By MONICA DAVEY
Published: February 27, 2004

 

HICAGO, Feb. 26 — One baseball — one ordinary, slightly scuffed baseball — did something Thursday night that few movie stars or politicians can ever pull off in this city. It shut down a busy downtown street, lured camera crews from around the world and drew a mob of Chicagoans to stand, transfixed, for hours in the chill.

They came not so much to see the little ball as to see it blown up. Or crushed, stomped or ripped to smithereens. The form of demolition, a subject of hype and speculation for weeks, seemed to matter less than the promise that the hated ball, and all it meant, would be gone forever.

This was the ball from Game 6 of the National League Championship Series last October, the one that a Chicago Cubs outfielder stretched up to catch just as a fan, Steve Bartman, reached for it. After that bobbled play, the Cubs, who had been just five outs from winning a trip to the World Series for the first time since 1945, collapsed. They lost that game and the next to the Florida Marlins, who went on to win the pennant and the world championship.

Fans blamed Mr. Bartman. They blamed the Cubs. Most of all, they blamed a curse that people here say has condemned the team to be losers for practically 60 years. Many came to view the Bartman Ball as the embodiment of that curse: a tiny, tangible repository of decades of missed plays, late-summer swoons, shattered hopes and lost seasons.

"I have no intention whatsoever of exercising my right to grant clemency or pardon or reprieve," Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois said shortly before the ball's demise. "That baseball has got to go."

The destruction ceremony, orchestrated by Harry Caray's restaurant group (named for the late Cubs sportscaster), lasted longer than some baseball games, with the national anthem and musical acts. Organizers turned it into a fund-raiser for diabetes research, selling shirts bearing the message: "Destroy the ball, find the cure."

Harry Caray's bought the ball at auction from a Chicago lawyer who had managed to snatch it in the stands after it bounced off Mr. Bartman's hands. The price hit $113,824 after a long night of bids and counterbids.

More than 20,000 people gave the restaurant ideas for the destruction: drop it into a volcano or a vat of molten steel; freeze it in liquid nitrogen, then smash it into a million pieces; bury it in center field at Yankee Stadium under cover of darkness, and on and on.

In a city that once exploded disco records at the White Sox' ballpark in a Disco Demolition Night that raged out of control, explosion seemed the obvious method.

The job went to Michael Lantieri, a special-effects creator from Hollywood. Even though Mr. Lantieri prides himself on "wrecking things for a living" in movies like "Jurassic Park," baseballs posed a particular challenge, he said.

At least one organization, the Chicago Historical Society, rose to the ball's defense. Lonnie Bunch, the society's president, said the ball could have joined its collection, beside a leftover Champagne bottle from the Cubs' sudden collapse in 1984 and tickets printed in the 1920's and 1930's for Cubs World Series games that never happened.

"I don't like to see any part of history destroyed," Mr. Bunch said.

One person was notably absent from the execution, held in a tent in the middle of Kinzie Street. Mr. Bartman, a financial analyst, has remained mostly out of sight since last October's game, when fans threatened and splashed him with beer. He was invited, said Grant DePorter, managing partner at Harry Caray's, but declined.

At precisely 7:31 p.m., Harry Caray's widow, Dutchie, gently led the crowd singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." When they were done, a row of police officers pushed people away from the ball, which awaited its doom in a clear, floodlit box hooked up with wires and explosives.

There were flashes, sparks and a series of bangs, and then poof: the ball was just a shaggy heap of cork, rubber and yarn. The room smelled like gunpowder, and somebody said, "The ball is dead."

The ball was gone, but what about the curse? Terrence Mullins, a fan from Wrigleyville, seemed pessimistic. "There's so much hype in all this, but you know, this is a team set up for doom."

So, on the eve of a spring training season, fans like Mr. Mullins wondered whether this indeed marked a fresh start, or whether this evening would turn out to be the last, best party of the season.