Lester and Cubs can rally around the horns
It might’ve passed for a scene out of ‘‘ The Andy Griffith Show’’ except that Jon Lester is about 190 pounds heavier than Opie.
But on a trail near a fishing spot just outside of Denver, a father and son with their fishing poles happened upon a sight that believers in fate and fortune might mark as the beginning of the end of the Billy Goat Curse.
“It’s not like it’s been in the dugout as a rally cry for us,” said Lester, who starts Sunday night in St. Louis as the Cubs open their championship defense. “I don’t even think half the guys know they’re in my locker.”
But the deer antlers that Lester and his dad found that day off in Colorado two years ago have been at every game, in Lester’s locker, every day since that earlyApril father- and- son discovery, since the Cubs beat the Rockies on Dexter Fowler’s ninth- inning home run the day after he brought it to the clubhouse — followed the next day by a walk- off win at home against the Reds.
If you believe in magic or UFOs — certainly if you believe in baseball curses — consider the antlers.
Nobody had any idea what the Cubs might do in Lester’s first season, coming off another last- place finish in 2014.
Certainly nobody expected them to reach the National League Championship Series when catcher David Ross suggested Lester take it on the team’s second road trip.
“So I just took them, and they’ve kind of just been riding along with us for two years,” Lester said.
Two years, 199 regular- season wins, 15 postseason wins and a curse- busting championship 108 years in the making.
Lester, by the way, isn’t especially superstitious. He does wear the same style of undershirt for every start.
“But I don’t have something I touch or something I do,” he said. “I try to keep everything the same. It’s kind of [ about] routine. It’s not really superstition.”
But the antlers aren’t going anywhere.
“They’ll stay with me,” he said.
“Do I think that the antlers had anything to do with us winning? No,” he said. “But it’s something fun and cool. And you see it every year. There’s some team that has something in the dugout that is a [ rallying point] of some sort. In 2002, it was the [ Angels’] Rally Monkey. The Royals had the praying mantis for a while [ last year].
“Maybe if you’re struggling, you’re thinking about the rally mantis as opposed to you struggling, and all of a sudden you’re hitting or pitching well.”
You won’t see the antlers on the ballpark video board. Most won’t see them at all.
But that doesn’t mean the power can’t be felt.
“It’s just something that started that nobody really knows about it, and I just throw them in my locker, and it takes up a lot of my room on the road,” Lester said. The antlers’ future? “We’ll keep rolling,” he said.
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