This article isn’t going to be coherent. I’m just writing thoughts down. Wouldn’t know how to be coherent here if I tried.
Last night, the Chicago Cubs did something amazing. Anyone reading this knows about it by now: They triumphed over bitter rival St. Louis to win the National League Division Series in four games. It was the first playoff series ever to be clinched at the 102-year-old Wrigley Field, and it happened in one of the most glorious ways you could imagine: Against the team that had tormented them for just about all of the last 100 years, but particularly in the last 20.
Perhaps most fittingly, given the way the two organizations have comported themselves the last 10 years, it came with the teams wearing far different tributes on their jerseys. The Cubs wore the 14 of Ernie Banks, one of the most universally beloved figures in baseball history, who passed away last winter, on their jersey sleeves. Meanwhile, St. Louis, in quintessentially St. Louis fashion, wore on their sleeves the initials of former outfielder Oscar Taveras, whose death in a car accident last winter appeared to be tragic until it was revealed that he was in fact driving plastered, at three times the American legal limit, and had killed his girlfriend in the process.
As if that weren’t enough, the Cubs scored four runs off John Lackey, who left his wife while she was battling breast cancer, in the clinching game. Going against an organization that puts on a veneer of doing things The Right Way, and beating them given these facts, not to mention the fact that they hacked into Houston’s internal database and were caught doing so earlier this year, was all the sweeter.
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The Cubs dong-barraged St. Louis into oblivion in Games 3 and 4, hitting a combined nine home runs, including a playoff-record six in Game 3. Every time something happened that threatened to turn Wrigley into the morgue it was for most of the playoff games in 2007 and 2008, the Cubs responded by doing something awesome nearly immediately. Literally every single stud that Cubs fans have been watching for, hoping for, praying for the last few years hit a home run in the two games except for Addison Russell, who missed Game 4 with an injury (incurred on a near-dong of his own that resulted in a triple). Anthony Rizzo. Kris Bryant. Kyle Schwarber. Javier Baez. Jorge Soler. Starlin Castro. They all went yard, some multiple times. Schwarber hit the longest home run to right field I’ve ever seen at Wrigley in Game 4, one that actually landed on top of the right field scoreboard. It was that dong that essentially cemented the game and the series, moving the Cubs’ lead from 5-4 to 6-4.
Perhaps the most unlikely dong of all came from Javier Baez, who’s been through the wringer professionally and personally in the 14 months since his MLB debut last August. Baez came up, hit three home runs in his first two games, and was nightmarishly bad the rest of the season, so bad that he spent almost all of 2015 in AAA. Well, the AAA stint was due to that and other things: Javy lost his younger sister, his biggest fan, to complications from spina bifida, so he took a lengthy leave to get himself back together. Just when he finally appeared to be putting it together in AAA offensively, he broke a bone in his hand on a slide at second base. He didn’t get called back up until September, more than a year after his MLB debut.
None of it mattered Tuesday. Javy came up with two on and his team down by one in the second and whacked the first pitch by Lackey - a good pitch off the plate, it should be noted, though whiny bitch Lackey didn’t want to do anything that might accidentally result in giving credit to the opponent, facts be damned - out to the opposite field. Just about everything about 2015 since the calendar flipped to August has been cathartic, but that might have been my favorite moment with everything considered.
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Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that all of this happened almost entirely on the backs of players acquired by Theo Epstein, who took over as team president in November 2011 and stripped the organization down to its roots to rebuild it. It was a plan many, including myself, weren’t enamored with for a while. And while I still don’t like losing games on purpose for any reason, there are two inescapable truths of the matter: 1) MLB created a system that, repugnantly, makes it intelligent to tank. 2) Theo, beyond doubt, 100 percent freaking NAILED the process.
The two draft picks the Cubs got by losing on purpose were Kris Bryant and Kyle Schwarber, two of the most dangerous hitters in the current Cubs lineup. Jake Effing Arrieta, the hyper-robot-super-ace, was acquired ALONG with mainstay setup man Pedro Strop for nothing more than a half-season of Scott Feldman. Addison Russell, Kyle Hendricks, Justin Grimm, and probably others I’m forgetting were all acquired as part of trades Theo made to make the MLB team, at the time, worse. They weren’t all tank trades — Theo knocked it out of the park to acquire MVP-caliber first baseman Anthony Rizzo and Travis Wood for oft-injured, occasionally-effective pitchers in separate deals.
Those names dotted the 25-man roster of the Cubs’ victorious group, along with those of stud closer Hector Rondon (Rule 5 pickup!), leadoff hitter extraordinaire Dexter Fowler (acquired straight up for Luis Valbuena), and several scrap-heap pickups that the Cubs got for a song, including three different relievers - Clayton Richard, Trevor Cahill and Fernando Rodney - that were DFA’d this year (Richard by the Cubs). None of those three surrendered a run in this series.
Theo got some luck along the way, of course: San Diego trading away Rizzo for Andrew Cashner made little sense at the time and now makes none. Oakland GM Billy Beane probably went insane last July when he shipped Russell (and fairly highly-regarded prospect Billy McKinney) to the Cubs for Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel in an unsuccessful effort to finally get his World Series. The Astros passing on Bryant for Mark Appel in the 2013 draft looks dumber by the second. Arrieta morphing into a monster with the Cubs is among the most unlikely things I’ve ever seen in baseball.
That said, it’s nearly impossible to build a good team without some luck, so I can’t really penalize Theo for getting some here. The bottom line is that while I wasn’t the biggest fan of how it happened, there can be no arguing that the Cubs’ rebuilding process looks like an overwhelming success at this juncture.
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We don’t know yet what the rest of October (and, hopefully, early November) 2015 holds for these Cubs. The whole thing could come to a screeching halt in the NLCS against either the Mets or Dodgers, both of which boast tough pitching staffs and solid enough offenses. And if it does, St. Louis fans would probably like for us to be ok with that, that beating them would be enough for this season. The national narrative would be that it was enough, because this is the first year this iteration of the Cubs has been good. But it’s not.
There have been generations on generations of Cubs fans that have lived entire lives and died without seeing a World Series title. We’re getting to the point now that Cubs fans have done so without even seeing a World Series GAME. That drought needs to stop. Fans much older than myself have earned this. Fans younger than myself, too. We’ve hoped, and watched, and bought tickets and merchandise and MLB.TV subscriptions. We’ve devoted entire summers to this team with too little payback. This season has gone a long way to making that all worth it. But it won’t be sealed until we see a title.
And while this is the first year of the Cubs’ resurgence, that doesn’t mean next year’s team is guaranteed to be better. Not to throw water on everything, because I don’t want to do that, but the Washington Nationals acted like that was the case when they intentionally did not pitch Stephen Strasburg in the 2012 playoffs in a misguided attempt to keep him healthy. They lost a five-game NLDS and haven’t been back. Tomorrow is never promised, no matter how good you appear to be or how good the future looks. Every opportunity to win is precious and must be savored.
Maybe this is the team to do it, maybe it isn’t. But it’s the best team left this year. The Cubs personally knocked out the only two teams that had an argument to be considered better. They have one of the top three pitchers in the game, a pretty damn good #2 in Jon Lester (it’s a mark of how amazing this ride has been that I haven’t come close to mentioning him yet despite his success), and unequivocally the most dangerous top-to-bottom offense. They have the most lovable group of players I’ve ever been fortunate enough to witness (Miguel Montero and his broken English tweeting, otherwise useless utilityman Jonathan Herrera and his Buckethead schtick, Rizzo’s increasingly ridiculous list of walk-up music that includes ‘Bad Blood’ by Taylor Swift and 'Good Vibrations' by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, the list goes on), a manager who’s been there before, and a city that’s as behind them as any city could be.
Maybe this is the group, and maybe it isn’t. But if it is...how magical would it be?
