Savage: A Cubs fan abroad, awash in a sea of Yankees caps
From SABR member Bill Savage at ESPN.com on August 18, 2016:
Greetings not from Section 416, but from Car K on the 15:30 Edinburgh-to-London train. Your faithful correspondent is on a two-week holiday away from Chicago — and it’s killing him. Things have gone terribly wrong, and I don’t just mean the recent pair of tough losses to the Cardinals that ended the Cubs’ 11-game winning streak.
Being away from my sweetheart, friends, regular bartenders and Chicago is always rough. But missing any of this season’s action has turned out to be tougher than I’d anticipated, even if being abroad during the baseball season isn’t the utter disconnection it once was.
When I first studied in Ireland in the early 1980s, I’d get the baseball scores a day late, via the International Herald-Tribune; and no box scores either, just line scores. As recently as 2003, I had to learn of Kerry Wood‘s NLDS victory over the Braves via a phone message from a student. The landlady in my Oxford B&B told me “Caroline rang to tell you that Chicago beat Sri Lanka.” A cricket test match, I thought — or perhaps we beat “Atlanta.”
Nowadays, the minute I wake up six hours ahead of Chicago time, the ever-giving gift of the geek geniuses (aka the internet) lets me check the prior day’s score on my phone before getting out of bed. Then I read the local beat writers and columnists, the play-by-play game account, the blogs, ESPN.com and the Twitter chatter.
Read the full article here: http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/17308783/cubs-fan-abroad-awash-sea-yankees-caps
Originally published: August 18, 2016. Last Updated: August 18, 2016.