Sorry, but I don't want the Cubs to win the World Series.
That franchise's 108-year run of ineptitude _ punctuated by Bartman, billy goats and memorably bad baseball _ is one of the sport's most compelling story lines. Sacrificing so much delicious history for the brief satisfaction of a Michigan Avenue parade seems an unworthy trade-off.
For me, the Cubs will always be best captured by a framed Norman Rockwell print I pass on every trip up and down the stairs in our home.
"The Dugout," sometimes called "Bottom of the Ninth," was one of Rockwell's 322 Saturday Evening Post covers, that one from Sept. 4, 1948. The artist based the scene on a Cubs-Braves doubleheader he'd attended in Boston earlier that season. Its focus is a frowning Chicago batboy who, wearing a too-big uniform that's stained at the knees, stands forlornly in front of the visiting team's dugout.
The youngster seems to be the focal point of all the frustration surrounding another last-place season. In the dugout, several jaded Cubs, including manager Charlie Grimm, view him silently with a combination of disinterest and dismay. Above, in the Braves Field box seats, a few colorful fans are more vocal, their jeers aimed at the boy.
The look the artist wanted on the youngster's face was the one he imagined most Cubs fan wore. "Try to think how you'd feel if your dog died," Rockwell instructed the model, Braves batboy Frank McNulty.
The painting, which now hangs in the Brooklyn Museum, manages to convey baseball's homespun appeal as well as the cynicism that sometimes infects it participants and fans, particularly toward the end of another long, unsuccessful seasons like the 1948 Cubs were experiencing.
Some, like longtime Cubs fan and NPR "Weekend Edition" host Scott Simon, now cite "Dugout" as the origin of what Simon in his autobiography called "the national image of the Cubs as "cuddlesome incompetents."
I'm no art expert. Growing up, the only thing framed in our house was a color-by-number drawing I'd given my mother as a birthday gift and which she charitably hung in the most remote corner of the recreation room.
But since I saw the world through the prism of sports, I soon was drawn to sports paintings, like those by Philadelphia's Thomas Eakins that depicted rowers, boxers, early baseball players. And Rockwell's sports illustrations appealed to me just as powerfully.
It's true that the artist, who took the train from New England to Philadelphia to personally deliver each Post cover to the magazine's editors in the Curtis Building at 5th and Chestnut, could be corny and simplistic. And often his characters crossed the line into caricature.
But his paintings also were wonderfully rendered, witty, homespun and insightful. And whether their subject was sports or war, they portrayed the kind of impossibly innocent America that Americans wished to see.
When it came to sports, America's artist seemed most comfortable with America's Pastime. In addition to "Dugout", one of his more popular baseball works is "Tough Call," in which a trio of umpires contemplates raindrops during the sixth inning of a 1-0 game. Another is "Knothole Baseball," a glimpse of a game through a tiny circular opening in a wooden fence.
In 1951, Rockwell painted four calendar scenes involving "Sporting Boys" at play in each of the seasons. He featured baseball, football, golf and his only representation of basketball. That one, subtitled "Oh Yeah!" shows a huddle of four unathletic boys vigorously arguing a call.
The best of his sports work, though, might be "Coin Toss," an Oct. 21, 1950, cover depicting that familiar ritual at the start of a high school football game in New England.
This slice of Americana was how Rockwell and, more importantly, the Post editors opted to see the nation in those tense Cold War years. A counterpoint to the painting appeared on that same cover, a teaser for the issue's lead story, "Case History of College Communism."
At the illustration's center is a portly referee who is clutching a football beneath one arm and flipping a coin into the air. He is perfectly framed by two skinny young players. In the idyllic distance, we see a half-filled grandstand and beyond it a church steeple and a swath of bright autumn foliage.
Though the artist was paid just $2,500, the original of "Coin Toss" sold for $1.1 million in 1989. The buyer was Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones. Rockwell's work, it turns out, is particularly popular among wealthy Texas conservatives.
"I had just bought the team and I had no money left _ I mean nothing," Jones said in 2014, after Christie's appraised the work that hangs in his living room at $18.5 million. "But Ross Perot collects Rockwells and he told me this one was too good to pass up so I scraped together $1.1 million."
Rockwell had eclectic tastes. I wonder if what drew this native New Yorker and lifelong New Englander to the Cubs was their shared misery.
He too was beloved but, in his lifetime at least, rarely taken seriously. Like the National League doormats, the artist was used to getting kicked around by his peers. Despite his popular and commercial success, the art world derided Rockwell as a cornball illustrator.
Since his death in 1978, however, his reputation has enjoyed an upward reassessment. Numerous biographies and exhibits have presented Rockwell as a "narrative genius" with a camera's unwavering eye. In 2013, an unidentified bidder purchased his "Saying Grace" for $46 million.
I'm OK with Rockwell transitioning from cuddly to great. After all, I've even learned to accept the curse-free Red Sox.
But "World Champion Cubs" would be too much to bear. If that happened, the batboy on my stairway print would never look quite so forlorn again.
