Catching Hell (2011)

3 months ago

“AND THAT’S A CUBS FAN WHO TRIED TO MAKE THAT CATCH.”

by Elizabeth Cantwell

My husband is a huge fan of the Chicago Cubs. Like everyone I know who’s a big Cubs fan, this loyalty goes back in his family for generations. His uncle’s father (who went by the nickname “Lefty,” after his pitching arm) secured the family’s first season tickets in the 40’s or 50’s, and accepted the offer to “upgrade” those seats every year. By the early 90’s, he had the two first seats behind the Cubs dugout—previously owned by the Chicago Tribune (and before that, the Wrigleys themselves). When I visited Chicago with Chris a few years ago, his family was generous enough to let us have the seats, and we watched the Cubs defeat the Mets in a feel-good victory that climaxed in a grand slam at the bottom of the 5th. It was Chicago baseball at its best.

His family may still have the seats, but Lefty is no longer around. He passed away in 2009, having lived all of his 80-some years without ever seeing the Cubs win a World Series—as did all those Cubs fans unlucky enough to be born after 1908 and to have died before … well, who knows. The Cubs are still trying to end that 103-year drought. And they looked like they were going to do it in 2003, getting all the way through the playoffs to battle the Marlins for the NLCS title—which is why their defeat that year was so very hard to swallow, for Lefty and thousands of other fans.

Before the fall: Lefty (center, in the Cubs jacket) celebrates the Cubs’ third victory over the Marlins in 2003.

You don’t have to be a Cubs fan to remember what happened in 2003. Up three games to two against the Marlins, just five outs away from winning that key fourth game and going to the World Series for the first time since 1945—so close to breaking the “Curse of the Billy Goat”—the Cubs blew it all after a series of on-field disasters that seemed to be triggered by that fly ball on the foul line that Moisés Alou just couldn’t catch. That fly ball that seemed like it was cruising for the stands, but was still in play as Alou made a lovely leap against the stands with his glove outstretched. Yes, that fly ball—the one Steve Bartman thought was about to make his day.

And I suppose it did make his day, but in a much more sinister way than anyone would have predicted. Catching Hell, the documentary that recently aired on ESPN as part of their 30 for 30 series, traces the echoes of that unforgettable play across the field, the stadium, the evening, the week, the month, the years. Written and directed by Alex Gibney, it’s impeccably well-made, giving just enough background on the history of the Cubs (along with a bonus briefing on the Red Sox, revolving around the Bill Buckner play that ended their 1986 World Series bid in a Game 6 disaster eerily prefiguring the Cubs’ 20 years later) to draw you in and build you up to the actual moment that ball flies off Luis Castillo’s bat.

Gibney does more, though, than just give a nostalgic play-by-play of the events. Anyone could look that up on Google if they only cared about the facts of the game—what the score of the game was at the time, at what angle Bartman reached for the ball, what subsequently unfolded in the stands. Rather than dwell on these details, Gibney uses the documentary to ask the questions we don’t really want to ask: Did the Bartman play actually contribute in any measurable way to the Cub’s loss? (It wasn’t, after all, even the play that ended Game 6, let alone the play that ended the series.) Were the commentators and the media wrong to harp on the incident—to repeatedly play footage of it, including close-ups on Bartman’s face—both during the game and in the days afterwards? What is it in human nature that compels us to seek out scapegoats on which to project our angers, our frustrations, our rocks, our beer cans? And, finally, who was Steve Bartman?

No matter how many times you watch that footage, it doesn’t get any less discomfiting. Sure, there’s the wincing pain of watching a fan interfere with a play and seemingly put the ultimate defeat of the Cubs in motion. But there’s also the sheer weirdness of the moments afterwards. Steve Bartman’s blank face, staring at—at what? At nothing. Not at the game, not at his two “friends” next to him in the stands, not at the security guards trying to protect him from the tide of the stadium slowly turning against him, not at the journalist trying to pass him a business card. Just an expressionless gaze with no object. An eerie un-presence.

That’s not how a person is supposed to react.

A person is supposed to be sorry. A person is supposed to feel guilty. A person is supposed to stand up, cover his face, howl at the sky, yell out “OH MY GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?” He should call the umpire over, say “Please call fan interference on me,” and throw himself out of the stadium in humiliation, crying “You can do it, Cubs—you can win even in spite of my actions!” as he leaves.

A person is not supposed to sit mutely with headphones on, refusing eye contact.

As Catching Hell unfolds, it’s impossible not to think about how this might have all been different if someone like you had been sitting in that seat. You’d have been so apologetic! You would have behaved like you knew what was at stake—and maybe, in the wake of your shame, the Cubs would have gone on just fine. After all, they were still just five outs away.

But you’re not Steve Bartman, and for whatever reasons, Steve Bartman didn’t follow the unspoken human contract of how one is “supposed” to behave after fucking up. And because of that, he had to be spirited out of the stadium in disguise. He couldn’t sleep in his own home that night. He received death threats. He broke a deeply engrained social contract—and because of that, he had to disappear.

Catching Hell triggers a meditation on human behavior, not just an examination of a ballgame; Gibney essentially anatomizes the violent response triggered by those who don’t follow the implied social rules. We all know what that feels like—even mundance occurrences can push that button. For example, the other day I was waiting for the elevator in my building, and another woman came in and stood right in front of the division in the elevator doors—like, literally a few inches from it—and it made me incredibly angry for no apparent reason. I mean, we were both still going to get on the elevator. But who stands in front of the doors like that?? On an extreme scale, we have Amanda Knox, who became the object of investigators’ suspicions and prosecutors’ wrath not because of any DNA traces or incriminating evidence, but because she simply didn’t behave the way we believe someone who has just found her roommate murdered should behave. [N.B.: I’m not arguing for or against Knox here—just pointing out the reason she became a suspect in the first place.]

Maybe some of our brains are wired to understand these social codes and cues and some aren’t. I don’t know. What I do know is that Bartman acted no differently during the play in question than any other fan would have. Gibney’s documentary makes that clear. It’s what he did (or didn’t do) once the play was over that made all the difference.

Steve Bartman, in case you were wondering, doesn’t appear anywhere in the film outside of the famous footage of the game and a few cartoon images. His absence is upsetting—not because it would have been “cool” to see an actual interview with him, or because it would have been a coup for Gibney to pin down such a notoriously elusive target, but because it drives home more clearly than any of the events in the documentary the central message: human beings are so stunningly adept at hurting each other. The Red Sox’s Bill Buckner finally got some closure and forgiveness in 2008, when he was invited to throw the first pitch of the season and received a standing ovation from the crowd, twenty-two years after Mookie Wilson’s ground ball rolled between his legs. Perhaps Bartman will earn a similar redemption some day. But for now, he remains invisible—a ghost engendered by his fellow fans’ primal need to pin their anger on a living being and watch him go up in flames: a face on which to map a century of loss. An effigy.

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Elizabeth Cantwell wants to thank Chris Cantwell for her new name, some essential fact-checking for this essay, and those great Cubs seats. She cried a lot while watching this documentary. She tumbls here.