LIVELY DEBATE: WAS SERIES BALL ‘DEAD’? Hey! Hey! Holy Cow!
It’s time for baseball ballyhoo!
How about kickin’ up a little dugout dirt and hittin’ this one up in the air?
Curve ball: Did a conspiracy sink the Chicago Cubs’ last shot at a World Series title in 1945?
Fast Ball: Hmmmm: Did the 1945 World Series winning Detroit Tigers fix the series to win?
Foul Ball? Did doctored baseballs blow the Cubbies’ chance to win the coveted and elusive baseball crown? A bit outta left field, you say?
Consider this pop fly theory from Bartman Ball pulverizer Grant DePorter, who recently purchased the ball used in the last out of the 1945 World Series between the Cubs and the Detroit Tigers. (They square off again at Wrigley Thursday!)
“I think I may have found the smoking gun that cost the Cubs the Series,” DePorter tells Sneed.
“I had the 1945 World Series ‘Last Out Ball’ scanned to have a peek at its guts, and the image revealed the ball was akin to a dead ball; a ball which wasn’t going to go very far when hit. It has a dark center, like there’s not much there — which would be like hitting a pillow,” he said.
“If the baseball had a dense cork center, like it was supposed to, it would crack off the bat — and show up white in an X-ray.
“The Cubs, who were a superior hitting team than the Tigers, really showed no power during the World Series. Only 2 percent of hits in that series were home runs, where as, on average, in every other World Series since 1931, 12 percent of hits were home runs,” said DePorter.
Translation: “The Tigers may have secretly substituted a dead ball into the game after taking a 6-1 lead in the second inning of game seven in order to keep the lead. And maybe they swapped dead balls in during opportune moments the entire series,” he said.
DePorter’s theory may be out of left field, but is it out of the park?
“To have a good comparison, we’ve got to find other baseballs used in the 1945 Series to CAT scan. We need people to contact us,” he said. (In the meantime, and since Major League balls have been made the same since 1931, DePorter holds the image against the Cat scan of a 2005 World Series home run ball hit by White Sox player Paul Konerko to show contrast — one of several other balls he’s had X-rayed.)
“Historians say that the number one reason the Cubs lost the World Series was because they only hit one home run for the entire seven-game series,” said DePorter, who bought the notorious Bartman baseball for $113,824 and blasted it to smithereens in hopes of ending the 67-year-old Cubs curse. In case you forgot, Steve Bartman deflected a potential catch of a foul ball during the National League Championship Series at Wrigley Field in 2003, and some Cubs fans still blame him for the team’s collapse.
DePorter bought the “Last Out Ball” at auction recently for $8,972 in another effort to end the Cubbie hex.
“I wanted to do something to change the Cubs’ momentum and end the 103-year World Series championship drought,” said DePorter.
Backstory: The 1945 World Series gave birth to the legend of the Billy Goat Curse when a hex was placed on the Cubs by Billy Goat Tavern owner William Sianis, who was furious when his goat was denied entry to Wrigley Field.
So is the end of the curse at hand?
DePorter, a Harry Caray eatery exec/showman, slipped into Wrigley Field Tuesday night with the ball to shower some ju-ju magic on the Cubs,
Rahmsville ...
Mayor Rahm Emanuel went bye-bye Wednesday: Off to Prague to celebrate his 13-year-old daughter Ilana’s bat mitzvah by visiting the Spanish Synagogue, one of the last remaining synagogues to survive World War II.