PAPER CASE, REAL CHASE
With highly anticipated season set to begin, Cubs have the talent to win Series, but do they have the requisite resolve?
After six months of thinking about the Cubs, dreaming about the Cubs and pretending to be someone who cares about the things that society deems important — family, job and something else you can’t remember at the moment (eating?) — you can finally get back to the stuff that matters: real baseball games.
Not hot-stove chatter. Not freeagent signings. Not spring-training games featuring uniform numbers that match the high temperature in Arizona. Not manager Joe Maddon’s latest motivational slogans. Real games. At last.
The Cubs open their season Monday night in Anaheim, California, against the Angels. It can’t come soon enough, given all the offseason attention on the team. I don’t want to say that interest in the Cubs has reached fever pitch, but Chicago-area hospitals are reporting that cases of swooning are at Beatles-concert levels.
This is what happens when your team is coming off a 97-victory season, when 107 years have passed since your team’s last World Series title and when everyone seems to be picking your team to win it all.
Go ahead and try to tell the guy next to you to tone down his excitement. Tell the woman wearing the “Next Year is Here’’ T-shirt that the Cubs are built for “sustained success’’ and that, if a championship doesn’t arrive this year, it might in 2017. Swooning will be the least of your physical problems.
The Cubs are good enough to win it all this year. They should win it all this year. I don’t think
saying that is tempting fate. It’s simply stating the obvious: Few teams can match the talent level the Cubs have.
But things happen. These being the Cubs, bad things can and likely will happen. I would like to present that possibility as a positive. For this franchise to win a World Series, it will have to overcome something substantial along the way. It might be an injury to an important player. It might be a stretch of bad baseball in August. It might be a player or two not playing close to their potential. Great teams persevere and prevail. What, you thought this was going to be easy? A cakewalk? You can’t go a century-plus without a title and then expect childbirth without labor pains.
Championship teams aren’t just talented. There’s a tensile strength to them. There’s a resolve to them, a fierceness. Do the Cubs have that? I’m not sure we know yet. We know that talented Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant have smiles that could defrost a freezer. We know that an understated Jason Heyward can do anything you need a player to do on a baseball field. We know that Jake Arrieta, the reigning National League Cy Young winner, has a nastiness to him on the mound.
But can they be great when they need to be great in the biggest moments? Do they have “it’’?
We’re about to find out. This whole season is going to be a runon sentence of big moments. The aforementioned strength, resolve and fierceness will have to be there if the Cubs are to overcome whatever it is you want to call 107 years without a World Series title. A curse. A cruel cosmic joke. Bad luck. Whatever words you choose to name the mountain won’t change the fact that it’s still a mountain that has to be climbed.
The city is so caught up in what the young Cubs accomplished last season that it tends to gloss over what the Mets did to them in the National League Championship Series. The 4-0 sweep was as dominant as it sounds. The Cubs scored only eight runs in those four games. Their pitchers couldn’t keep up with the Mets’ hard-throwing young pitchers. But the general consensus was that it was a good experience for the Cubs, who got farther than almost anyone figured they would, and that it was the start of something bigger.
In the offseason, they responded by signing Heyward, second baseman Ben Zobrist and pitcher John Lackey. They were pleasantly surprised when center fielder Dexter Fowler chose to re-sign with the team, allowing Heyward to play his natural position, right field.
But before the championship parade starts, there’s a ways to go, physically and metaphysically. There’s little doubt the Cubs are good enough to win the World Series this season. They’re certainly the team to beat on paper. It’s worth noting that paper is good for writing down history, not for confronting it.
It’s time for real games and answers. Finally.