Opening day: The Cubs always start the season undefeated

When it comes to opening day of the baseball season, I'm a lot like one of those old, beaten-down Willy Loman-style producers who always call me, telling me they're just one pitch meeting away from selling their labor of love project about the guy who invented invisible ink. Except I'm selling the idea that this will be the year the Chicago Cubs win the World Series. So far, since 1908, we're 0-101 in the winning the World Series department, but hope springs eternal.

 As I mentioned when I started this blog, we care deeply about the movie business and the media world, but we care even more about our beloved Cubbies, so you'll have to put up with occasional explosions of glee or misery during the baseball season. That would be the season that started today with the Cubs in Houston, playing the Astros, where -- as I write this -- the Cubs have the lead, thanks to home runs from Alfonso Soriano and Aramis Ramirez and stellar pitching from our ace, Carlos Zambrano. The newest Cub, Milton Bradley, also made a great off-his-shoetops catch in right field which turned into a double play, eventually nabbing a runner off second base. (That fans, is a rare 9-3-6 double play.)

Every Cub fan is holding his or her breath that Bradley, who was run out of Los Angeles after two unhappy seasons with the Dodgers, can stay healthy and hold his temper -- he is surely one of the few players to go on the DL after blowing out his knee arguing with an umpire. But he gives us the left-handed bat we lacked last year, when we ended up being shut down in the playoffs by the Dodgers' tough right-handed pitching. Yes, sir, there's nothing better than having a great left-handed bat in the middle of the lineup -- and nothing worse than being convinced that you are the victim of a vast conspiracy devoted to keeping your team from acquiring a good left-handed bat.

Which brings us to our opening day baseball video clip, a brilliant mash-up from "Downfall," Oliver Hirschbiegel's absorbing 2004 German drama about the last days of the Third Reich. This clip allows us to imagine Adolf Hitler as a long-suffering Cubs fan. I can't post the clip itself, since it contains a small amount of profanity, but you can watch it right here on YouTube. It definitely captures the misery of a 101-year-long baseball curse.

UPDATE: Cubs WIN! CUBS WIN! Final score: 4-2. That means 1 down, 161 to go.Go Cubs!

With Barack Obama in the White House, a new "Star Trek" movie only two months away, the World Baseball Classic starting up and everyone -- even Manny Ramirez -- having reported to spring training, all feels right with the world. We're even starting up our new Little League season at the Bad News Bears complex in West L.A., where my 10-year-old gets to play on what is surely the only Little League field in the world with a plaque dedicated to a Hollywood screenwriter -- Bill Lancaster, who wrote the original 1976 "Bad News Bears" film. (Lancaster, the son of Burt Lancaster, played ball on our Little League field when he was a kid in the late 1950s.) 

Hollywood has had a long love affair with baseball -- "Pride of the Yankees," "The Natural" to "Bull Durham" and "The Rookie" to name a few standouts. But instead of compiling the best baseball movies, Rootzoo blogger KoufaxSpahn has come up with a clever post assembling an all-star team of players from classic baseball movies, complete with Bill James-style assessments of their abilities. His all-time movie team's starting lineup includes Wesley Snipes' Willie Mays Hayes (from "Major League") batting leadoff and playing center field; Jackie Earle Haley's Kelly Leak ("Bad News Bears") batting third and playing left field; Robert Redford's Roy Hobbs ("The Natural") batting cleanup and playing right field; and Kevin Costner's Crash Davis ("Bull Durham") batting sixth and catching.

He also has a host of pitchers, with Brendan Fraser's Steve Nebraska ("The Scout") as a starter and Charlie Sheen's Rick "Wild Thing" Vaughn ("Major League") as his closer, along with Geena Davis' Dottie Hinson ("A League of Their Own") as a pinch-hitter. And who else but Tom Hanks' Jimmy "There's no crying in baseball" Dugan ("League of Their Own") as his manager. Hanks would have his hands full with all the flakes and troublemakers on this team -- which also features Tatum O'Neal's Amanda Whurlitzer (from "The Bad News Bears") pitching in middle relief -- but I'm sure he could handle it.

The whole roster is here -- but if you really want to get into the spirit, just watch this clip of Hanks' famous tirade, which concludes with the all-time greatest insult ever leveled at a baseball umpire:

For a cranky entertainment reporter like me, December means the arrival of the demolition derby known as Oscar season. But as a sports dad, December means the arrival of high school basketball season, when my 10-year-old son and I start hanging out in crowded Los Angeles gyms, watching some of the nation's best high school basketball talent play in local tournaments. We were at Westchester High last night, watching a great match-up in the school's Tip-Off Classic between Westchester High and Windward High. Westchester is a perennial powerhouse, having won eight City Section championships and four state titles under current coach Ed Azzam. (As our high school sports expert Eric Sondheimer recently pointed out, Westchester has --count 'em -- six former standouts playing in the NBA.

It was a kick seeing Windward, a private school not normally associated with the top hoops programs, going up against Westchester. But the real surprise was discovering that one of the team's best players, Malcolm Washington, is the youngest son of Denzel Washington. (Apparently athleticism runs in the family -- Denzel's oldest son, John David, played football at Morehouse.) My spies tell me that Denzel comes to nearly all of his son's games, his famous face often buried in a baseball cap, even when Malcolm was playing in a summer tournament this past July in Las Vegas. I didn't spot him last night, though he was at Windward's Tuesday game, wearing sweats and a New York Yankees cap.

Malcolm is a small but solidly built point guard who rarely shoots, but he is easily Windward's defensive ace. He's quick and opportunistic, always looking to set a pick or steal the ball. Windward was over-matched against Westchester, which will clearly contend for another state championship, led by their phenomenal senior guard, Dominique O'Connor. However, Windward has its share of talent, with two seniors who going to major colleges -- Anthony Stover, a 6-foot-10 center who's headed for UCLA and Darius Morris, a 6-foot-3 swingman who's going to Michigan. How good is Malcolm Washington? I asked my pal, Frank Burlison, the sports columnist at the Long Beach Press-Telegram and a fount of basketball knowledge, for his assessment of Malcolm's skills:

Frank says: "Malcolm understands how a point guard is supposed to play, especially in terms of running the offense and taking care of the basketball. He's not careless or too flashy, like a lot of guys at the position. He's a sound defensive player with great fundamentals. They list him at 5'11, which is probably generous, and he rarely shoots, but he has all the intangibles you want from a point guard. He doesn't over-handle the ball, and he really creates opportunities for the whole offense, not just for himself. From what I understand, he's going to the University of Pennsylvania, and at an Ivy League school, he could play substantial minutes. He has physical limitations, being short and not especially fast, but he's a coach's player, the kind of kid every coach wants to have on his team." 

Photo: Denzel Washington (right), his wife Paulette and his son Malcolm. Credit: Dan Steinberg / Associated Press

Since he closed up Revolution Studios, Joe Roth has kept his hand in the movie business -- he's got projects at Sony, Fox and Disney, where he's producing Tim Burton's upcoming "Alice in Wonderland." But he's spending most of his time with his new love, commuting up to Seattle, where he's the majority owner of the Seattle Sounders FC, the new Major League Soccer expansion team that begins play next spring. A lifelong sports junkie -- he spent years coaching his son's soccer team, has courtside Lakers seats and knows more obscure baseball stats than Bill James -- Roth has discovered that soccer is a great laboratory to test out both Internet community-based marketing and Hollywood-style glitz.

But when we had lunch the other day, Roth also made the tantalizing case that the new popularity of soccer in America has a lot in common with the groundswell of support for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Roth is not a neutral political observer. It was Roth, along with David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, who organized Obama's first major Hollywood fundraiser early last year, back when Obama was 20 points behind Hillary Clinton in the polls. Roth sees soccer as appealing to the same fast-growing demographic groups that have been at the center of Obama's campaign.

"If you took a map of America where Obama is strongest and laid it over a map of where soccer has its biggest appeal, you'd see an incredible overlap," he told me. "The blue states on both coasts are very soccer-friendly as well as huge areas of support for Obama, where as the center of the country is full of people who are the enemies of soccer and Obama -- white, 50-and-over guys who listen to talk radio and only care about football or basketball."

Before he bought the Sounders, whose minority owners include comedian Drew Carey, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Adrian Hanauer (who owned Seattle's minor league soccer franchise), Roth did a lot of homework into soccer's key areas of demographic appeal. "The way America is changing in its ethnicity -- becoming more Latino and African American -- is going to make soccer a major sport in the same way those ethnic shifts are helping Obama. Soccer's fastest growth is in liberal, better-educated cities, places like Seattle, Portland, Boston, Vancouver, Montreal and Los Angeles. All you have to do is look at the MLS crowds -- they're young, they're noisy and they're not that different from the youthful spirit you'd see at an Obama rally."

If Obama wins on Tuesday, election analysts will give much of the credit not just to the candidate, but to his enormously effective political machine, which has used the Internet to boost fundraising and create a loyal, engaged community of potential voters. Roth has been using similar techniques to launch his soccer club, which has already set an MLS record by pre-selling more than 17,000 season tickets. What has he learned about the impact of the Facebook-style spirit of the Internet that will transform the way soccer fans interact at Sounders games? Keep reading:

While everyone else was watching the vice presidential debates, I was watching my beloved Cubs play the Dodgers at Wrigley Field, wondering how many ground balls it was possible for one infield to fumble, drop, boot, muff, flub, mishandle, bobble and butcher in the course of one playoff game. It was ugly. I keep telling my 10-year-old Little Leaguer that as Cubs fans, we don't believe in curses. This is the modern world--we're not prisoners of pagan superstition.

But seeing the befuddled Cubs flail around last night, I confess that they had the look of a team imprisoned under a witch's spell. How else to explain how one of the best defensive infields in the majors suddenly took on the bumbling air of the hapless 1962 Mets, making four errors, two of them coming in the disastrous second inning when the Dodgers put the game away, ultimately winning 10-3. It didn't help matters when I immediately got an e-mail from a Hollywood executive, gloatingly referring to the origins of the curse (a fan with a billy goat was turned away from Wrigley during the 1945 World Series) by saying: "Baaaa! Baaaa! I hear the bay of the goat!"

As someone who sees all things through the prism of cinema, I always thought that this season, the 100th anniversary of the last time the Cubs went to the World Series, would be our equivalent of "Field of Dreams," our version of "Angels in the Outfield." But after last night, the Cubs looked like they were auditioning for a bad remake of "I Walked With a Zombie."

I've got another interview coming up with a die-hard Cubs fan from the entertainment world. But first I've got to talk myself off the 95th story of the Hancock Tower. I was so despondent last night that I couldn't even cheer up my son, who's been a Cub fan since birth--he had a Ron Santo jersey in his crib. I tried telling him that losing a couple of games at home wasn't the end of the world. Why look, I said, even the Angels, who were supposed to roll over the Red Sox, lost their first game at home. My son looked at me, exasperated. He saw through that ruse immediately.

"What does that have to do with anything?" he said. "We don't even care about the Angels!" 

Photo by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

As promised, we finally persuaded a longtime Chicago Cubs fan to talk about the roots of his Cubs-mania. The man who stepped up to the plate? None other than actor and comic Jim Belushi, who stars in the ABC sitcom "According to Jim." He first went to Wrigley Field with his Cub Scout troop and has been hooked ever since. Of all his stories, my favorite is the one about Belushi and his Aunt Susie giving Cubs announcer Harry Caray a ride home from the ballpark. A legendary ladies man, Harry engaged in some serious flirting with Aunt Susie, who was about 80 years old at the time. Belushi not only offers up more fun memories, but aced our rigorous set of Cubs trivia questions.

So hoist a brewski and listen to two lunatic Cubs fans sharing the sheer pleasure of being only 26 days away from seeing the Cubs back in the postseason:

Every summer we spend part of our family vacation making a pilgrimage to Wrigley Field to see our beloved but woeful Chicago Cubs. Except this year the Cubbies aren't so woeful. In fact, they have the best record in the National League and are leading the league's toughest division, the NL Central, by 4 1/2 games. (To give you an idea of how tough the division is, if the Dodgers were in the NL Central, they'd be 15 games out of first place.) I hate to view all my experiences through the prism of show business, since we really just went to Chicago to see baseball played in the best ballpark in the land. But baseball is entertainment and the Cubs--who are in the process of being sold by Sam Zell, who also owns my newspaper--are a one-of-a-kind entertainment commodity, which is why a host of suitors, including Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theatres owner Mark Cuban, are salivating at the prospect of shelling out more than $1 billion for the franchise.

And why not? Studio chiefs and network execs spend zillions trying to establish brand loyalty for their product. Imagine their envy when they study the zealous loyalty of Cubs fans: Even when the team was abysmal, which was almost always (we haven't been to a World Series in 63 years, haven't won one in 100), Wrigley Field has been packed with rabid fans. In recent years, even with the Cubs fielding some truly hapless teams, every game is a sellout. In TV or film, a lousy product almost invariably spells disaster. At Wrigley, it hardly matters. The experience of being at Wrigley with the faithful is what matters.

We had especially great seats at one of the games last month, right behind home plate. I found myself seated next to an elderly man who went to his first Cubs games as a boy in 1933. He saw Hack Wilson play left field before there was any ivy on the brick outfield wall, in fact before there was even a left-field wall (in the '30s, there were field-level bleachers). He'd seen it all, from a skinny rookie shortstop named Ernie Banks to slow-walking relief ace Lee Smith to irrepressible outfielder Jose Cardenal (who used to keep his Afro comb tucked in the ivy in left field). He even remembered the gloomy early-'60s era when the Cubs decided the team should be run by a college of coaches instead of a regular manager, an especially bad idea that inspired even more ignominious defeats. When I asked him what kept him coming back, he shrugged and finally said, "Hope springs eternal."

As anyone who's ever seen the Cubs play at Dodger Stadium can attest, there are untold thousands of transplanted Cubs fans in L.A., including a healthy contingent of showbiz loyalists. I've been nagging various actors and comics and filmmakers, trying to get someone to talk about the roots of their Cubs mania. I finally got a true loyalist to sit down and reminisce about his childhood days at Wrigley Field and even answer a few trivia questions. Tune in later today and I'll have our first Hollywood Cubs Fan Quiz up on the blog.

Photo by Brian Kersey / Associated Press

   

Spring training special: Hollywood's baseball all-stars

With Barack Obama in the White House, a new "Star Trek" movie only two months away, the World Baseball Classic starting up and everyone -- even Manny Ramirez -- having reported to spring training, all feels right with the world. We're even starting up our new Little League season at the Bad News Bears complex in West L.A., where my 10-year-old gets to play on what is surely the only Little League field in the world with a plaque dedicated to a Hollywood screenwriter -- Bill Lancaster, who wrote the original 1976 "Bad News Bears" film. (Lancaster, the son of Burt Lancaster, played ball on our Little League field when he was a kid in the late 1950s.) 

Hollywood has had a long love affair with baseball -- "Pride of the Yankees," "The Natural" to "Bull Durham" and "The Rookie" to name a few standouts. But instead of compiling the best baseball movies, Rootzoo blogger KoufaxSpahn has come up with a clever post assembling an all-star team of players from classic baseball movies, complete with Bill James-style assessments of their abilities. His all-time movie team's starting lineup includes Wesley Snipes' Willie Mays Hayes (from "Major League") batting leadoff and playing center field; Jackie Earle Haley's Kelly Leak ("Bad News Bears") batting third and playing left field; Robert Redford's Roy Hobbs ("The Natural") batting cleanup and playing right field; and Kevin Costner's Crash Davis ("Bull Durham") batting sixth and catching.

He also has a host of pitchers, with Brendan Fraser's Steve Nebraska ("The Scout") as a starter and Charlie Sheen's Rick "Wild Thing" Vaughn ("Major League") as his closer, along with Geena Davis' Dottie Hinson ("A League of Their Own") as a pinch-hitter. And who else but Tom Hanks' Jimmy "There's no crying in baseball" Dugan ("League of Their Own") as his manager. Hanks would have his hands full with all the flakes and troublemakers on this team -- which also features Tatum O'Neal's Amanda Whurlitzer (from "The Bad News Bears") pitching in middle relief -- but I'm sure he could handle it.

The whole roster is here -- but if you really want to get into the spirit, just watch this clip of Hanks' famous tirade, which concludes with the all-time greatest insult ever leveled at a baseball umpire:

For a cranky entertainment reporter like me, December means the arrival of the demolition derby known as Oscar season. But as a sports dad, December means the arrival of high school basketball season, when my 10-year-old son and I start hanging out in crowded Los Angeles gyms, watching some of the nation's best high school basketball talent play in local tournaments. We were at Westchester High last night, watching a great match-up in the school's Tip-Off Classic between Westchester High and Windward High. Westchester is a perennial powerhouse, having won eight City Section championships and four state titles under current coach Ed Azzam. (As our high school sports expert Eric Sondheimer recently pointed out, Westchester has --count 'em -- six former standouts playing in the NBA.

It was a kick seeing Windward, a private school not normally associated with the top hoops programs, going up against Westchester. But the real surprise was discovering that one of the team's best players, Malcolm Washington, is the youngest son of Denzel Washington. (Apparently athleticism runs in the family -- Denzel's oldest son, John David, played football at Morehouse.) My spies tell me that Denzel comes to nearly all of his son's games, his famous face often buried in a baseball cap, even when Malcolm was playing in a summer tournament this past July in Las Vegas. I didn't spot him last night, though he was at Windward's Tuesday game, wearing sweats and a New York Yankees cap.

Malcolm is a small but solidly built point guard who rarely shoots, but he is easily Windward's defensive ace. He's quick and opportunistic, always looking to set a pick or steal the ball. Windward was over-matched against Westchester, which will clearly contend for another state championship, led by their phenomenal senior guard, Dominique O'Connor. However, Windward has its share of talent, with two seniors who going to major colleges -- Anthony Stover, a 6-foot-10 center who's headed for UCLA and Darius Morris, a 6-foot-3 swingman who's going to Michigan. How good is Malcolm Washington? I asked my pal, Frank Burlison, the sports columnist at the Long Beach Press-Telegram and a fount of basketball knowledge, for his assessment of Malcolm's skills:

Frank says: "Malcolm understands how a point guard is supposed to play, especially in terms of running the offense and taking care of the basketball. He's not careless or too flashy, like a lot of guys at the position. He's a sound defensive player with great fundamentals. They list him at 5'11, which is probably generous, and he rarely shoots, but he has all the intangibles you want from a point guard. He doesn't over-handle the ball, and he really creates opportunities for the whole offense, not just for himself. From what I understand, he's going to the University of Pennsylvania, and at an Ivy League school, he could play substantial minutes. He has physical limitations, being short and not especially fast, but he's a coach's player, the kind of kid every coach wants to have on his team." 

Photo: Denzel Washington (right), his wife Paulette and his son Malcolm. Credit: Dan Steinberg / Associated Press

Since he closed up Revolution Studios, Joe Roth has kept his hand in the movie business -- he's got projects at Sony, Fox and Disney, where he's producing Tim Burton's upcoming "Alice in Wonderland." But he's spending most of his time with his new love, commuting up to Seattle, where he's the majority owner of the Seattle Sounders FC, the new Major League Soccer expansion team that begins play next spring. A lifelong sports junkie -- he spent years coaching his son's soccer team, has courtside Lakers seats and knows more obscure baseball stats than Bill James -- Roth has discovered that soccer is a great laboratory to test out both Internet community-based marketing and Hollywood-style glitz.

But when we had lunch the other day, Roth also made the tantalizing case that the new popularity of soccer in America has a lot in common with the groundswell of support for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Roth is not a neutral political observer. It was Roth, along with David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, who organized Obama's first major Hollywood fundraiser early last year, back when Obama was 20 points behind Hillary Clinton in the polls. Roth sees soccer as appealing to the same fast-growing demographic groups that have been at the center of Obama's campaign.

"If you took a map of America where Obama is strongest and laid it over a map of where soccer has its biggest appeal, you'd see an incredible overlap," he told me. "The blue states on both coasts are very soccer-friendly as well as huge areas of support for Obama, where as the center of the country is full of people who are the enemies of soccer and Obama -- white, 50-and-over guys who listen to talk radio and only care about football or basketball."

Before he bought the Sounders, whose minority owners include comedian Drew Carey, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Adrian Hanauer (who owned Seattle's minor league soccer franchise), Roth did a lot of homework into soccer's key areas of demographic appeal. "The way America is changing in its ethnicity -- becoming more Latino and African American -- is going to make soccer a major sport in the same way those ethnic shifts are helping Obama. Soccer's fastest growth is in liberal, better-educated cities, places like Seattle, Portland, Boston, Vancouver, Montreal and Los Angeles. All you have to do is look at the MLS crowds -- they're young, they're noisy and they're not that different from the youthful spirit you'd see at an Obama rally."

If Obama wins on Tuesday, election analysts will give much of the credit not just to the candidate, but to his enormously effective political machine, which has used the Internet to boost fundraising and create a loyal, engaged community of potential voters. Roth has been using similar techniques to launch his soccer club, which has already set an MLS record by pre-selling more than 17,000 season tickets. What has he learned about the impact of the Facebook-style spirit of the Internet that will transform the way soccer fans interact at Sounders games? Keep reading:

While everyone else was watching the vice presidential debates, I was watching my beloved Cubs play the Dodgers at Wrigley Field, wondering how many ground balls it was possible for one infield to fumble, drop, boot, muff, flub, mishandle, bobble and butcher in the course of one playoff game. It was ugly. I keep telling my 10-year-old Little Leaguer that as Cubs fans, we don't believe in curses. This is the modern world--we're not prisoners of pagan superstition.

But seeing the befuddled Cubs flail around last night, I confess that they had the look of a team imprisoned under a witch's spell. How else to explain how one of the best defensive infields in the majors suddenly took on the bumbling air of the hapless 1962 Mets, making four errors, two of them coming in the disastrous second inning when the Dodgers put the game away, ultimately winning 10-3. It didn't help matters when I immediately got an e-mail from a Hollywood executive, gloatingly referring to the origins of the curse (a fan with a billy goat was turned away from Wrigley during the 1945 World Series) by saying: "Baaaa! Baaaa! I hear the bay of the goat!"

As someone who sees all things through the prism of cinema, I always thought that this season, the 100th anniversary of the last time the Cubs went to the World Series, would be our equivalent of "Field of Dreams," our version of "Angels in the Outfield." But after last night, the Cubs looked like they were auditioning for a bad remake of "I Walked With a Zombie."

I've got another interview coming up with a die-hard Cubs fan from the entertainment world. But first I've got to talk myself off the 95th story of the Hancock Tower. I was so despondent last night that I couldn't even cheer up my son, who's been a Cub fan since birth--he had a Ron Santo jersey in his crib. I tried telling him that losing a couple of games at home wasn't the end of the world. Why look, I said, even the Angels, who were supposed to roll over the Red Sox, lost their first game at home. My son looked at me, exasperated. He saw through that ruse immediately.

"What does that have to do with anything?" he said. "We don't even care about the Angels!" 

Photo by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

As promised, we finally persuaded a longtime Chicago Cubs fan to talk about the roots of his Cubs-mania. The man who stepped up to the plate? None other than actor and comic Jim Belushi, who stars in the ABC sitcom "According to Jim." He first went to Wrigley Field with his Cub Scout troop and has been hooked ever since. Of all his stories, my favorite is the one about Belushi and his Aunt Susie giving Cubs announcer Harry Caray a ride home from the ballpark. A legendary ladies man, Harry engaged in some serious flirting with Aunt Susie, who was about 80 years old at the time. Belushi not only offers up more fun memories, but aced our rigorous set of Cubs trivia questions.

So hoist a brewski and listen to two lunatic Cubs fans sharing the sheer pleasure of being only 26 days away from seeing the Cubs back in the postseason:

Every summer we spend part of our family vacation making a pilgrimage to Wrigley Field to see our beloved but woeful Chicago Cubs. Except this year the Cubbies aren't so woeful. In fact, they have the best record in the National League and are leading the league's toughest division, the NL Central, by 4 1/2 games. (To give you an idea of how tough the division is, if the Dodgers were in the NL Central, they'd be 15 games out of first place.) I hate to view all my experiences through the prism of show business, since we really just went to Chicago to see baseball played in the best ballpark in the land. But baseball is entertainment and the Cubs--who are in the process of being sold by Sam Zell, who also owns my newspaper--are a one-of-a-kind entertainment commodity, which is why a host of suitors, including Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theatres owner Mark Cuban, are salivating at the prospect of shelling out more than $1 billion for the franchise.

And why not? Studio chiefs and network execs spend zillions trying to establish brand loyalty for their product. Imagine their envy when they study the zealous loyalty of Cubs fans: Even when the team was abysmal, which was almost always (we haven't been to a World Series in 63 years, haven't won one in 100), Wrigley Field has been packed with rabid fans. In recent years, even with the Cubs fielding some truly hapless teams, every game is a sellout. In TV or film, a lousy product almost invariably spells disaster. At Wrigley, it hardly matters. The experience of being at Wrigley with the faithful is what matters.

We had especially great seats at one of the games last month, right behind home plate. I found myself seated next to an elderly man who went to his first Cubs games as a boy in 1933. He saw Hack Wilson play left field before there was any ivy on the brick outfield wall, in fact before there was even a left-field wall (in the '30s, there were field-level bleachers). He'd seen it all, from a skinny rookie shortstop named Ernie Banks to slow-walking relief ace Lee Smith to irrepressible outfielder Jose Cardenal (who used to keep his Afro comb tucked in the ivy in left field). He even remembered the gloomy early-'60s era when the Cubs decided the team should be run by a college of coaches instead of a regular manager, an especially bad idea that inspired even more ignominious defeats. When I asked him what kept him coming back, he shrugged and finally said, "Hope springs eternal."

As anyone who's ever seen the Cubs play at Dodger Stadium can attest, there are untold thousands of transplanted Cubs fans in L.A., including a healthy contingent of showbiz loyalists. I've been nagging various actors and comics and filmmakers, trying to get someone to talk about the roots of their Cubs mania. I finally got a true loyalist to sit down and reminisce about his childhood days at Wrigley Field and even answer a few trivia questions. Tune in later today and I'll have our first Hollywood Cubs Fan Quiz up on the blog.

Photo by Brian Kersey / Associated Press

   

Denzel Washington: Sports dad

For a cranky entertainment reporter like me, December means the arrival of the demolition derby known as Oscar season. But as a sports dad, December means the arrival of high school basketball season, when my 10-year-old son and I start hanging out in crowded Los Angeles gyms, watching some of the nation's best high school basketball talent play in local tournaments. We were at Westchester High last night, watching a great match-up in the school's Tip-Off Classic between Westchester High and Windward High. Westchester is a perennial powerhouse, having won eight City Section championships and four state titles under current coach Ed Azzam. (As our high school sports expert Eric Sondheimer recently pointed out, Westchester has --count 'em -- six former standouts playing in the NBA.

It was a kick seeing Windward, a private school not normally associated with the top hoops programs, going up against Westchester. But the real surprise was discovering that one of the team's best players, Malcolm Washington, is the youngest son of Denzel Washington. (Apparently athleticism runs in the family -- Denzel's oldest son, John David, played football at Morehouse.) My spies tell me that Denzel comes to nearly all of his son's games, his famous face often buried in a baseball cap, even when Malcolm was playing in a summer tournament this past July in Las Vegas. I didn't spot him last night, though he was at Windward's Tuesday game, wearing sweats and a New York Yankees cap.

Malcolm is a small but solidly built point guard who rarely shoots, but he is easily Windward's defensive ace. He's quick and opportunistic, always looking to set a pick or steal the ball. Windward was over-matched against Westchester, which will clearly contend for another state championship, led by their phenomenal senior guard, Dominique O'Connor. However, Windward has its share of talent, with two seniors who going to major colleges -- Anthony Stover, a 6-foot-10 center who's headed for UCLA and Darius Morris, a 6-foot-3 swingman who's going to Michigan. How good is Malcolm Washington? I asked my pal, Frank Burlison, the sports columnist at the Long Beach Press-Telegram and a fount of basketball knowledge, for his assessment of Malcolm's skills:

Frank says: "Malcolm understands how a point guard is supposed to play, especially in terms of running the offense and taking care of the basketball. He's not careless or too flashy, like a lot of guys at the position. He's a sound defensive player with great fundamentals. They list him at 5'11, which is probably generous, and he rarely shoots, but he has all the intangibles you want from a point guard. He doesn't over-handle the ball, and he really creates opportunities for the whole offense, not just for himself. From what I understand, he's going to the University of Pennsylvania, and at an Ivy League school, he could play substantial minutes. He has physical limitations, being short and not especially fast, but he's a coach's player, the kind of kid every coach wants to have on his team." 

Photo: Denzel Washington (right), his wife Paulette and his son Malcolm. Credit: Dan Steinberg / Associated Press

Since he closed up Revolution Studios, Joe Roth has kept his hand in the movie business -- he's got projects at Sony, Fox and Disney, where he's producing Tim Burton's upcoming "Alice in Wonderland." But he's spending most of his time with his new love, commuting up to Seattle, where he's the majority owner of the Seattle Sounders FC, the new Major League Soccer expansion team that begins play next spring. A lifelong sports junkie -- he spent years coaching his son's soccer team, has courtside Lakers seats and knows more obscure baseball stats than Bill James -- Roth has discovered that soccer is a great laboratory to test out both Internet community-based marketing and Hollywood-style glitz.

But when we had lunch the other day, Roth also made the tantalizing case that the new popularity of soccer in America has a lot in common with the groundswell of support for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Roth is not a neutral political observer. It was Roth, along with David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, who organized Obama's first major Hollywood fundraiser early last year, back when Obama was 20 points behind Hillary Clinton in the polls. Roth sees soccer as appealing to the same fast-growing demographic groups that have been at the center of Obama's campaign.

"If you took a map of America where Obama is strongest and laid it over a map of where soccer has its biggest appeal, you'd see an incredible overlap," he told me. "The blue states on both coasts are very soccer-friendly as well as huge areas of support for Obama, where as the center of the country is full of people who are the enemies of soccer and Obama -- white, 50-and-over guys who listen to talk radio and only care about football or basketball."

Before he bought the Sounders, whose minority owners include comedian Drew Carey, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Adrian Hanauer (who owned Seattle's minor league soccer franchise), Roth did a lot of homework into soccer's key areas of demographic appeal. "The way America is changing in its ethnicity -- becoming more Latino and African American -- is going to make soccer a major sport in the same way those ethnic shifts are helping Obama. Soccer's fastest growth is in liberal, better-educated cities, places like Seattle, Portland, Boston, Vancouver, Montreal and Los Angeles. All you have to do is look at the MLS crowds -- they're young, they're noisy and they're not that different from the youthful spirit you'd see at an Obama rally."

If Obama wins on Tuesday, election analysts will give much of the credit not just to the candidate, but to his enormously effective political machine, which has used the Internet to boost fundraising and create a loyal, engaged community of potential voters. Roth has been using similar techniques to launch his soccer club, which has already set an MLS record by pre-selling more than 17,000 season tickets. What has he learned about the impact of the Facebook-style spirit of the Internet that will transform the way soccer fans interact at Sounders games? Keep reading:

While everyone else was watching the vice presidential debates, I was watching my beloved Cubs play the Dodgers at Wrigley Field, wondering how many ground balls it was possible for one infield to fumble, drop, boot, muff, flub, mishandle, bobble and butcher in the course of one playoff game. It was ugly. I keep telling my 10-year-old Little Leaguer that as Cubs fans, we don't believe in curses. This is the modern world--we're not prisoners of pagan superstition.

But seeing the befuddled Cubs flail around last night, I confess that they had the look of a team imprisoned under a witch's spell. How else to explain how one of the best defensive infields in the majors suddenly took on the bumbling air of the hapless 1962 Mets, making four errors, two of them coming in the disastrous second inning when the Dodgers put the game away, ultimately winning 10-3. It didn't help matters when I immediately got an e-mail from a Hollywood executive, gloatingly referring to the origins of the curse (a fan with a billy goat was turned away from Wrigley during the 1945 World Series) by saying: "Baaaa! Baaaa! I hear the bay of the goat!"

As someone who sees all things through the prism of cinema, I always thought that this season, the 100th anniversary of the last time the Cubs went to the World Series, would be our equivalent of "Field of Dreams," our version of "Angels in the Outfield." But after last night, the Cubs looked like they were auditioning for a bad remake of "I Walked With a Zombie."

I've got another interview coming up with a die-hard Cubs fan from the entertainment world. But first I've got to talk myself off the 95th story of the Hancock Tower. I was so despondent last night that I couldn't even cheer up my son, who's been a Cub fan since birth--he had a Ron Santo jersey in his crib. I tried telling him that losing a couple of games at home wasn't the end of the world. Why look, I said, even the Angels, who were supposed to roll over the Red Sox, lost their first game at home. My son looked at me, exasperated. He saw through that ruse immediately.

"What does that have to do with anything?" he said. "We don't even care about the Angels!" 

Photo by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

As promised, we finally persuaded a longtime Chicago Cubs fan to talk about the roots of his Cubs-mania. The man who stepped up to the plate? None other than actor and comic Jim Belushi, who stars in the ABC sitcom "According to Jim." He first went to Wrigley Field with his Cub Scout troop and has been hooked ever since. Of all his stories, my favorite is the one about Belushi and his Aunt Susie giving Cubs announcer Harry Caray a ride home from the ballpark. A legendary ladies man, Harry engaged in some serious flirting with Aunt Susie, who was about 80 years old at the time. Belushi not only offers up more fun memories, but aced our rigorous set of Cubs trivia questions.

So hoist a brewski and listen to two lunatic Cubs fans sharing the sheer pleasure of being only 26 days away from seeing the Cubs back in the postseason:

Every summer we spend part of our family vacation making a pilgrimage to Wrigley Field to see our beloved but woeful Chicago Cubs. Except this year the Cubbies aren't so woeful. In fact, they have the best record in the National League and are leading the league's toughest division, the NL Central, by 4 1/2 games. (To give you an idea of how tough the division is, if the Dodgers were in the NL Central, they'd be 15 games out of first place.) I hate to view all my experiences through the prism of show business, since we really just went to Chicago to see baseball played in the best ballpark in the land. But baseball is entertainment and the Cubs--who are in the process of being sold by Sam Zell, who also owns my newspaper--are a one-of-a-kind entertainment commodity, which is why a host of suitors, including Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theatres owner Mark Cuban, are salivating at the prospect of shelling out more than $1 billion for the franchise.

And why not? Studio chiefs and network execs spend zillions trying to establish brand loyalty for their product. Imagine their envy when they study the zealous loyalty of Cubs fans: Even when the team was abysmal, which was almost always (we haven't been to a World Series in 63 years, haven't won one in 100), Wrigley Field has been packed with rabid fans. In recent years, even with the Cubs fielding some truly hapless teams, every game is a sellout. In TV or film, a lousy product almost invariably spells disaster. At Wrigley, it hardly matters. The experience of being at Wrigley with the faithful is what matters.

We had especially great seats at one of the games last month, right behind home plate. I found myself seated next to an elderly man who went to his first Cubs games as a boy in 1933. He saw Hack Wilson play left field before there was any ivy on the brick outfield wall, in fact before there was even a left-field wall (in the '30s, there were field-level bleachers). He'd seen it all, from a skinny rookie shortstop named Ernie Banks to slow-walking relief ace Lee Smith to irrepressible outfielder Jose Cardenal (who used to keep his Afro comb tucked in the ivy in left field). He even remembered the gloomy early-'60s era when the Cubs decided the team should be run by a college of coaches instead of a regular manager, an especially bad idea that inspired even more ignominious defeats. When I asked him what kept him coming back, he shrugged and finally said, "Hope springs eternal."

As anyone who's ever seen the Cubs play at Dodger Stadium can attest, there are untold thousands of transplanted Cubs fans in L.A., including a healthy contingent of showbiz loyalists. I've been nagging various actors and comics and filmmakers, trying to get someone to talk about the roots of their Cubs mania. I finally got a true loyalist to sit down and reminisce about his childhood days at Wrigley Field and even answer a few trivia questions. Tune in later today and I'll have our first Hollywood Cubs Fan Quiz up on the blog.

Photo by Brian Kersey / Associated Press

   

Would Obama's election make soccer a major league American sport?

Since he closed up Revolution Studios, Joe Roth has kept his hand in the movie business -- he's got projects at Sony, Fox and Disney, where he's producing Tim Burton's upcoming "Alice in Wonderland." But he's spending most of his time with his new love, commuting up to Seattle, where he's the majority owner of the Seattle Sounders FC, the new Major League Soccer expansion team that begins play next spring. A lifelong sports junkie -- he spent years coaching his son's soccer team, has courtside Lakers seats and knows more obscure baseball stats than Bill James -- Roth has discovered that soccer is a great laboratory to test out both Internet community-based marketing and Hollywood-style glitz.

But when we had lunch the other day, Roth also made the tantalizing case that the new popularity of soccer in America has a lot in common with the groundswell of support for Barack Obama's presidential campaign. Roth is not a neutral political observer. It was Roth, along with David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, who organized Obama's first major Hollywood fundraiser early last year, back when Obama was 20 points behind Hillary Clinton in the polls. Roth sees soccer as appealing to the same fast-growing demographic groups that have been at the center of Obama's campaign.

"If you took a map of America where Obama is strongest and laid it over a map of where soccer has its biggest appeal, you'd see an incredible overlap," he told me. "The blue states on both coasts are very soccer-friendly as well as huge areas of support for Obama, where as the center of the country is full of people who are the enemies of soccer and Obama -- white, 50-and-over guys who listen to talk radio and only care about football or basketball."

Before he bought the Sounders, whose minority owners include comedian Drew Carey, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Adrian Hanauer (who owned Seattle's minor league soccer franchise), Roth did a lot of homework into soccer's key areas of demographic appeal. "The way America is changing in its ethnicity -- becoming more Latino and African American -- is going to make soccer a major sport in the same way those ethnic shifts are helping Obama. Soccer's fastest growth is in liberal, better-educated cities, places like Seattle, Portland, Boston, Vancouver, Montreal and Los Angeles. All you have to do is look at the MLS crowds -- they're young, they're noisy and they're not that different from the youthful spirit you'd see at an Obama rally."

If Obama wins on Tuesday, election analysts will give much of the credit not just to the candidate, but to his enormously effective political machine, which has used the Internet to boost fundraising and create a loyal, engaged community of potential voters. Roth has been using similar techniques to launch his soccer club, which has already set an MLS record by pre-selling more than 17,000 season tickets. What has he learned about the impact of the Facebook-style spirit of the Internet that will transform the way soccer fans interact at Sounders games? Keep reading:

While everyone else was watching the vice presidential debates, I was watching my beloved Cubs play the Dodgers at Wrigley Field, wondering how many ground balls it was possible for one infield to fumble, drop, boot, muff, flub, mishandle, bobble and butcher in the course of one playoff game. It was ugly. I keep telling my 10-year-old Little Leaguer that as Cubs fans, we don't believe in curses. This is the modern world--we're not prisoners of pagan superstition.

But seeing the befuddled Cubs flail around last night, I confess that they had the look of a team imprisoned under a witch's spell. How else to explain how one of the best defensive infields in the majors suddenly took on the bumbling air of the hapless 1962 Mets, making four errors, two of them coming in the disastrous second inning when the Dodgers put the game away, ultimately winning 10-3. It didn't help matters when I immediately got an e-mail from a Hollywood executive, gloatingly referring to the origins of the curse (a fan with a billy goat was turned away from Wrigley during the 1945 World Series) by saying: "Baaaa! Baaaa! I hear the bay of the goat!"

As someone who sees all things through the prism of cinema, I always thought that this season, the 100th anniversary of the last time the Cubs went to the World Series, would be our equivalent of "Field of Dreams," our version of "Angels in the Outfield." But after last night, the Cubs looked like they were auditioning for a bad remake of "I Walked With a Zombie."

I've got another interview coming up with a die-hard Cubs fan from the entertainment world. But first I've got to talk myself off the 95th story of the Hancock Tower. I was so despondent last night that I couldn't even cheer up my son, who's been a Cub fan since birth--he had a Ron Santo jersey in his crib. I tried telling him that losing a couple of games at home wasn't the end of the world. Why look, I said, even the Angels, who were supposed to roll over the Red Sox, lost their first game at home. My son looked at me, exasperated. He saw through that ruse immediately.

"What does that have to do with anything?" he said. "We don't even care about the Angels!" 

Photo by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

As promised, we finally persuaded a longtime Chicago Cubs fan to talk about the roots of his Cubs-mania. The man who stepped up to the plate? None other than actor and comic Jim Belushi, who stars in the ABC sitcom "According to Jim." He first went to Wrigley Field with his Cub Scout troop and has been hooked ever since. Of all his stories, my favorite is the one about Belushi and his Aunt Susie giving Cubs announcer Harry Caray a ride home from the ballpark. A legendary ladies man, Harry engaged in some serious flirting with Aunt Susie, who was about 80 years old at the time. Belushi not only offers up more fun memories, but aced our rigorous set of Cubs trivia questions.

So hoist a brewski and listen to two lunatic Cubs fans sharing the sheer pleasure of being only 26 days away from seeing the Cubs back in the postseason:

Every summer we spend part of our family vacation making a pilgrimage to Wrigley Field to see our beloved but woeful Chicago Cubs. Except this year the Cubbies aren't so woeful. In fact, they have the best record in the National League and are leading the league's toughest division, the NL Central, by 4 1/2 games. (To give you an idea of how tough the division is, if the Dodgers were in the NL Central, they'd be 15 games out of first place.) I hate to view all my experiences through the prism of show business, since we really just went to Chicago to see baseball played in the best ballpark in the land. But baseball is entertainment and the Cubs--who are in the process of being sold by Sam Zell, who also owns my newspaper--are a one-of-a-kind entertainment commodity, which is why a host of suitors, including Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theatres owner Mark Cuban, are salivating at the prospect of shelling out more than $1 billion for the franchise.

And why not? Studio chiefs and network execs spend zillions trying to establish brand loyalty for their product. Imagine their envy when they study the zealous loyalty of Cubs fans: Even when the team was abysmal, which was almost always (we haven't been to a World Series in 63 years, haven't won one in 100), Wrigley Field has been packed with rabid fans. In recent years, even with the Cubs fielding some truly hapless teams, every game is a sellout. In TV or film, a lousy product almost invariably spells disaster. At Wrigley, it hardly matters. The experience of being at Wrigley with the faithful is what matters.

We had especially great seats at one of the games last month, right behind home plate. I found myself seated next to an elderly man who went to his first Cubs games as a boy in 1933. He saw Hack Wilson play left field before there was any ivy on the brick outfield wall, in fact before there was even a left-field wall (in the '30s, there were field-level bleachers). He'd seen it all, from a skinny rookie shortstop named Ernie Banks to slow-walking relief ace Lee Smith to irrepressible outfielder Jose Cardenal (who used to keep his Afro comb tucked in the ivy in left field). He even remembered the gloomy early-'60s era when the Cubs decided the team should be run by a college of coaches instead of a regular manager, an especially bad idea that inspired even more ignominious defeats. When I asked him what kept him coming back, he shrugged and finally said, "Hope springs eternal."

As anyone who's ever seen the Cubs play at Dodger Stadium can attest, there are untold thousands of transplanted Cubs fans in L.A., including a healthy contingent of showbiz loyalists. I've been nagging various actors and comics and filmmakers, trying to get someone to talk about the roots of their Cubs mania. I finally got a true loyalist to sit down and reminisce about his childhood days at Wrigley Field and even answer a few trivia questions. Tune in later today and I'll have our first Hollywood Cubs Fan Quiz up on the blog.

Photo by Brian Kersey / Associated Press

   

No joy in Cubsville

While everyone else was watching the vice presidential debates, I was watching my beloved Cubs play the Dodgers at Wrigley Field, wondering how many ground balls it was possible for one infield to fumble, drop, boot, muff, flub, mishandle, bobble and butcher in the course of one playoff game. It was ugly. I keep telling my 10-year-old Little Leaguer that as Cubs fans, we don't believe in curses. This is the modern world--we're not prisoners of pagan superstition.

But seeing the befuddled Cubs flail around last night, I confess that they had the look of a team imprisoned under a witch's spell. How else to explain how one of the best defensive infields in the majors suddenly took on the bumbling air of the hapless 1962 Mets, making four errors, two of them coming in the disastrous second inning when the Dodgers put the game away, ultimately winning 10-3. It didn't help matters when I immediately got an e-mail from a Hollywood executive, gloatingly referring to the origins of the curse (a fan with a billy goat was turned away from Wrigley during the 1945 World Series) by saying: "Baaaa! Baaaa! I hear the bay of the goat!"

As someone who sees all things through the prism of cinema, I always thought that this season, the 100th anniversary of the last time the Cubs went to the World Series, would be our equivalent of "Field of Dreams," our version of "Angels in the Outfield." But after last night, the Cubs looked like they were auditioning for a bad remake of "I Walked With a Zombie."

I've got another interview coming up with a die-hard Cubs fan from the entertainment world. But first I've got to talk myself off the 95th story of the Hancock Tower. I was so despondent last night that I couldn't even cheer up my son, who's been a Cub fan since birth--he had a Ron Santo jersey in his crib. I tried telling him that losing a couple of games at home wasn't the end of the world. Why look, I said, even the Angels, who were supposed to roll over the Red Sox, lost their first game at home. My son looked at me, exasperated. He saw through that ruse immediately.

"What does that have to do with anything?" he said. "We don't even care about the Angels!" 

Photo by Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times

As promised, we finally persuaded a longtime Chicago Cubs fan to talk about the roots of his Cubs-mania. The man who stepped up to the plate? None other than actor and comic Jim Belushi, who stars in the ABC sitcom "According to Jim." He first went to Wrigley Field with his Cub Scout troop and has been hooked ever since. Of all his stories, my favorite is the one about Belushi and his Aunt Susie giving Cubs announcer Harry Caray a ride home from the ballpark. A legendary ladies man, Harry engaged in some serious flirting with Aunt Susie, who was about 80 years old at the time. Belushi not only offers up more fun memories, but aced our rigorous set of Cubs trivia questions.

So hoist a brewski and listen to two lunatic Cubs fans sharing the sheer pleasure of being only 26 days away from seeing the Cubs back in the postseason:

Every summer we spend part of our family vacation making a pilgrimage to Wrigley Field to see our beloved but woeful Chicago Cubs. Except this year the Cubbies aren't so woeful. In fact, they have the best record in the National League and are leading the league's toughest division, the NL Central, by 4 1/2 games. (To give you an idea of how tough the division is, if the Dodgers were in the NL Central, they'd be 15 games out of first place.) I hate to view all my experiences through the prism of show business, since we really just went to Chicago to see baseball played in the best ballpark in the land. But baseball is entertainment and the Cubs--who are in the process of being sold by Sam Zell, who also owns my newspaper--are a one-of-a-kind entertainment commodity, which is why a host of suitors, including Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theatres owner Mark Cuban, are salivating at the prospect of shelling out more than $1 billion for the franchise.

And why not? Studio chiefs and network execs spend zillions trying to establish brand loyalty for their product. Imagine their envy when they study the zealous loyalty of Cubs fans: Even when the team was abysmal, which was almost always (we haven't been to a World Series in 63 years, haven't won one in 100), Wrigley Field has been packed with rabid fans. In recent years, even with the Cubs fielding some truly hapless teams, every game is a sellout. In TV or film, a lousy product almost invariably spells disaster. At Wrigley, it hardly matters. The experience of being at Wrigley with the faithful is what matters.

We had especially great seats at one of the games last month, right behind home plate. I found myself seated next to an elderly man who went to his first Cubs games as a boy in 1933. He saw Hack Wilson play left field before there was any ivy on the brick outfield wall, in fact before there was even a left-field wall (in the '30s, there were field-level bleachers). He'd seen it all, from a skinny rookie shortstop named Ernie Banks to slow-walking relief ace Lee Smith to irrepressible outfielder Jose Cardenal (who used to keep his Afro comb tucked in the ivy in left field). He even remembered the gloomy early-'60s era when the Cubs decided the team should be run by a college of coaches instead of a regular manager, an especially bad idea that inspired even more ignominious defeats. When I asked him what kept him coming back, he shrugged and finally said, "Hope springs eternal."

As anyone who's ever seen the Cubs play at Dodger Stadium can attest, there are untold thousands of transplanted Cubs fans in L.A., including a healthy contingent of showbiz loyalists. I've been nagging various actors and comics and filmmakers, trying to get someone to talk about the roots of their Cubs mania. I finally got a true loyalist to sit down and reminisce about his childhood days at Wrigley Field and even answer a few trivia questions. Tune in later today and I'll have our first Hollywood Cubs Fan Quiz up on the blog.

Photo by Brian Kersey / Associated Press

   

The Hollywood Cubs Quiz

As promised, we finally persuaded a longtime Chicago Cubs fan to talk about the roots of his Cubs-mania. The man who stepped up to the plate? None other than actor and comic Jim Belushi, who stars in the ABC sitcom "According to Jim." He first went to Wrigley Field with his Cub Scout troop and has been hooked ever since. Of all his stories, my favorite is the one about Belushi and his Aunt Susie giving Cubs announcer Harry Caray a ride home from the ballpark. A legendary ladies man, Harry engaged in some serious flirting with Aunt Susie, who was about 80 years old at the time. Belushi not only offers up more fun memories, but aced our rigorous set of Cubs trivia questions.

So hoist a brewski and listen to two lunatic Cubs fans sharing the sheer pleasure of being only 26 days away from seeing the Cubs back in the postseason:

Every summer we spend part of our family vacation making a pilgrimage to Wrigley Field to see our beloved but woeful Chicago Cubs. Except this year the Cubbies aren't so woeful. In fact, they have the best record in the National League and are leading the league's toughest division, the NL Central, by 4 1/2 games. (To give you an idea of how tough the division is, if the Dodgers were in the NL Central, they'd be 15 games out of first place.) I hate to view all my experiences through the prism of show business, since we really just went to Chicago to see baseball played in the best ballpark in the land. But baseball is entertainment and the Cubs--who are in the process of being sold by Sam Zell, who also owns my newspaper--are a one-of-a-kind entertainment commodity, which is why a host of suitors, including Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theatres owner Mark Cuban, are salivating at the prospect of shelling out more than $1 billion for the franchise.

And why not? Studio chiefs and network execs spend zillions trying to establish brand loyalty for their product. Imagine their envy when they study the zealous loyalty of Cubs fans: Even when the team was abysmal, which was almost always (we haven't been to a World Series in 63 years, haven't won one in 100), Wrigley Field has been packed with rabid fans. In recent years, even with the Cubs fielding some truly hapless teams, every game is a sellout. In TV or film, a lousy product almost invariably spells disaster. At Wrigley, it hardly matters. The experience of being at Wrigley with the faithful is what matters.

We had especially great seats at one of the games last month, right behind home plate. I found myself seated next to an elderly man who went to his first Cubs games as a boy in 1933. He saw Hack Wilson play left field before there was any ivy on the brick outfield wall, in fact before there was even a left-field wall (in the '30s, there were field-level bleachers). He'd seen it all, from a skinny rookie shortstop named Ernie Banks to slow-walking relief ace Lee Smith to irrepressible outfielder Jose Cardenal (who used to keep his Afro comb tucked in the ivy in left field). He even remembered the gloomy early-'60s era when the Cubs decided the team should be run by a college of coaches instead of a regular manager, an especially bad idea that inspired even more ignominious defeats. When I asked him what kept him coming back, he shrugged and finally said, "Hope springs eternal."

As anyone who's ever seen the Cubs play at Dodger Stadium can attest, there are untold thousands of transplanted Cubs fans in L.A., including a healthy contingent of showbiz loyalists. I've been nagging various actors and comics and filmmakers, trying to get someone to talk about the roots of their Cubs mania. I finally got a true loyalist to sit down and reminisce about his childhood days at Wrigley Field and even answer a few trivia questions. Tune in later today and I'll have our first Hollywood Cubs Fan Quiz up on the blog.

Photo by Brian Kersey / Associated Press

   

Go Cubs go!

Every summer we spend part of our family vacation making a pilgrimage to Wrigley Field to see our beloved but woeful Chicago Cubs. Except this year the Cubbies aren't so woeful. In fact, they have the best record in the National League and are leading the league's toughest division, the NL Central, by 4 1/2 games. (To give you an idea of how tough the division is, if the Dodgers were in the NL Central, they'd be 15 games out of first place.) I hate to view all my experiences through the prism of show business, since we really just went to Chicago to see baseball played in the best ballpark in the land. But baseball is entertainment and the Cubs--who are in the process of being sold by Sam Zell, who also owns my newspaper--are a one-of-a-kind entertainment commodity, which is why a host of suitors, including Dallas Mavericks and Landmark Theatres owner Mark Cuban, are salivating at the prospect of shelling out more than $1 billion for the franchise.

And why not? Studio chiefs and network execs spend zillions trying to establish brand loyalty for their product. Imagine their envy when they study the zealous loyalty of Cubs fans: Even when the team was abysmal, which was almost always (we haven't been to a World Series in 63 years, haven't won one in 100), Wrigley Field has been packed with rabid fans. In recent years, even with the Cubs fielding some truly hapless teams, every game is a sellout. In TV or film, a lousy product almost invariably spells disaster. At Wrigley, it hardly matters. The experience of being at Wrigley with the faithful is what matters.

We had especially great seats at one of the games last month, right behind home plate. I found myself seated next to an elderly man who went to his first Cubs games as a boy in 1933. He saw Hack Wilson play left field before there was any ivy on the brick outfield wall, in fact before there was even a left-field wall (in the '30s, there were field-level bleachers). He'd seen it all, from a skinny rookie shortstop named Ernie Banks to slow-walking relief ace Lee Smith to irrepressible outfielder Jose Cardenal (who used to keep his Afro comb tucked in the ivy in left field). He even remembered the gloomy early-'60s era when the Cubs decided the team should be run by a college of coaches instead of a regular manager, an especially bad idea that inspired even more ignominious defeats. When I asked him what kept him coming back, he shrugged and finally said, "Hope springs eternal."

As anyone who's ever seen the Cubs play at Dodger Stadium can attest, there are untold thousands of transplanted Cubs fans in L.A., including a healthy contingent of showbiz loyalists. I've been nagging various actors and comics and filmmakers, trying to get someone to talk about the roots of their Cubs mania. I finally got a true loyalist to sit down and reminisce about his childhood days at Wrigley Field and even answer a few trivia questions. Tune in later today and I'll have our first Hollywood Cubs Fan Quiz up on the blog.

Photo by Brian Kersey / Associated Press