Twenty Things I Learned from the 2008 Chicago Cubs

1.) I don't think I can do this again.  Cubs fandom is, as my mother mentioned frequently this weekend, part of my heritage, and I've dealt with the disappointment that goes along with that many times, not to mention the Rockies last year.  This was the worst loss I can remember, though, because this year's team was (as you may have noticed) my favorite.  I just can't go through another season that ends that way.  

But more than anything, I don't want to feel like this season was all for nothing.  Right now it does feel that way, but I'm trying to remember that this team was special; they taught me some things, and here are a few of them.  All pictures from the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, or Getty Images via Yahoo!Sports.

2.) Let's begin with shallowness, okay?  I think we all need a little shallowness after last week.  Thus: something about this team really, really makes women want to have their babies:

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

3.) No one in baseball - in fact, no one in the world - has a better autobiography than Carlos Zambrano.

4.)  You totally want to hear the first line of Z's autobiography again, right?  I knew you did:

"The life of Carlos Zambrano is that of the eagle that flies in the middle of a storm and, facing opposing winds, ascends powerfully until it reaches the top of the mountains."

5.) At the beginning of this season, I barely knew who Reed Johnson was.  Now, he's the guy who made The Catch (and did other great defensive and offensive work).  I hope he sticks around with us for a good long time.

6.) We have some good guys on this team:

7.) Ryan Theriot and Mark DeRosa: best manlove ever, seriously.

8.) Cincinnati and Cleveland are TOTALLY different cities.

9.) Puppies.  Also, Geo lounges very handsomely and Theriot and DeRo laugh like frat boys.

10.) Ted Lilly barreling into Yadier Molina like a crazy man (not to mention almost throwing his own no-hitter the day after Z's)?  That guy is intense.  Probably as the result of a lifetime of being named Theodore Roosevelt Lilly.

11.) All of the following, which my friend R. the Red Sox fan laid out for me one night when we were talking about baseball fanfic.  I wrote down everything she said because it was so true:

"I feel like our team [the Red Sox, that is] would be a story like Blade Runner.  Everyone is insane, and some people, like Josh Beckett, are either an alien or a robot.  Tito is the guy trying to save the world and restore justice and order.  Your team is more like a story about a family reunion.  The family is crazy, but not in a bad way.  Geo and Ryan Dempster would be the guys everyone loves, who hold the whole family together.  Then someone would be the crazy uncle who everyone's scared of.  I see about four candidates there.  [She didn't name them.]  Z would be the guy who frightens the children just by being so gigantic, but by the end of the evening the children are all hanging off him going, "Daddy, pony!"  On that note, then there's Mike Fontenot."

12.) Which provides me with an excellent segue:

Mike Fontenot: Amazing Person

This man definitely deserves his own subsection.  Where to begin?

13.) Perhaps with this interview at Bleed Cubbie Blue:

BCB: I read an article last year that said you watch [Theriot's] kids sometimes. Is that true?

Mike: I think that was the "Sports Illustrated" where it said I’m more of a kid than his kids. That he came in there and I was jumping on the bed.

BCB: That’s the one. So, is it true?

Mike: Not necessarily. I wouldn’t say that I was jumping on the bed. I mean, I might have done it once or twice but Houston, his son, was the main one jumping on the bed and I’m like hey watch out and he started getting a little crazy. But I’ll go over there, spend time, hang out. And he just had another one, so they have three now. I’ll go over there and hang out every once in a while.

14.) Zambrano on Fontenot's hitting prowess: "I didn't know short men could hit the ball like that.  He hit the ball like a man, you know?"  Z's right; Fontenot hit .365 in July and almost hit for the cycle on,  if I remember correctly, June 20th.  He went on a similar hot streak last year.

15.) And to what can we attribute this "hitting the ball like a man"?  

"I don't know," Fontenot said. "I've always had decent power my whole life. I guess it's bat speed. Timing a little bit. My grown-man strength."

16.) And of course, the highlight of this particular section has got to be:

The explanation of what's going on in this picture may be more awesome than the picture itself:

"I really can't remember where we got it from," Fontenot said. "It's just driving a nail into the ground, and then we implemented a thing where I jump on his back and he carries me to the promised land."

17.) Ryan Theriot could beat up Mike Fontenot (although he wouldn't), but even the two of them combined couldn't take out Z.  Theriot can also pitch.  He has a 0.00 ERA.

18.) No Cubs pitcher had thrown a no-hitter in 36 years, until this guy came along:

19.)  Every time I thought they were done, they weren't even close.  There was that insane comeback game against the Rockies, there was the game I went to, there was that hideous losing streak in September.  They always came back...

20.) ...except when it counted, right?  It's so hard to believe it's over, even now.  So does the rest of this stuff mean anything at all?  

I think it does.  We'll remember how miserable it was to lose last week, but maybe we'll also remember everything that happened during the rest of the season, and I haven't even covered half of it here.  I think, for me, the last word on this year will always be Geo's home run in the game I went to.  I hope everyone else has a story like that from this year  - that they got to see something amazing, whether on TV or in person.  And I hope that, whenever I think about how much last week hurt, I'll also think about how I got to be at that game, and how it encompassed everything I love about baseball.  I can't help thinking a passage in Mark Helprin's story "Perfection," which is about baseball and God, among other things, where he writes,

[It] was as if God had chosen that moment to make his presence known, and [fans at the game] reacted accordingly in wonder and delight.  For the moment, at least, they felt as if the deepest circles within them had been squared, their ragged doubts knit smooth, and the world were ablaze with the light of perfection.