by Wayne Drehs
As the baseball climbed into the dark October night and began making its way toward Wrigley Field's left-field corner, Pat Looney had no doubt. The ball was his.
He had caught a pop foul once before, reaching high above the fans sitting around him to snag a ball he later handed to a kid sitting nearby. This play felt the same -- as if the baseball gods had targeted his hands as the final resting place for a memorable souvenir. But this ball, from this game, wouldn't be going to any stranger. His wife had recently learned she was pregnant, so this ball would go to his first-born child."It was coming right at me," he says.
They say baseball is a game of inches, life a game of chance. A few more inches here, five more seconds there, and everything is different. The lightning strikes someone else's house. The swerving car just misses the deer. The lottery ball comes up one digit away from the number on your ticket. These are the twists of fate that fill our lives, most of the time going completely unnoticed.
The story of Pat Looney is one of these tales. When the most famous foul ball in baseball history went up for grabs in Game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series, no one reached farther and tried harder to take that ball home than Looney. But he missed -- by two inches. Instead, the man standing next to Looney was the first to touch the ball -- and to catch everything else that came with it. As fate would have it, the quiet, unassuming man in his blue Cubs hat, green turtleneck and black headphones would become a household name. His life would become a nightmare. For Looney, there were death threats, and interview requests from as far away as Japan. But life eventually would return to normal. All because he came up two inches short.
"The truth is, I should have caught that ball," Looney says. "I should have been Steve Bartman."
The fateful foul ball should have come with a warning label. Something like: "Caution: Handle With Care." Or: "Warning: Contents Flammable." But who could have known then that a play that initially seemed so innocent -- a lazy fly ball into the left-field corner -- would wind end up nearly ruining the lives of the men who came closest to it.
That night, who would have predicted that ball would fetch $100,000 at an auction and later be blown up on national television? Who would have guessed that a 5-ounce ball of string would come to represent a century of Cubs futility? And who could have known that the ball would polarize Chicago and become the central figure in one of the ugliest nights in Wrigley Field history?
"If I would have known then what I know now, there's no way in hell I would have gone for that ball," Looney says. "No f---ing way."
But with one out in the eighth inning that night, when Luis Castillo lifted that ball in Looney's direction, the only thought on his mind was a souvenir. At the time, he and the three friends he went to the game with were doing the same thing as every other Cubs fan around the world -- counting outs until a celebration that was sure to rival Carnival. Six outs to go, five outs to go. The Cubs hadn't been to a World Series since 1945. They hadn't won it all since 1908. Up 3-0 on the Florida Marlins, baseball's lovable losers stood five outs from the sport's grandest stage.
In anticipation of the party that was about to commence, Looney and his friends lined up a dozen beers at their feet. Although last call had come an inning earlier, these guys were prepared.
"Our thinking was, 'If they win, we'd just hang out and celebrate,'" Looney says. "We had the perfect spot."
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