Aisle 228: The poetry of the Chicago Cubs and baseball fandom

Baseball is poetry — literally, in the case of Sandra Marchetti, her Chicago Cubs fandom and her new book Aisle 228, available for pre-order Apr. 14.

Baseball has always been a sport that’s lent itself to poetry. From Ernest Thayer’s classic Casey at the Bat, published way back in 1888, to poems from luminaries like William Carlos Williams and May Swenson, the quietness of baseball has provided a rich space for some of the nation’s best poets to explore. I remember when I was getting my PhD, a classmate cornered me one night at a party to talk about how poetic the silences in between pitches were.

And now, we’ve got another name to etch into the baseball poem tradition with the release of Sandra Marchetti’s Aisle 228, a book about the Chicago Cubs, but that’s also about more than the Cubs — it’s a book about family, about the struggles of life, all filtered through the lens of the ivy-strewn walls of Wrigley Field, through the voices calling Cubs games on the radio.

Aisle 228 begins in a familiar place for long-time Cubs: in the days when the Cubs were still mired in the Curse of the Billy Goat. In the first poem, “Frame,” Marchetti writes:

My father gripes and wipes his nose
through the April game—
the team terrible again—

yet players lope over this green hill
and our minds agree to rise
and clap for them.

Those words capture something fundamental about being a sports fan, especially a fan of a perennial loser — we return each year knowing we’re gearing up for more heartbreak, but we still let some hope come out, we still clap for the players. It’s a thought echoed in the final couplet of the book’s second poem, The Unsayable — “We flicker in our seats, dimly/recede, but never leave.”

Marchetti’s book runs the gamut of Cubs’ history. In Strikeout, the speaker reflects on Kerry Wood’s 20-strikeout game. In 1965, a father listening to the radio as Sandy Koufax pitches a perfect game against the Cubs. That these moments both exist in this collection speaks to the depth of it: this isn’t a book about one particular moment for the Cubs, and it isn’t a book that shies away from the bad moments, even as the book builds toward the team’s success in the 2010s.

As the book draws closer and closer to its conclusion, a kind of hopefulness rising as the poems start to bring in images of the 2016 World Series champions, there’s still a sense that the long-suffering history of the fandom is lurking. In one of the final poems, The good Lord wants the Cubs to win, a poem that comes right after one celebrating the 2016 championship, the speaker is plunged back into uncertainty:

I dreamt you rewound
the last play that evening
our fortunes changed
and took it away.

Even when everything’s gone well, there’s this doubt lurking in the back. And that’s what fandom is when you’re rooting for a team that hasn’t had much success — after 108 years of not winning the World Series, it’s hard to really comprehend winning it, and those losses still haunt you. As Marchetti writes in Being a Cub Fan:

How many
minutes
of my life
have I spent
with hands
clasped,
hoping for one
to go out?

But while this book is “about” the Chicago Cubs, it’s also a collection that runs much deeper than that. It’s about family. About memory. Marchetti dedicated the collection to her father, and you can feel that father figure in so many of these poems.

In Sunday Night, the other in the poem — it isn’t clear if that other is the father, but it’s implied from the overall narrative of the collection — is juxtaposed against the speaker and the rest of the crowd. On the night Glavine gets his 300th win, “Cubs fans/cheered him easily,” but Marchetti writes “you didn’t want/to applaud,” and ends the poem with “you wouldn’t/stand for history.”

In these poems, this father represents the cynical Cubs fan — or maybe not cynical, but the realistic Cubs fan, the one who has endured decades of the team’s struggles. As Marchetti writes in Recording, “my father is at the game/and is so tired of hearing/this song, its lament.” She goes on to conclude that poem:

I whisper
to him: it’s over,
it’s almost over,
and since I want
to believe, I wipe
my cheek.

At their heart, these are poems about fandom, and they’re very specifically not poems about one version of fandom. The speaker and the father have different ideas of the Chicago Cubs, ideas informed by different perspectives because of the differing pasts they have with the team.

In the end, Aisle 228 manages to create its own world around the world it inhabits. It’s a book about the Cubs, but it’s also a book that’s not about the Cubs, a book that uses the decades of futility and the eventual World Series title as an occasion to tell a deeper story: one of family, one of self, and one of what it means — and what it takes — to be a fan.

Ed. Note — Sandra Marchetti is a poet and an occasional but beloved FanSided contributor. Aisle 228 is available for pre-order today, April 14, 2023.