Baseball is a game of failures. A hitter with a .300 batting average, the traditional benchmark of a star player, fails seven times out of 10. Errors are given equal billing alongside runs and hits, a naked public accounting of imperfection consistent on scoreboards from Little League diamonds to major league stadiums. The game is a turn-based series of individual conflicts where mistakes are amplified. The difference between good and great, between winning and losing, exists in the management of the inevitable, incremental defeats that unlike other sports are not mere hazards of the trade but its essence.
No team in sports has failed better over the last century than the Chicago Cubs, which makes them the quintessential American sports tale: neither an aspirational brand like the Yankees nor born losers like the Phillies, they are a team for the rest of us. Plenty had transpired in American life since the Cubs had last won the World Series. Mark Twain died and the Ottoman Empire fell. The RMS Titanic was laid down, constructed, sank and was re-discovered. Halley’s Comet passed Earth, twice. Eighteen different US presidents were elected and sworn in.
But that century and more of heartbreak is now but a memory after the Cubs’ epochal 8-7 victory over the Cleveland Indians on Wednesday night in Game 7 of the World Series, a heart-stopping barn-burner of a finale that lifted the hard-luck franchise from Chicago’s north side to their first championship in 108 years. When it was accomplished – after Cleveland’s Michael Martinez hit a chopper to third baseman Kris Bryant who fired it to Anthony Rizzo for the final out – the Cubs finally hit reset on the most storied title drought in a nation’s sporting folklore.
This is uncharted territory of the most extraordinary kind, a rare air never approached by Ernie Banks or Ron Santo or Fergie Jenkins or Billy Williams or the hundreds of other Cubs players who toiled away at Wrigley Field only dreaming about nights like Wednesday. We know the Cubs won the World Series in 1908 for no other reason than because that’s what the history books assure us happened. Oral accounts from first-hand observers no longer exist because said first-hand observers are in the ground, every last one of them. Were he alive today, it’s doubtful even noted Chicago entrepreneur Al Capone could tell you much about it; he was aged eight at the time.
Yet here we are: the World Series champion Chicago Cubs, an oxymoron as timeworn as jumbo shrimp, sweet sorrow and Great Depression. And while it may seem hard to swallow given the team’s woebegone history, it simultaneously feels like a natural progression from the team’s meteoric resurgence under Theo Epstein, the front-office whiz under whose five-year watch the team’s win total has climbed from 61 to 66 to 73 to 97 to 103 this year, when the Cubs finished with baseball’s best record for the first time since 1945. Their starting pitchers combined to allowed only 6.91 hits per nine innings, the third-lowest mark of all time and best since 1968, when the mound was five inches higher. Stacked as they were with young and veteran talent, a deep rotation and a well-stocked bullpen, they were the best team from wire to wire.
The Cubs coasted to a division title but not until the postseason pressure-cooker was their mettle truly put to the test. They overcame a battle-hardened San Francisco club with a championship pedigree in the National League Division Series, rallied from a two-games-to-one deficit to see off the Dodgers in the NLCS and, now, have become only the seventh team in major league history to storm back from a three-games-to-one deficit to win the World Series, joining the 1903 Red Sox, the 1925 Pirates, the 1958 Yankees, the 1968 Tigers, the 1979 Pirates and the 1985 Royals.
But as they extended a 6-3 lead heading into the eighth inning on Wednesday night, it was clear the past wasn’t through with the Cubs. They managed to squander the lead with four outs left as their flame-throwing closer Aroldis Chapman cut an ominous resemblance to George Foreman in Zaire, ragged and punchless and exhausted from overuse – 97 pitches over the last 76 hours when the dust cleared – that sharply indicted manager Joe Maddon.
This was exactly how the Cubs would lose.
Then for the first time in more than a century the heavens looked down with favor on baseball’s most star-crossed franchise. Right when it seemed all psychic forces had aligned against them once more, the skies opened and allowed a priceless opportunity to regroup, keyed by an impromptu team meeting in the weight room as the infield was covered with taps. After 108 years, what was another 17 minutes?
When play resumed, the bare truth of infinitesimal margins inherent to these Game 7s was never more evident. The ultramarathon that is the Major League Baseball season – more than 200 games when you include spring training, the 162-game regular season and the play-offs – had been reduced to a sprint. Someone’s life would never be the same after this. It was like watching the sports lottery. Or maybe Russian roulette.
And like that, the Cubs immediately shook from their untimely swoon and scored the runs that would prove decisive. This was not 2003, when they frittered away a three-games-to-one lead to the Florida Marlins in an NLCS best remembered for a moment of fan interference five outs from the pennant in Game 6. Nor was it 1984, when they squandered a two-games-to-none lead in the best-of-five NLCS against the San Diego Padres. Nor was it 1969, when they spent 155 days in first place before losing of 17 of their last 25 games and missing the postseason completely.
“It has nothing to do with curses, superstition,” Maddon said afterward in the delirious aftermath. “It has nothing to do with what’s happening today, nothing. If you want to believe in that kind of stuff, it’s going to hold you back for a long time.
“I love tradition. I think tradition is worth time mentally, and tradition is worth being upheld, but curses and superstitions are not. So it’s really great for our entire team to get beyond that moment and continue to move forward, because now based on the young players we have in this organization, we have an opportunity to be good for a long time, and without any constraints, without any of the negative dialogue.”
Therein lies the challenge for the Cubs and their supporters as they move into a future of unfamiliar promise and limitless potential. Rizzo is 26, Bryant is 24, Javier Baez is 23 and Addison Russell is 22. It is a team built not just for one championship but many, perhaps at odds with an identity that’s hung around their neck like a millstone. But don’t tell that to Maddon.
“The burden has been lifted,” he said. “It should have never been there in the first place, I don’t think, but now we can move forward.”
Say it once more: the World Series champions Chicago Cubs. You lived to see the day.
Failure may be unavoidable in baseball, but these Cubs finally learned the serenity to accept the things they could not change, the courage to change the things they could, and the wisdom to know the difference. And though the outcome may be difficult for long-time observers to process, there’s reason to believe that Chicago won’t need to wait nearly as long for the next one.
View all comments >