George Will is a conservative political writer, commentator, and pundit, who waxes philosophic about the state of politics for a living. But he's also famously a die-hard baseball fan, and wouldn't you know it, a Cubs fan. An intellectual Cubs fan, no less.

He revealed the depth of Cubs history while delivering the commencement address at Washington University in 1998.

"I grew up in Champaign, Ill., midway between Chicago and St. Louis. At an age too tender for life-shaping decisions, I made one. While all my friends were becoming Cardinals fans, I became a Cub fan. My friends, happily rooting for Stan Musial, Red Schoendienst and other great Redbirds, grew up cheerfully convinced that the world is a benign place, so of course, they became liberals. Rooting for the Cubs in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I became gloomy, pessimistic, morose, dyspeptic and conservative. It helped out of course that the Cubs last won the World Series in 1908, which is two years before Mark Twain and Tolstoy died. But that means, class of 1998, that the Cubs are in the 89th year of their rebuilding effort, and remember, any team can have a bad moment. So fellow members of the Class of 1998, my last piece of advice is - Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be Cub fans.”

His comments garnered quite a bit of attention. So much so, in fact, he wrote the following in the Washington Post. (A good, if sarcastic, combination of his love of Cubs and politics.)

I may be uptight, to paraphrase a current popular tune, but I'm certainly not out of sight. People depend on me to provide them with sharp, incisive commentary on national politics, and damn it, I do a fine job, but unless I'm discussing the Chicago Cubs, I'm ignored.

Speaking of the Cubs, it's that time of year again, when the Cubbies appear to have a lock on optimistic pronouncements coming out of the ideal (and overly idealized) world of spring training. Ah, yes, I can hear it now: Sosa will hit fifty home runs; the pitching staff will keep the windows from breaking on Waveland Avenue; and they'll be playing ball in Chicago all the way through the wintry days of late October. By the way, Clinton's good luck on the economy could change overnight if he stumbles into another foreign imbroglio like Bosnia.

Ah, the flowers that bloom in the spring -- you can count on the desert blooms (the Cubbies train in Arizona) to pop up quickly and often with the Chi town ink-stained sports wags thirsting, quite literally, for a story. Any story. Like how the campaign funding scandal might blow good soldier Gore's candidacy right out of the Tennessee swamps.

George Will has written about the Cubs many times, but in early 2008, he may have actually contributed something to the collective Cubs psyche. He tried to look on the bright side of being a Cubs fan, citing an actual scientific study. From his Newsweek column...

"The sometimes terrible truth is that being a sports fan is a physical phenomenon as well as a psychological condition: It involves observable (with imaging technology) alterations of brain matter. Jordan Grafman, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, was born and raised in Chicago, so he knows whereof he speaks when he speaks, politely, about the "paradox" of being a Cub fan even though baseball is supposed to provide relief from life's problems. Grafman has been to a pleasant purgatory, Wrigley Field, and returned with good news: Yes, rooting for the Cubs is a minority taste because it is an interminable tutorial in delayed gratification, but "there is some evidence that being in the majority (everyone loves a winner) reduces reflective thinking."

Rooting for a loser makes one thoughtful, or perhaps neurotic, which on Chicago's North Side may be a distinction without a difference. "The scientific literature," Grafman says, "suggests that fans of losing teams turn out to be better decision-makers and deal better with divergent thought, as opposed to the unreflective fans of winning teams."

That's us. Great decision makers. Even though, as he admitted in his 1998 commencement address, we might have made one tragically bad decision in our childhoods.