By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2016/09/16/the-runaway-cubs-taking-a-division-title-any-way-they-can-get-it/Try to resist the temptation to say the Cubs backed into the National League Central clinch Thursday night. Oh, sure, they lost a
close one to the Brewers, 5-4, while the otherwise backsliding Giants did them a favour and spanked the Cardinals, 6-2. But when
you’ve got baseball’s best record, and a division runaway was all but a given by the middle of the summer, you can afford to let
someone else help you sign the title papers.
But while you’re at it, try to resist the temptation to say it’s just a question of who earns the honour of getting slapped silly by
the Cubs in the coming postseason rounds, up to and including in the World Series. Don’t put the picnic basket before the park
entrance, Cub Country. You’ve had enough heartbreak to last about four lifetimes, ten generations, and nineteen American
presidents.
And your heroes have also pulled off the fastest postseason clinch since the 1998 Yankees, even if it isn’t the fastest division title
clinch of all time. (That one still belongs to the 1975 Big Red Machine.) So pop open a cold one. Party like it’s 2008, for now.
Then sit back, and ponder just when it was you realised these Cubs were anything but merely a team named after baby bears.
Was it Opening Day, when Jake Arrieta shut out the Angels on a measly two hits over seven innings, when Miguel Montero and
reserve outfielder Matt Szczur sent home three apiece with (respectively) a three-run homer and a three-run double, and the 9-0
Cubs win opened up a 17-5 April en route a season-opening 47-20 journey? Was it 21 April, when the Cubs nuked the Reds 16-0 and,
adding insult to destruction, Arrieta no-hit the Reds, becoming only the second Cub to throw two such gems? (Ancient history: Ken
Holtzman was the first, in 1969 and 1971.)
Was it 8 May, finishing a sweep of the likely National League East champion Nationals—and a staggering thirteen walks to Bryce
Harper over the set—when Javier Baez ripped Nats reliever Blake Treinen for a game-ending bomb? Was it when they ended June
and opened July by getting swept by the Mets—who vanquished them in last year’s National League Championship Series—and
outscored 32-11 over the sweep, yet awoke the following day to realise they still had a measly eight-game division lead in spite
of it?
Was it 31 July, when Jon Lester—who’d been bludgeoned for eight runs and nine hits in one and a third starting the final game
of that Met sweep—was inserted as a pinch hitter with his lifetime .051/.102/.065 slash line . . . and dropped a bunt to the first
base side of the mound that Mariners pitcher Chris Martin tossed in-glove to catcher Mike Zunino, too late to nail Jason Heyward
sliding across the plate with the game-ending run?
Was it bagging Aroldis Chapman from the suddenly-rebuilding Yankees—not knowing the Yankees were on the threshold of a
surprise resurgence and entry into the wild card picture—near the non-waiver trade deadline, and suddenly owning a bullpen
that didn’t know the meaning of the word pushover?
Was it Heyward—up to that point a bust despite his solid defensive play—stepping up big against the Giants at the Confines,
smacking a fourth-inning RBI single off Johnny Cueto and a ninth-inning, re-tying RBI single off Santiago Casilla in the ninth,
before shooting a game-ending RBI single off Matt Reynolds in the thirteenth, the fifth time the Cubs won a game in their last
at-bat all season?
Was it Kris Bryant yanking himself into the MVP conversation? Kyle Hendricks going from nothing much special until this season
to into the Cy Young Award conversation this season? Was it waking up on Labour Day to realise the Cubs had outscored their
opponents by 229 runs to that point? Was it a general attitude from the top to the bottom, from owner Tom Ricketts to the lowliest
scrub, that whatever was wrong with the Cubs in the past it had nothing to do with billy goats and other curses?
Yes, this is a franchise that’s had as much bizarre and tragic fortune as the Red Sox had in the ages before 2004. You name it,
the Cubs and their faithful have borne it. They haven’t won the World Series since the Roosevelt Administration—Theodore. They
haven’t been there since just after the end of another Roosevelt Administration. (If you have to ask . . .) And they’ve been
obstructed in their efforts to return by . . . no, we’re not going to spoil the party and run down the sublime, ridiculous, surreal,
tragic, obscene, and dumb obstructions tonight.
“We don’t believe in curses,” Ricketts told a writer for
The New Yorker (not, alas, Roger Angell) during spring training. “Since
World War II, we’ve only had, like, twenty winning seasons. If you want to break ‘the curse,’ you’ve got to start winning baseball
games. I think it was just years of poor management.” If you had a dollar for every time
that, or variations thereupon, was said in
the past, you could retire tomorrow.
Now, this is frightening. In a few short years, shorter than even Cub fans who’d heard and seen it all and then some, the Cubs
went from poor or at least ill-advised management to management that has them returning to the postseason with a division title
in hand and (still) the best record in baseball. Last year, the Cubs got to the postseason while still trying to decide who they really
were. This year, they clinched the division early after making up their minds who they were in spring training.
“We’re just going to pick up where we left off,” said Bryant, “but hopefully play a little longer this year.”
They face considerable odds. Since the turn of the century (into the 21st Century, silly), only three teams who finished the regular
season with baseball’s best record have won the World Series and two of them were the Red Sox. (2007, 2013.) All of those had
what the Cubs can’t thanks to the National League’s All-Star loss this year: home field advantage. And, if you’re looking forward
to a 100+ win finish, beware: only one 100+-game winner in this century has won a World Series. (The 2009 Yankees.)
These Cubs have been a pleasantly defiant group up until now. If they continue defying everything including their franchise’s own
history and maybe the cleverest joke ever devised about them (Q:
What does a mama bear on birth control have in common with
the World Series? A:
No Cubs) . . . well, if you thought the country didn’t know what to do with the Red Sox returning at long
enough last to the Promised Land, you
could be in for a big, heaping helping of you ain’t seen
nothing yet.
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Ladies and gentlemen, your 2016 National League Central champion Chicago Cubs . . .
