By Jim K.

When I was in high school some friends and I took a train from Columbus to Chicago to attend a couple of Cubs games.

There are no Amtrak stations in Columbus. The nearest connection is an hour north of the city in a small town called Crestline, which as I remember it is little more than a coffee shop and a train station. Our departure time was three in the morning, which meant that in our excitement none of us slept since the night before. The train was quiet as the rest of the passengers slumbered, but I couldn't sleep. I kept sliding off my sanitary vinyl seat while my mind subconsciously pined for the beast to pick up some real steam and fly off to O'Hare.

The next day I sat in the Wrigley Field bleachers through nine innings of grueling Chicago Cubs baseball. The temperature was in the nineties and the humidity seemingly higher. The sun burnt my thick brown hair which sat on my head like an upturned copper bowl while my sleep-deprived brain gasped for relief. My arms and knees turned the color of raw chuck. I squirmed, I sweated, I stank. And I couldn't even order a beer.

A dozen years later I've reacquainted myself with Wrigley Field many times over, and in all my excursions there, that miserable afternoon in the bleachers 12 years ago reigns as one of my more pleasant experiences.

Let me put it this way: Wrigley Field is a hellhole of decaying American values.

I'm not concerned why the baseball team is so horrific year in and year out; that's another issue that I'll boil correctly down to money, money and money. But why does the ballpark sell out year after year when the baseball is so bad, the people are such asses and the hot dogs so lousy? The fact of the matter is, people attend Wrigley Field for a variety of reasons, and baseball is hardly one of them.

Cubs fans don't want the Cubs to win. They want their team to lose. They pay to slum it for a few hours, to play loser until it's time to hop back in their Lexus SUVs, rejoin the real world and be winners again. These people find their status in life so staggeringly perfect that it's actually a burden to be alleviated at a Cubs game. And Wrigley Field is the perfect stage for their little charade.

Hey, the building's fine. It's great. It's got ivy and bricks and neighboring buildings that overlook the outfield. It's surrounded by cute stone houses instead of parking lots. It's got public transportation a half-block away. There's shopping. Bars. Little plastic people and in their little plastic cars. It looks like a fucking train set.

Let's face it. The one undeniably good thing Wrigley Field has going for it is that it's still standing. You can't say that about the Polo Grounds or Crosley Field. It's old-fashioned because it's old. But no matter how nice the ballpark is, it's nothing unless the fans are paying attention to the baseball.

Your old Cubs fan pays attention to the baseball, but not very well. They sit in silence the whole game, decked out like amateur clowns in red, white and blue while a wax-coated earplug spouts play-by-play from deep within their ear canals. They are a sad lot, beaten down by sixty or more years of muffed double plays, wild pitches and dropped fly balls. They are dead to the world. They'd care if they could, but their caring is merely a charade. One can only pity them.

Your middle-aged Cubs fans are more troublesome. The men attend games in ugly business suits, open collars telling everyone that they're so hardworking they had to come straight to the park from the law firm. Their women wear shiny Revlon faces, fake tans and ugly jewelry. They talk on cell phones and make their husbands find them imported warm tap beer so they don't have to drink cans of Old Style like the rest of the riffraff.

But nothing compares to the twentysomething Cubs fan. These people are very nearly the epitome of evil. Though they can be found anywhere in the park, the very worst of them inhabit the bleachers a dirty, writhing mass of beer-soaked fratboy/sorority-girl tackiness. These people see their lives quickly sliding into ravines of such debilitating dullness that all they can do is hold their cup of beer to the sky, salute the great Nothing and yell, "Woooooooooooooooooo!"

And then there are the children. The poor children. Growing up under the mind-controlling television waves of WGN, they see a grownups' playground, hear the slovenly singing of the seventh inning stretch, hear the sound of a ball snap off Sammy Sosa's bat. The team loses, but they lose cooler than any other team in sports. It's all a part of the party, so it's okay. But what those kids won't know until it's too late is that that party they're watching on TV is just another sad, sloppy binge they're going to have to endure time and time again until they reach a point in life when they have legitimate excuses to fall asleep at nine o'clock in the evening.

Those people in the stands at Wrigley Field don't know how to drink. They do it too sporadically, infrequently and stupidly. They opt for flat beer and sweet-tasting shots of only the finest date-rape elixirs. They go glassy-eyed and loud. They throw up in the stands but are never kicked out. They act sleazy and dumb but it's all part of the party. Such a boring party, too.

Booze isn't the goal of a baseball game. It's a part of the game, sure, but so is baseball.

Ask your average Cubs fan if he or she knows how to keep score. Or knows which position corresponds to which number on the scorecard. Or what the infield fly rule is. Okay. I'll admit I'm pretty sketchy on all three of those points, but I guarantee my friends could help me out and that's good enough to prove my point. When my friends and I go to a baseball game—if you can call a Cubs game baseball—we don't just get drunk and talk to each other about life, we actually watch the baseball.

Until people start watching baseball at Wrigley Field it'll never be anything better than an outdoor museum. Better to go to Comiskey Park for a White Sox game. Or better yet, go to a real baseball town like Cincinnati.