Nonesuch President Bob Hurwitz responds to Senior Vice President David Bither's previous entry on being a Cubs fan.

David,

There are two pictures I vividly remember from a night in October, nine years ago, when you and I were at the sixth and last game of the 1998 ALCS championship, when the Yankees beat Cleveland at Yankee Stadium. In the first photo, echoing the remarks in your note the other day to Chris, you are seen standing to the side of my very happy family, with the whole world wildly cheering, you have a bemused look on your face, but you look clearly far more reserved than anyone else around. I remember at that moment you said that as semi-happy as you were to be there (winning a pennant is always a tremendously exciting event), and even half-heartedly rooting for the Yankees to win, it also brought this intense feeling of longing and even poignancy, it pained you to be among all of those happily celebrating, and you felt outside, thinking what it might be like if it ever happened to the Cubs.

The other picture is one I took of my son Nick, who was nine, which is one of the most joyful and unabashedly happy photographs I have ever seen; it was taken as the last out of the last play took place, when all of life was perfect. Only a year earlier, the night that the Indians won the Division playoff, the moment came when he realized not just that the Yankees had been defeated, but there would be no more baseball games that year by the Yankees; he was impossible to console.

This range of emotions, from yours of devastation (as a boy in 1969 when the Mets beat the Cubs); of deep frustration (1984 when Cubs had a 2-0 lead against the Padres and blew it); of anger (I never saw you, in all the years we've known each other, as mad as you were when Lee Smith once blew a save at a Shea Stadium); of poignant resignation (when the Yankees won); as well as, within 12 months, my own son's ecstasy one year and sense of being shattered the next, gives some insight as to why baseball means so much to so many of us. There is heartbreak for 29 of 30 teams each year, and, like in classical music or hip-hop, those who are on the outside can never completely understand the people for whom these passions become all consuming.

For Yankees fans, by the way, I think there has become another emotion—sourness—that has taken over our lives in the last seven or eight years, as the Yankees have fallen short; we are becoming like the Braves in our ability to perform at a high level for 162 games a year, and then, in the next four or five, fall on our faces. But sourness is often associated with people of privilege, who are used to having everything come easy. Cubs fans, looking at the years since the Yankees won the World Series in 2000, with six division titles, two American League titles, and seven straight playoff appearances, shake their heads in disgust when they hear Yankee fans whine.

And of course there is the emotion of utter and total depression and pain. All you need to say are three words—Dent, Buckner, Boone—and you know what I’m talking about. (That pain was permanently lifted, starting with a walk in the ninth inning of a game in October 2004 to Kevin Millar).

It was with a certain irony that you and I were together with our two sons last night for the Yankees and Indians again, your Sam around the age of Nick, now ten years older and so far removed from the innocence of a different time—of a perfect time—for a Yankees fan. It was clearly a night where the Yankees went out with a whimper, not a bang, and both of us were rooting more for our sons’ happiness than a Yankees victory: that will always be the way it is.

Bob