A NICE LITTLE PLACE ON THE NORTH SIDE

Veteran conservative political pundit Will (One Man's America: The Pleasures and Provocations of Our Singular Nation, 2009, etc.) writes an affectionate birthday card to the home of his beloved Chicago Cubs.

The author, who has written often about baseball (Bunts: Pete Rose, Curt Flood, Camden Yards and Other Reflections on Baseball, 1997, etc.) as well as issuing his periodic poundings of liberals and celebrations of conservatives, traces his Cub fandom back to 1948, when he was 7. He notes that since his birth, the Cubs are nearly 700 games below .500, a sad record that in a perverse way unites their fans. (Will compares the Cubs to Miss Havisham, the jilted bride in Great Expectations.) This is not a traditional, chronological history but an emotional one; in fact, greedy readers will find little about the construction of the place—though there is a nice little section about the decision to plant ivy to crawl along the outfield wall. Along the way, readers will learn about a baseball-related shooting that inspired Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952), some history of the odd Wrigley family, the relationship between beer and attendance at baseball games, some discoveries by baseball statistician Bill James, the surprising news that Jack Ruby (yes, he who shot Lee Harvey Oswald) once was a vendor at Wrigley and that the Cubs used to train on Santa Catalina Island. Of course, it wouldn’t be George-Will-on-baseball without allusions to Dickens, Aristotle and some other luminaries. He dispels a few myths along the way. For example, the famed double-play combo (Tinker to Evers to Chance) actually turned two very rarely, and he waxes philosophical a bit, ruminating about how fandom is like tribalism.

Digressive, amusing, anecdotal, legend-shattering, self-deprecating and passionate—just what you want in a friend sitting beside you at the ballpark.