Your Brain on Cubs in the Postseason
With the Chicago Cubs about to begin their postseason series against the LA Dodgers on Wednesday night, we asked Dana press author and loyal Cubs fan, Dan Gordon, to give us some insight into the minds of Cub fans everywhere:
Baseball's playoffs are approaching, and we Cubs fans are looking forward to them with a complex mix of anticipation and dread. Will they make a quick exit, as they did in 2007? Will they instead get tantalizingly close to the World Series, as they did in 2003, only to break our hearts? Could we dream, dare I say it, of a championship?
As editor of Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans, my perspective has changed in the past couple of years. I know just how much baseball is a brain game, for fans as well as players. My hope despite past disappointment has something to do with, yes, my frontal lobe (see chapter 1). I even know a little bit about how we can believe in a baseball "curse," even though there's no scientific evidence of such a thing (chapter 4).
Of course, my biggest hope is that I'll be rereading chapter 7 joyously, rather than for consolation. You guessed it—that one's about agony and ecstasy in the brain. To put it another way, it's not whether they win or lose—it's whether they win.
