The Bar

Hopefully, I'm not lowering it.

The Cubby Bear isn’t actually relevant to this article, but you try finding a public domain photo of a baseball bar. It’s harder than you think. And I do mention Wrigleyville, so we’re rolling with it.

I’ve always been a little envious of sports fans who have a go-to bar for gameday. But outside of watching Cheers when I was a kid, I’ve never really had a favorite bar, and I’m not sure that counts anyway.

I suppose I only have myself to blame. Being an antisocial introvert who gets anxious around large crowds of people I don’t know and doesn’t drink much probably means the bar thing was never going to happen. I’m way more comfortable on my couch or at a friend’s house, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes wish the opposite was true.

When I briefly lived in Chicago in my early-20’s, I was usually strapped for cash. I couldn’t afford Cubs tickets most days, but that didn’t stop me from occasionally wandering down to Wrigleyville on gamedays to soak in the atmosphere. I didn’t spend much actual time in bars though, since, like I said, I was broke and not much of drinker. I’d usually wander around the neighborhood and hit up the Billy Goat Tavern for a cheezborger with grilled onions. (If you know, you know.) Then I’d stop by a used bookstore that was in the area (I have no idea if it still is), meander past the stadium again, and take the Red Line home.

There is one brief exception to this and it happened in 2017. I was still riding high from the Royals’ postseason runs in 2014-15, and as a longtime admirer of the Cubs (see above paragraph), that rush carried over to the fall of 2017. Unfortunately, we had moved to a new place that didn’t come with cable built into the rent, and we were doing the whole cut the cord thing and watching only streaming apps at the time. To make matters worse, we were in a spot where a digital antenna was worthless. But I wanted to watch some playoff baseball, so I called my cousin Scott.

Scott lives in a small Kansas town with a population of 500. We both went to school there. It doesn’t offer much, but despite its small size, it hosts the county’s middle and high schools. Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with it. Scott has a pretty good setup and seems happy enough, and at the time, he had satellite with DirectTV.

The two of us watch a lot of sports together, so there was nothing out of the ordinary when I made plans to head out there after work to watch some playoff baseball. Unfortunately, before I arrived, DirectTV suffered some kind of catastrophic failure and was out completely. I don’t know if it was just his dish or a widespread outage, but it didn’t really matter. We needed to scramble for an alternative.

Like I said, there isn’t much in Scott’s hometown, but there is a bar. Or at least there used to be. I believe it’s currently vacant, so if anyone out there is interested in buying a small-town bar, let me know and I’ll see if I can put you in touch with the right person. But up until a year or two ago, this bar was in constant operation throughout my life, albeit under the management of a never-ending string of owners. So yeah, maybe it’s not the best investment, after all.

We used to go there after class in middle school when we had time to kill before a football or basketball game. No one seemed to mind that a group of middle school kids took over the bar once or twice a week, but it was a different time. It was the early-nineties, so we ordered food — they had an epic tenderloin — played pool or pinball, loaded up the jukebox, and some of us pumped quarters into the cigarette machine and helped ourselves to a pack of Marlboros. Other than a few day-drunks in the corner, eyeing us warily, no one ever said anything, probably because we were keeping the place in business.

Those owners were long gone by the time I returned in 2017, and there were no kids around either. Frankly, there weren’t a whole lot of people around period, which made it an ideal hangout for me. The owner was a guy I went to high school with, but I didn’t really know him. He was a few years younger, in my sister’s class, and he was a competitive barbecue man. That was the bar’s calling card.

We invited Scott’s mom (my aunt) to join us, and it didn’t feel like we were stepping on anyone’s toes when we asked the bartender, a friend of Scott’s, to switch the TV over to the game. The Nationals were hosting the defending champion Cubs, so even though the Royals weren’t playing, I still had a rooting interest.

What followed was an extremely pleasant three hours that was everything I’d hoped bar baseball could be. No one was being too loud or a dumbass. We ordered pulled pork nachos that were amazing, and nobody gave me a side glance for nursing a Pepsi instead of slamming beers. It was great, and the Cubs even won Game 1 of the series, punctuated by a Wade Davis save. It was the closest thing I was going to get to a Royals victory in those playoffs, and I was willing to take it.

In fact, we had such a good time we decided to do it again the next night, even though his DirectTV feed had been fixed by then. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite the same. Not that it was in any way bad, but it just didn’t have the same magic. The Nats won Game 2, although the bright spot was a Sean Doolittle save. I love Sean Doolittle. Any baseball player who devotes a large percentage of each road trip to seeking out used bookstores and buying books is all right with me. What can I say, I like used bookstores.

We got more pulled pork nachos and I drank a few more glasses of Pepsi, but the thrill was gone. It turns out I’m just not a bar guy. But that’s okay. For one night in 2017, I got to experience what it was like, and it was fantastic. Turned out, that’s all I needed.

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. Do you have a favorite bar or baseball hangout? Let me know in the comments, and you might as well subscribe for free while you’re here. Go on, you know you want to.