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‘You want to be the champion,’ Maddon says
They have warded off superstition by enjoying their ride to the best record in baseball; are they as good as we think they are?
Joe Maddon, the man of many T-shirts, unveiled a new one on the first day of the last week of the regular season.
“Try Not To Suck-Tober,” was emblazoned on the Chicago Cubs manager’s white shirt along with an outline of his famed hornedrim glasses. It is a modified version of the “Try Not To Suck” T-shirts the Cubs began wearing this spring after heightened expectations entering this season.
“Suck-Tober, it’s a new word,” Maddon said with a grin. “You can look it up on urbandictionary .com.”
The Cubs did a remarkable job of living up to the slogan in the regular season as they compiled the best record in the major leagues at 103-58 and won the National League Central by 17½ games over the three-time defending division champion St. Louis Cardinals.
The Cubs begin their best-offive NL Division Series on Friday at Wrigley Field by hosting the winner of the wild-card game between the New York Mets and San Francisco Giants.
After finishing with triple-digit wins for the first time since 1935, the Cubs have been installed as favorites to win the World Series by oddsmakers.
The Cubs, of course, haven’t been to the World Series in more than seven decades, last appearing in 1945 when they lost to the Detroit Tigers. Further, the franchise hasn’t won it all since 1908, and its litany of failure in the succeeding 108 years is too long to chronicle here.
While Cubs fans are born with the fatalistic gene, they finally have reason for optimism that this is the year the World Series championship drought ends.
Seemingly, the only thing that can stop the Cubs in October is the weight of great expectations or the belief the franchise truly is cursed. As the story goes, it happened the day tavern owner William Sianis was asked to leave Game 4 of the 1945 World Series at Wrigley Field because the odor of his pet goat was too strong, and Sianis then cursed the Cubs.
However, if the Cubs are feeling pressure, they sure aren’t showing it. Their clubhouse is a happy place where everyone is smiling and eager to get on with the postseason.
“We haven’t felt any pressure all year when everyone thought the pressure was on us,” first baseman Anthony Rizzo said. “Why would we feel pressure now?”
Indeed, the early days of the Cubs’ spring training camp in Mesa, Ariz., were circus like.
The national media descended after an offseason in which right fielder Jason Heyward, second baseman Ben Zobrist and righthander John Lackey were added as high-profile free agents to a team that won 97 games last season and advanced to the NL Championship Series before being swept by the Mets.
Everyone wanted to know how the Cubs would handle the role of being World Series favorites. They rallied around Maddon’s slogans, including another printed on T-shirts: “Embrace The Target.”
The Cubs embraced the target throughout the regular season and say that will not change in the postseason.
“Why would you ever want to work somewhere where there’s no expectations?” Maddon says. “I don’t understand that. There’s that comfortable component of society that maybe they want to live in that moment where there are no expectations or any kind of pressure, and that to me would be absolutely no fun whatsoever.
“I think all of our guys, where you’re trained coming up as an athlete, you want to play in the championship game. You want to be the champion. I know our guys want to be champions. They openly talk about it. They don’t hide from it.”
The Cubs have every reason to be confident after leading the major leagues in lowest average number of runs allowed at 3.43 a game and finishing third in runs scored with a 4.99 average.
Maddon can run out three No. 1 starters in the postseason in lefthander Jon Lester and righthanders Kyle Hendricks and Jake Arrieta. President of baseball operations Theo Epstein added a lockdown closer in July by acquiring left-hander Aroldis Chapman from the New York Yankees.
Rizzo and third basemanoutfielder Kris Bryant are both strong candidates for the NL Most Valuable Player Award and are joined in the lineup by three others selected to play in the 2016 All-Star Game — Zobrist, shortstop Addison Russell and center fielder Dexter Fowler.
“They have a great team with a lot of great players,” says Pittsburgh Pirates manager Clint Hurdle, whose team went 4-14 against the Cubs this season and 74-69 against everyone else. “They really have pretty much everything you’d want.”
One concern is that it will be the first meaningful game the Cubs will have played in almost two weeks since clinching homefield advantage throughout the NL playoffs Sept. 23. They wrapped up the NL Central title Sept. 15 when 17 days remained in the regular season.
Maddon managed the last seven games like it was spring training, using various lineup combinations and preplanning the usage of his pitching staff in an effort to both get his players rest while keeping them sharp for the postseason.
“I don’t know if there is a perfect way,” Maddon said. “I know I’d rather have this problem than scrambling until the last day of the season just to get in.”
Instead, getting in early has only heightened the anticipation of Cubs fans.
While it certainly might not be fair considering the vagaries of short series in October, many people will feel the Cubs’ season will be something less than a total success if they don’t win the Series.
“It’s there, and we’re not blind to it,” Lester says of the pressure. “You can’t run from it. You just have to worry about what your team can control and really just try to win it.”