Putting last year behind them won’t be easy
MESA, Ariz. — They paraded down Michigan Avenue in front of 5 million fans. They sang on "Saturday Night Live", danced with Ellen, cracked jokes with Fallon and shot the breeze with Kimmel.
They were carried through their hometowns on the front of firetrucks and the back of convertibles, and through the Magic Kingdom at the side of Mickey Mouse. They stood in the Oval Office in the last days of the Obama presidency.
They caused stampedes of adoring fans in furniture stores and restaurants, and were thanked from the bottom of uncounted hearts from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands to Thailand.
For 3½ months this winter, the Chicago Cubs were the Beatles, if the Beatles had 25 members, hailed from five different countries and constantly reminded each other to “try not to suck.”
All things being equal, the 2016 Cubs probably would have been happy to have kept their World Series victory tour going until the end of time. The intoxicating mixture of the franchise’s 108year title drought, the extra-inning drama in an epic Game 7 and the players’ warm charisma won over the nation and turned the Cubs into the sort of pop-culture phenomenon the sports world rarely sees.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” reliever Pedro Strop said with a dreamy look in his eyes. “It changed everybody’s life.”
But all things are never equal, especially not in baseball, and so the Cubs have gathered again in spring training, in only a slightly reconfigured form, to begin their title defense.
Every year, every team stresses some version of “turning the page” from last season, whether that season brought a train wreck or a title. No team, though, has encountered a more challenging turn-thepage season than these Cubs will in 2017.
“One of the great things about winning a title after 108 years is people come up to you all the time and they want to tell their story, or their family’s story — which relatives lived to see it or didn’t live to see it,” Cubs general manager Jed Hoyer said.
“It was part of our existence all offseason. And it’s going to be part of our existence going forward. We have to be good at compartmentalizing it.”
Like many members of the Cubs’ brain trust, Hoyer was with Boston in 2004 when the Red Sox snapped an 86-year title drought. He thought this one would feel similar, but the emotion was stronger, the connection to the fans even deeper — a realization that hit Hoyer in the parade down Michigan Avenue.
“All I wanted to do was hit the slowmotion button, or the pause button, so you could keep enjoying it and soaking it in,” Hoyer said. “You’re almost bummed going down the route, because with every turn of the wheel you were closer to the end.”
What the Cubs have going for them in 2017 is the same thing they had going for them in their 103-win campaign in 2016 — a collection of young talent that stands as the envy of the game.
And unlike the 2005 Red Sox, who lost such essential pieces as Pedro Martinez, Derek Lowe and Orlando Cabrera to free agency, the 2017 Cubs return almost intact — having lost only one member of their Game 7 starting lineup (center fielder Dexter Fowler), plus starter Jason Hammel and closer Aroldis Chapman.
They still have three of the top starters in baseball (Jake Arrieta, Kyle Hendricks and Jon Lester), the reigning National League MVP (third baseman Kris Bryant), the reigning World Series MVP (second baseman/ outfielder Ben Zobrist) and three other 2016 all-stars (shortstop Addison Russell, first baseman Anthony Rizzo and newly acquired closer Wade Davis).
Getting postseason hero Kyle Schwarber back for a full season, after he missed almost the entire 2016 season with a knee injury, is like signing another 30-homer slugger over the winter.