This is like nightmare scenario for me as a Red Sox fan. On one side, Terry Francona. On the other, Theo Epstein, Jed Hoyer, Jason McLeod, Jon Lester. I don’t harbor one ounce of resentment toward any of them for leaving Boston, and in fact am still so angry with Sox ownership over the low-class way they handled both Tito and Theo’s departures that it warms a little dark spot in my soul to see them having success elsewhere. I guess I’m pulling for the Cubs because 108 years is long enough, but it won’t be wholeheartedly.
Yeah, who expected that erasing a 30-year drought would be so quickly overshadowed?
Great job, Cubbies. Dodgers only sent the minimum to the plate. Amazing.
Goddamned allergies…
Ha ha. Me too. Luckily it seems to be dying down without waking up the kiddos.
71 years. Incredible.
If the Cubs win the World Series, it will be bad news for Donald Trump.
In every Presidential Election year in which the Cubs have won the World Series, the incumbent party has won the White House.
I have no interest in baseball, but I used to live on the North side, and would always see Wrigley full of fans, no matter how bad the Cubs were doing. Congratulations to Cubs fans - you folks deserve this!
No shit. Cite?
As I look back on all the monumental sea changes that have transpired within my all too brief, let strangely incredibly long life, it astounds me how quickly things can change forever. JC Penney, Tower Records, Blockbuster Video, CompUSA, Borders Books And Music, Kay-Bee, Carl’s Jr., Circuit City, Sports Authority…all gone. Viable electric vehicles a reality (I own one). Chinese Democracy and Duke Nukem Forever were released. A black man elected flippin’ President of the United States. Gay marriage, marijuana, legal.
And then there was the late Fall of 2004.
This was not a particularly auspicious year for me. My car was a half-dead clunker of a Camry prone to overheating at the worst possible moments, I was in a doomed City and County job where I never felt comfortable, I almost never could get anything finished on time, and pretty much everyone hated me (this despite working my butt off every goddam day), my internet service was somewhere between “extremely unreliable” and “somewhat unreliable”, and, for reasons I still fail to understand to this day, George W. Bush easily won reelection. So when I got the news that the Boston Red Sox were in the ALCS, I found it hard to care very much. I was never a big baseball fan to begin with, but given the seeming utter invincibility of The Curse, I just couldn’t envision a miracle in the cards.
Make no mistake, if I thought they had a chance, I would’ve be hanging onto every pitch. One of the most joyous moments for me, in sports and elsewhere, is when The Crap Is Finally Over. The Soviet Union collapses, ending the ruinous Cold War and paving the way for Olympiads that are not complete and utter travesties on every level. Susan Lucci has her Emmy, so we can stop hearing about how she’s never won an Emmy. Lance Armstrong finally admits to [insert what Lance Armstrong admitted to here], and an entire nation can stop pretending to give a damn about cycling. Ending one of the longest, and by far the most bizarre championship drought in history, and permitting an honest reappraisal of '86 and the admission that blaming it all on Bill Buckner was only for the benefit of the fans to stupid to remember more than one name? Hey, count me in. If there’s any chance of it happening, of course. Which there isn’t, because this curse thing is more powerful than every single monotheistic deity put together, and you can also toss in the Cthulhu, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, AND Sagume Kishin.
And for the first three games and nearly all of the fourth, the status quo held true. The Red Sox couldn’t get anything going. They couldn’t catch a break. They couldn’t find a way to win. Game 4, one out to go. Yankees up 3-0 and on the verge of closing out a total massacre.
And then, The Curse…The Curse…the single most powerful force in the history of baseball…breaker of hearts, destroyer of lives, ruiner of hopes, that horrible, nightmarish force of pure evil that took 10 million bullets and lived and took 50,000 bazooka shells and lived and took 5,000 nuclear missile strikes and lived and lived and lived and lived and lived…ended.
The rest is history. Red Sox get all the breaks. Yankees can’t catch a break. Yankees get the chance to blow up the Who’s Your Daddy guy, get one measly run. Yankees get a chance to close out a game in extra innings, don’t. Yankees have a crucial go-ahead runner on first, get a double…a ground rule double; runner stranded on third, they never threaten again. Alex Rodriguez slaps the ball out of the first baseman’s mitt, umpires don’t catch it; Red Sox protest, umpires listen and make the right call.
Oh, sure, there still was a World Series to be won. But when the pendulum shifted so dramatically, so…violently that October, I knew it was merely a formality. The Crap Was Finally Over.
Now we have the Cubs, a team which has long since progressed beyond “can’t finish the job” and proceeded into “complete irrelevance”. A hundred changes were supposed to make the difference. A hundred players were supposed to be the final piece of the puzzle. (Yeah, I remember Kerry Wood.) None were. The Red Sox and White Sox broke unbelievable droughts in dramatic fashion, while the Cubs couldn’t even close out a damn pennant. And when they did get a chance, they turned a slight bit of misfortune (that involved SEVERAL fans, I remind you) into a full-on Chernobyl.
And that’s why, more than even the Red Sox, I was never able to get behind them. As long as they had an excuse for failure…as long as they could cry Steve Bartman and billy goats and misplaced ivy…that was good enough for them. No need to look in the mirror, no need to fix what was broken, definitely no need to memorize more than one name. They coulda done it, woulda done it if that Bartman jerk would’ve just kept his grubby paws to himself, so there’s no need to do it for real.
Somehow, I can see a change this year. There was a time, not very long ago, when the offensive shutdowns in games 3 and 4 would’ve been the writing on the wall. We coulda done it if they didn’t pull that infield switch! Or put in that pitcher! Or the weather was better that day! Or this! Or that! Coulda, woulda, shoulda! Instead, they adjusted. They said, “Okay, playtime’s over, it’s time to show them who’s the best team in the playoffs.” They turned it around.
No more excuses, no more wallowing in the past, no more scapegoats and curses and hexes. It’s time to win.
Is The Crap Finally Over? Can I look forward to a future where “no World Series since 1908” is just a historical note? I can’t say. But looking back to a few magical days in 2004, I have to say…right now it’s looking pretty good.
I’ve been trying to come up with a positive spin for tonight’s game and the best I got is, at least I don’t need to listen to Joe Buck tomorrow.
Ah well. The Cubs deserve it. I hope they win the series.
Woohoo!
Joe Maddon said he was happy that there would be no game 7 necessary on Sunday, and instead he can watch football. I was left wondering, what’s this “football” thing he’s talking about?
Well this is very Cleveland of us. Set up to crush the dreams of That Team That Has Had It Worse.
They are by no means The TOWN That Has Had It Worse. So we’re not sorry for yas!
In winning their championship, the Cleveland Cavaliers beat the basketball team with the best record. Can the Cleveland Indians now beat the baseball team with the best record?
Silver lining: at least everyone in our household will be rooting for the same team in the Series (except the cats, but they’re assholes).
Well that kinda sucks. The cubs are the only team that can take the underdog narrative away from the Indians. Against the vast majority of teams, the “Can the city of sports futility become the city of champions?” storyline would’ve been fun, but now we’re going to be looked at as the team standing in the way of letting the Cubs finally win.
The Cubs are not underdogs this year. They are strong, very strong. I haven’t checked the oddsmakers but I think they’d be favored to win.
No, they aren’t underdogs, but for many, many (Many!) years they’ve held the Lovable Losers label. If they win, that appeal will be gone and the casual fan will look for who’s the next Lovable Losers. They won’t have to look any farther than NE Ohio.
ETA: yep, the Cubs opened the odds as favorites.
CHC: -175
CLE: +155
If you don’t like the Vegas line, 538 has the Cubs at 63%.
They certainly shouldn’t. The Cubs are a wealthy and advantaged organization, and much of their loserdom in the modern era has been their own fault. They’re obviously much smarter and better now (and still rich), but they shouldn’t get underdog ‘credit’ for having done worse than mediocre things with their resources before.
Cool. Looking just now it’s CHC 52%, CLE 48%.
ETA: Correction, those are the odds for Game 1 only. Overall for the series, yes asterion, it’s CHC 63%, CLE 37%.
It’s Sympathetic City vs. Sympathetic Franchise.
The Cubs haven’t won a championship in 100+ years. But the city of Chicago has won 9 (?) championships in the past 59 years, whereas the city of Cleveland has won only 1 championship in that time frame.