CUBS’ TRIUMPH TRULY A NUMBERS GAME
Turns out 108 kept adding up in Chicago’s magical season
BULLS OF THE WEEK
Outside of president of baseball operations Theo Epstein and his Chicago Cubs, the hottest thing in North American professional sport this week has been the number 108. As in the fact the Cubbies ended the 108-yearold Curse of the Billy Goat on Wednesday night by winning their first World Series title since 1908.
As in the age of Chicago fan Hazel Nilson of New Hampshire, the 108-year-old who watched the second Cubs championship of her lifetime — she was two months old the last time around.
Or how about the 108-minute running time of Back to the Future 2 starring Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, the 1989 sequel that saw the Cubs winning the World Series, albeit in 2015.
Or the sum total of 108 in the birthday (12/7/89) of Chicago’s Game 7 World Series starter Kyle Hendricks or the fact Cubs ace Jon Lester was born in Tacoma, Wash., the 108th-largest city in the United States.
Or as in the 108 stitches used to produce the official Spalding Major League baseball or the 108 outs it takes to win a World Series (four games of 27 outs each), setting aside the fact it took the Cubs 111 outs to make history this year. Or the other bizarre connections between the Cubs and the number 108, outlined in the book Hoodoo: Unraveling the 100 Year Mystery of the Chicago Cubs.
The bottom line is that there has seldom been anything quite like this year’s Cubs win. With an average of 40 million Americans and 2.66 million Canadians watching Game 7, it produced the best baseball TV ratings since 1991 and a home run on social media, given the 33 million users who drove 150 million interactions on Facebook during this World Series, along with the 18 million tweets that pertained to the World Series, an astonishing 10.5 million of which related to Game 7.
The biggest question now: What does Epstein — now a sure bet to enter the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown as a builder — do as a third act after being the baseball brains behind the 2016 Cubs ending the curse of the Billy Goat and his 2004 Boston Red Sox snapping the 86-year-old Curse of the Bambino?
BEARS OF THE WEEK
In the busiest nine days of the year in North American professional sport — with all five major leagues in play at the same time from Oct. 25 through Wednesday, Nov. 2 — neither the NFL nor the NHL had particularly good weeks in the shadow of Major League Baseball.
Despite a sexy divisional matchup featuring the Dallas Cowboys and the Philadelphia Eagles, Sunday Night Football was outmatched by Game 5 of the World Series, continuing the poorest television start to an NFL season in at least a decade.
Meanwhile, U.S. congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (Democrat, Illinois) compared Gary Bettman and the NHL to the tobacco industry in the 1990s for the way she believes they’re dragging their feet on the links between concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
The NFL’s vice-president for health and safety policy, Jeff Miller, last year admitted the link between concussions and CTE, but that didn’t soften this week’s news that football concussion lawsuit plaintiff Kevin Turner died of CTE last March at age 46.