New Cubs history gets caught in present

Pity the bar owners of Wrigleyville who just saw a fortune go out the window with the Cubs' collapse, but save any pity for Glenn Stout.

Stout was sitting pretty as author of "The Cubs: The Complete Story of Chicago Cubs Baseball," a new comprehensive history of the franchise released this month from Houghton Mifflin. It figured to do boffo business, even with its $40 list price, if the Cubs had won it all or just made the World Series.

Now the book is out there on shelves trying to entice fans who, for the moment, might not want anything to do with the Cubs.

Yet Stout was philosophical about it when he sat down in the lobby of his hotel downtown during a promotional tour earlier this week.

"When you set out to do a book like this," he said, "the last thing you can bank on -- particularly with a franchise like the Cubs -- is that they're going to make the postseason.

"It's going to do well regardless," Stout added. "Certainly it helps that they had a pretty good season and made the playoffs. Maybe if they had won everything, maybe it wouldn't have done that well, because there would have been so much quicky stuff thrown out there."

"The Cubs" would probably have held its own in that event, just as it will more than hold its own now, because if there's one thing it won't be mistaken for it's a quick knockoff.

It was more than three years in the making, with Stout spending a year on research (he's an old hand at newspaper microfilm from his days working at the Boston Public Library), a year on writing and additional research, and then a year on the production to set off the glorious photos tracked down by his longtime collaborator Richard Johnson.

The result, from the wonderful cover shot of Ernie Banks right through to the back of the index, is a work that can be picked up and paged through as a coffee-table book but that also has the substance of an authoritative history. When Cubs fans are ready to go back to the Cubs, "The Cubs" will be there ready to ease and enrich the healing process -- whenever that might be.

Like any good historian, Stout concentrates on the fine details, but also finds themes in the arc of history. Look at how he goes back to the earliest days of the Cubs, when they were known as the White Stockings, and sees how star Albert G. Spaulding lost interest in the team except as a marketing tool in developing the sporting-goods company that still bears his name.

"Thus Spaulding inaugurated another grand tradition of Chicago Cubs baseball," Stout writes, "one since followed by later owners, such as Philip K. Wrigley and the Tribune Company. For much of their history, the Cubs have taken a backseat to the larger business interests of management. Spaulding used the White Stockings to position himself to make money regardless of how well the White Stockings played. Wins and losses were less important than profit potential, a circumstance that, over time, Cubs fans would find as recognizable as Wrigley Field's outfield ivy."

Stout said he cherishes finding how players and management are sometimes blind to the endemic problems they sustain. "And it doesn't take very long, as Lou Piniella recently discovered, to find out you're part of it," he added.

Stout gets down how the TV coverage on WGN Channel 9 likewise came to be more important than mere winning or losing. "It was able to establish the Cubs' dominance over the White Sox, not just in the city, but in the hinterlands," he said. "They sold the whole Wrigley Field experience -- the Friendly Confines -- and made that something the people in the rest of the country wanted to experience."

Stout typically has four or five projects going at once, including children's books under his Matt Christopher pen name and his work as overseeing editor on the annual "Best American Sports Writing" collection, but he relishes the opportunity to dig deep into something like "The Cubs."

"The first thing I had to do was steep myself in all things Chicago," he said. That was a pleasure, he added, in that although he lives in Vermont, he grew up in Columbus, Ohio, and has always considered himself a transplanted Midwesterner.

"In books of this size and scope we're trying to do a couple of things," he said. "We're not just trying to tell the history of the team in terms of wins and losses, but the history of the team in context of its city and of its fans. The last thing you want to do is not get that tone right or be open to charges you just did a fly-over, and readers will pick up on that."

"The Cubs" passes muster on that score, and through the second half of the book it also draws on contributions from Chicago writers like John Schulian and even Scott Turow, as well as reprinting a column by Mike Royko on how it was racism, not any billy goat, that cursed the Cubs to mediocrity after World War II.

"That was just to get some different voices in," Stout said, "because this is a long narrative, and long narratives, no matter who writes them or what they're about, can get a little tedious."

Not for Cubs fans, at least not once the most recent scars have healed and the passion begins to come back. When that happens, I prescribe a dose of "The Cubs," and Stout concurs: "This is a book, you can gnaw on it for three months, and it will get you through to the Cubs Convention."