TWISTS AND TURNS OF GAME 7
Cubs win gets Maddon off the hook
Magicians, even those who can only make a coin disappear at a five-year-old’s birthday party, should never show how their tricks are done. But there should be exceptions.
When Game 7 of the World Series ends in the 10th inning at 12:47 a.m. — and every journalist in the press box has a deadline that just became 12:47 a.m. — you have to have two completely opposite versions of reality operating in your mind simultaneously, each given equal authority because both truly are possible.
So below is the beginning of the column that I had written, but of course never filed, about Cleveland’s wonderful world title and Chicago’s almost unthinkable blown lead. Ironically, athletes understand this perverse duality and sometimes joke: “Yeah, but what would you have written if we’d lost?”
Over a career, they must cope with this split-screen world in which they know, deep down, that their greatest joys are separated from their worst pain by something so close to nothing that they have nightmares about the true nature of final scores: it is always “A beat B last night X-to-Y” and you fill in the blanks afterward, sometimes with a lifetime of impact attached.
As you read it, put it in the context of the most important 17-minute rain delay in the history of baseball. That rain fell at exactly the moment, at the end of nine innings, score 6-6, when every “baseball person” knew that the Tribe were probably — not certainly but very likely — going to win because a Cubs collapse, coming on top of 108 years of Cubs collapses, would almost pre-ordain it.
“The rain delay was really important for our team because we got everybody, all the players down into the weight room,” said Ben Zobrist, the Most Valuable Player of the World Series who hit .357 and drove in the go-ahead run in the 10th. “J-Hey (Jason Heyward) called a meeting and said, ‘Come in here, I’ve got something to say.’ And he said, ‘Whatever’s happened up to this point in the game, we’ve got to forget about it. It’s over. We’re still the best team. We’re going to pull this thing out. We need to pull together and chip away. We’re going to win this game.’ And everybody kind of rallied together.’’
If it hadn’t rained, if Heyward hadn’t used that moment to do with his brain and heart what he couldn’t do with his bat, here’s what you’d have read from me — as well as many similar things said by others (perhaps including you) — on what would now be a very different version of the Cubs world:
For the past 108 years, it’s been said that the Chicago Cubs were cursed and that, for the last 71 years of that dismal era, their afflictions had something to do with a goat named Murphy. This, of course, is sports-banter silliness, a conceit to entertain ourselves.
In truth, the Cubs were generally bad, especially since the Second World War, and have only had a handful of chances — 1969, 1984 and 2003 — to have hideously unpleasant things befall them at the end of promising seasons. But unlike other teams, the Cubs never really came close to the ultimate World Series prize. Oh, sure, famous ground balls rolled horrifyingly between the feet of their first basemen, but a measly pennant, never for a world title.
Curse, what curse? Surely that’s hyperbole. Now, all that is different. Now, after a genuine Cubs catastrophe — a three-run lead blown by super reliever Aroldis Chapman with just four outs to go to beat the Cleveland Indians and win Game 7 of the World Series — perhaps we can revisit this word “cursed.”
Cub fans all over the world thought they knew what would happen when Chapman entered with a 6-3 lead, a man on first base and two outs in the eight. This is the man who, earlier this season, threw a 105 m.p.h. fastball. He’d slam the door on the Tribe and leave Cleveland without a World Series win since 1948. So much for assumptions.
Now, you can call the Cubs anything you want. If the first word that comes to your mind is, indeed, “cursed,” then go for it. Nobody can call it hyperbole now. And while you’re at it, just change the name of that goat from Murphy to Maddon.
The foolish overuse of Chapman in Game 6 by Cubs manager Joe Maddon will now, with hindsight, be the future measuring stick for fretful over-managing. In Game 5, Chapman got a career-high eight outs to save a 3-2 win, using 42 pitches. On Tuesday, Maddon used the southpaw for a crucial out in the seventh inning. That should have been enough, since the Cubs took a five-run lead into the eighth inning. Yet Chapman pitched the entire eighth inning.
Then, almost inconceivably, Maddon left Chapman in to face the first hitter of the ninth inning, despite a 9-2 Chicago lead. Remember, Chapman also threw a total of 24 warm-up pitches in those three innings, most of them close to 100 m.p.h. After the game, Tribe manager Terry Francona said, “We hung around enough so at least Chapman had to pitch. You never know, that might help us.”
Thus was the stage set for a tectonic plate-shifting of curses. The Tribe, inspired, finished their work in the XX inning, winning their first World Series since 1948 by a score of X-Y ...
J-Hey (Jason Heyward) … said: ‘Whatever’s happened up to this point in the game, we’ve got to forget about it.’
They didn’t, but that Cleveland came so close, made this the best extra-inning Game 7 perhaps in baseball history.
As always, there are alternate versions of our endings. Sometimes, we actually love the one we got.