Someone once said that jazz music and pro sports are the quintessential American cultural productions, because in both endeavors the excellence of the group is achieved by way of liberating and lifting up the uniqueness of each individual’s talent. E pluribus, unus victor. That’s what fans and aficionados cheer for: individual brilliance in the service of a shared ambition, a common dream. At our best, that’s what we Americans hope we can do. Can be.

In pro sports, that dream sometimes becomes the dream of a whole city. If your ball club is in a pennant race, if your NBA team goes deep in the playoffs, if you make the Super Bowl, a change comes over your city. Suddenly, you’re joining the conversations of strangers in line at the grocery store or on the train. You nod with an easy familiarity at the guy who’s also wearing the jersey of your favorite player. One day, one night, you stop whatever you’re doing to watch the critical minutes of a critical game wherever you can, you’re there with new friends you’ve never met before, you’re all staring at that screen careening between hope and dread, and maybe in the back of your mind you sense that all of you in that moment are performing a small civic miracle, you’re all crossing those lines of class and culture and politics and even race that mark such sharp boundaries in our ordinary days and nights—and you’re happy. The dream is real.

To me, great cities have great fans. They stick with their teams when they’re champions, and they stick with their teams when they suck. Lesser cities have fair-weather fans. Buffalo is a great city, by this calculus. Vegas, not so much.

Chicago, my native city and the Greatest American City, is grieving this week. There’s a shadow over the friendly confines of Wrigley Field.

Ryne Sandberg died.

If you were old enough to be a baseball fan in the 1980s and 1990s, you remember Ryno. The best second-basemen of his era, one of the best of all time. With real power at the plate and game-changing gifts in the field, Ryne Sandberg played baseball with a mesmerizing rhythm and calm, a quiet mastery of the time and space of the game. I can see him now. Disciplined. Fluid. Almost serene. In my memory, even his home runs—282 of them—weren’t clobbered, towering moon shots, but long, rising arcs stroked into the Wrigley bleachers. He played our beautiful game beautifully.

And Sandberg’s supreme athletic abilities told only part of the story. His character is what truly defined him as a player, and his death hits harder because of what a fine man he was. A quiet and at times painfully shy person, Sandberg led by example. He never demanded attention, was generous with his teammates and respectful of his opponents. “He’s the kind of player you want your kid to be,” Joe Torre once said of him.

“The reason I am here, they tell me, is because I played the game the right way,” Sandberg himself said in his Hall Of Fame induction speech in 2005. “I don’t know about that, but I can tell you this: I love the game. I respected it. I played it hard. I tried to be the best teammate I could be.”

Ryne Sandberg was the heart and soul of those Cubs teams, which, like so many Cubs teams, broke our hearts. Twice Sandberg led the Northsiders to the National League Championship Series, the brink of the World Series, and twice the Cubbies fell short. Two more chapters in the club’s 108-year championship drought (hey, any team can have a bad century).

Sigh.

Let’s remember something else, something every boy (and every softball or baseball girl) who’ve picked up a bat and a glove understands. Ryno lived the dream. Not the World Series dream; for that, Chicago would have to wait. The deep dream in the heart of every ballplayer: excellence, grace, supreme beauty and accomplishment with your teammates on the diamond of what was once, and for many remains, our national game. The dream of becoming beautiful together on that diamond, in our land.

So this one’s for Ryno.

There are many great poems about baseball. This one is by B.H. Fairchild, a midwesterner and one of my favorite poets of the late 20th and early 21st Century. It’s called “Moses Yellowhorse is Throwing Water Balloons from the Hotel Roosevelt.”

The poem begins in Europe and an intellectual debate among friends. But the poet takes us back to his childhood, watching his dad play catch with Moses Yellowhorse, who was a real major leaguer.

.

The combed lawn of the Villa Carlotta

cools the bare feet of my aesthetic friend

cooing, Beautiful, so beautiful, a dream…

beneath the fat leaves of catalpa trees,

and my Marxist friend—ironic, mordant—

groans, Ah, yes, how beautifully

the rich lie down upon the backs of the poor,

but I am somewhere else, an empty field

near Black Bear Creek in western Oklahoma,

brought there by that ancient word, dream,

my father saying, You had the dream, Horse,

and two men toss a baseball back and forth

as the sun dissolves behind the pearl-gray strands

of a cirrus and the frayed, flaming branches

along the creek so that the men, too, seem

to be on fire, and the other one, a tall Pawnee

named Moses Yellowhorse, drops his glove,

But I wasn’t a man there, and there, I know,

is Pittsburgh, and man means something more

like human, for as a boy I had heard

this story many times, beginning, always,

He was the fastest I ever caught—the fastest,

I think, there ever was, and I was stunned

because for a boy in America, to be the fastest

was to be a god, and now my father

and his brothers move behind a scrim

of dust in a fallow wheat field, a blanket

stretched between two posts to make a backstop,

stand of maize to mark the outfield wall,

while their father watches, If an Indian

can make it, then so by God can they,

and so it goes, this story of failure

in America: Icarus unwarned,

strapped with his father’s wings, my father

one winter morning patching the drive line

of an old Ford tractor with a strand

of baling wire, blood popping out along

his knuckles, and then in fury turning

to his father, “I’m not good enough,

I’ll never get there, and I’m sorry,

I’m goddamned sorry, while Moses Yellowhorse

is drunk again and throwing water balloons

from the Hotel Roosevelt because now

he is “Chief” Yellowhorse, and even though

in a feat of almost angelic beauty

he struck out Gehrig, Ruth, and Lazzeri

with nine straight heaters, something isn’t right,

so one day he throws a headball at Ty Cobb,

then tells my father, He was an Indian-hater,

even his teammates smiled, and now, trying

to explain this to my friends, it occurs to me

that, unlike the Villa Carlotta, baseball is

a question of neither beauty nor politics

but rather mythology, the collective dream,

the old dream, of men becoming gods

or at the very least, as they remove

their wings, being recognized as men.