For Cubs, series victory is start of something big
CHICAGO Everybody in baseball ought to be feeling the sting of the beatdown the Chicago Cubs just put on the St. Louis Cardinals.
If not, well, they’ll experience it for themselves soon enough.
It wasn’t simply that the Cubs overwhelmed the Cardinals with a 6-4 victory to take their National League Division Series 3-1 on Tuesday. It was the relentlessness with which they just kept coming.
Javier Baez, who spent the season in Iowa, hit a three-run homer. Jorge Soler made the defensive play of the series, throwing out Tony Cruz at the plate on a one-hopper to save what would have been a go-ahead run for St. Louis.
Anthony Rizzo and Kyle Schwarber homered, with the ball Schwarber hit still streaking somewhere over Lake Michigan.
They’re like baseball’s version of the White Walkers in Game of
Thrones. Except scarier because they’re only getting started.
“With all of the talent that we had, all of the talent that we were building, everyone knew that the Cubs were coming,” Rizzo said. “And we’re here, and hopefully we can keep this thing going.”
Rizzo is the grizzled veteran of Chicago’s Cubbie Corps at 26. Soler is 23. Schwarber and Baez are 22. There’s also Kris Bryant, the likely Rookie of the Year at 23, and Addison Russell, who is all of 21.
They have played five postseason games and have already combined for nine home runs and 17 RBI. They’ve also done something no other Cubs have ever done. Not Ernie Banks. Not Billy Williams. Not Tinker, Evers or Chance.
By beating the Cardinals at Wrigley Field on Tuesday, they became the first Chicago team to clinch a postseason series at home since 1906, when the White Sox beat the Cubs in the World Series.
“I really don’t look at them as young guys. We’re good baseball players, that’s why we’re here,” said Schwarber, who has three homers and five RBI in the postseason. “You can’t look at it as young. We’re baseball players. We know what needs to be done.”
But this series did feel like something of a changing of the guard, and not only for the NL Central, where the Cardinals have finished first or second in each of the last seven seasons. It might very well have been a sneak peek at what baseball is going to look like for the next decade.
Hope is usually in rare supply for Cubs fans, a century’s worth of disappointment and futility ingraining doubt and fatalism into their DNA. But they have dared to dream this year, buoyed by the promise of these youngsters.
It’s fitting, then, that they clinched what is arguably the biggest win since that last World Series victory in 1908 on the four-year anniversary of Theo Epstein’s arrival in Chicago as club president.
Just as they did with the then-hapless Boston Red Sox, it was Epstein and his general manager Jed Hoyer who turned the Cubs upside down, knowing they had to build a new foundation or the franchise would never be able to stand.
The first few years were painful, no doubt. The Cubs lost — a lot — while Epstein and Hoyer restocked the farm system and built a core of young players one of whom was better than the next. As Bryant, Schwarber and the rest started coming through Iowa, there were hints of how good these new Cubs could be.
The initial thinking was that 2016 was going to be Chicago’s year — it’s always next year on the North Side, after all. But when they were able to lure rookie whisperer Joe Maddon to Chicago, the plan accelerated.
“This timing was the best-case scenario,” Epstein said on the field as his players and their families partied around him. “We were kind of pointing to 2016, but a lot of things have gone right in the last 16 months — most of all the guts of a lot of different players. Our young players having the mental toughness to adjust to big leagues way quicker than anyone imagined.”
Now there doesn’t seem to be any stopping them. This year, or for many to come.
“We hope. Nothing ’s promised in baseball and life,” Epstein said. “We’re excited about all the tomorrows, but we have to go earn it. The only thing we’re promised is a date Saturday in New York or Los Angeles, and we’re looking forward to that.”
Enjoy the ride — it’s just getting started.