to long-suffering fanbases, and it has been more than forty years since the ‘85 Bears shuffled. The weather is right — I don’t think I could ever truly love a warm-weather team (though I guess we’ll see).
And this Bears team is just fun. They’ve got a zonkers head coach named Ben Johnson who will go for it on fourth down pretty much every time and has talked about wanting to set the NFL scoring record. They’ve got a super fun quarterback named Caleb Williams who does miraculous things and soul-crushing things, and you never quite know which one you will get, and I like that. They’ve got game-breaking receivers, something that Browns fans have come to think of as mythical creatures, not unlike gorgons.*
*I think the Browns actually had a couple of gorgons at receiver over recent years.
And I had one of my favorite-ever experiences at a Bears game — wrote about it before, but a few years ago, our younger daughter Katie and I went to a Bears game with comedian and Bears mega-fan Jeff Garlin. The whole experience was great, but the best part was when Jeff offered to buy Katie a hot dog, and she asked the vendor for ketchup, and he pulled out a ketchup packet and held it over his head and shouted at jet-engine volume: “KETCHUP! YOU WANT KETCHUP?”
And the whole stadium booed.
And Katie loved every second of it.
You just don’t order ketchup for a hot dog at a Bears game.
So I went into the game pumped up. And what followed was — I’m SO sorry, Bears fans — a Hindenburg-level disaster that I feel fully responsible for. I had no right to take my bad Browns juju to Chicago. But so it goes. One week after scoring 59 points in a game, the Bears scored three. Rain turned the field into a mud pile. They had a fantastic drive to start the second half and seemed sure to go in for the go-ahead touchdown, but instead fumbled at the 1.
It was awful. All of it. I know Bears history is filled with games like this — I certainly can’t take all the responsibility here. But in the fourth quarter, something happened that, frankly, felt so Cleveland Browns that I felt sure there would be a knock at my door, and the SNL cast of Da Bears skit would be standing outside with a full police force, and they would say, “Uh, buddy, you haven’t been rooting for da Bears now, have you?”
The Bears put together a beautiful drive and pushed the ball to the Minnesota 6.
Caleb Williams dropped back and then saw an opening, and he took off running, and he was in the clear, and it seemed certain he would do some Caleb Williams magic act and get into the end zone, and the Bears would be out front.
Only then, Caleb Williams went crashing to the ground.
He wasn’t tackled. He wasn’t even touched. He had made a little skip to avoid a diving tackler, and in doing that, I guess his hamstring exploded or snapped or something. He went down. He writhed in pain. It looked awful. He had to be helped off the field. He had to be carted to the locker room. As I write this, we’re waiting for MRI news, and I guess the Bears still hope it’s a Grade 1 injury, which would only put him out for a short while. That would be great. That’s not how it looked.
Anyway, after that the Bears put in a guy named Tyson Bagent, who is a football player, and the Bears didn’t go anywhere, and then their game-tying field goal was blocked, and then they had a desperate shot to win in the last minutes, but Tyson Bagent got sacked on the final play, and that was that. It was a demoralizing experience. And I can’t help but feel I at least partly caused it.
I think I’ll try on the Buffalo Bills next week for their home game against the Chargers.
I’m sorry in advance, Bills fans.
A couple of people sent me a tweet from someone called DollarDog Nick that read: “Today, the Browns and Guardians both won on the same day for the first time since 2001.” Looking back on it, I’m quite sure that DDN meant it as a joke — in fact, he later said he meant it only as a joke — but it SOUNDS so plausible that people took it seriously.
