At 2:55 p.m. CDT (Cubs Daylight Time) Saturday, the scoreboard operator at Wrigley Field notified the crowd that the Houston Astros had lost to the Milwaukee Brewers 5-2, thus opening the door for a certain team from the North Side to clinch the National League Central Division title.
This was like the baby threatening to arrive three weeks early. It took a while to get used to the idea of an approaching playoff berth (or birth) and the attendant champagne hose-down, simply because Cubs fans had been braced for a long, difficult journey. Cubs fans could be riding to the 7-Eleven in a Lexus and they would be braced for a long, difficult journey.
So here were your tense, huddled masses at Wrigley yearning to breathe freely. Here they were roaring on every pitch from the eighth inning of the first game of a doubleheader against the Pittsburgh Pirates until the last pitch of the second game. This was 95 years of frustration talking, so cut it a little slack if it was hoarse.
This is a franchise that has known some heartache (in the way that Charlie Brown has known some rejection), and the ease of Saturday was what was so stunning. You kept waiting for the other baseball spike to drop.
You kept waiting for the storm clouds to roll in from the west, the way they had the day before. They didn’t. You kept waiting for Mark Prior to fall apart in Game 1. He didn’t, despite throwing 133 pitches in 6 2/3 innings. You kept waiting for the bullpen to fall apart. It didn’t, and the Cubs held on for a 4-2 victory.
So the second game of the doubleheader arrived defenseless in the face of all this civic hunger. By the end of the second inning, the hunger being what it was, with perhaps the hungriest Cubs fan of all, WGN Radio analyst Ron Santo, exhorting the crowd to cheer even louder, the game was all but over. It was 6-0.
And by the time it ended, after the Cubs had disposed of those accommodating Pirates 7-2, the celebration by the players and the 40,121 fans in attendance started in earnest. Fortified drinks seemed to be a central theme of the evening.
It was the craziest thing. As Sammy Sosa sprayed champagne onto his faithful fans in right field, the sun peeked out of the clouds and glowed on the outfield bleachers for the first time in hours. Make of that what you will–and the God-is-a-Cubs-fan set certainly will–but what can’t be debated is that the Cubs are going to the playoffs.
Yes, those playoffs. Yes, these Cubs. Feel free to commence believing now.
The Cubs will play the Braves in a best-of-five series beginning Tuesday night in Atlanta.
“We’re going to Atlanta,” Cubs first baseman Randall Simon screamed. “We’re going to beat them over there because we’re going to the World Series.”
It will be the Cubs’ 11th trip to the postseason since they last won the World Series in 1908 and it’s their first division title since 1989. They haven’t played in a World Series since 1945. For anyone who has had the pleasure or misfortune of following this franchise, many of those numbers are as familiar as the dates of family members’ birthdays. Or funerals.
Manager Dusty Baker has fought the team’s ugly history since he was hired in November, and who can blame him? It’s hard to look at the futility from any angle and see it as a motivational tool. But there it is, this darkness, and it happens to be a bond between the Cubs and their fans.
More so than any team in baseball, the Cubs are their fans. This is a package deal, for better or worse, till death do them part. And fans have died about 1,000 deaths each with this club. If the Cubs somehow ever find a way to win a World Series, the fans are as much the story as the players. Maybe more of the story. And that’s why they came early and stayed late Saturday. They had this coming.
“For me, when we had a sellout crowd for a Milwaukee Brewers game on a Tuesday afternoon at 1 o’clock, that said it all,” said first baseman Eric Karros, who was acquired from the Los Angeles Dodgers with second baseman Mark Grudzielanek over the winter.
There was some World Series talk Saturday because this team has excellent starting pitching. But that’s getting way ahead of current events, and you don’t ever want to do that in Chicago. You’re liable to get a face full of brick wall for your efforts.
Saturday was a first step, a wonderful first step. The Cubs figured they needed to sweep the Pirates to have the best chance to win the division. They couldn’t have expected the Astros to lose two in a row to the Brewers, couldn’t have expected that kind of collapse. It was unthinkable, almost Cub-like in its magnitude.
When Sosa launched a 450-foot home run to center field in the first inning of the second game, hope got a little stronger, got a little brazen even. When the Cubs scored five runs in the second inning, hope gave way to a certain swagger that hasn’t been seen much lately in this town. When center fielder Kenny Lofton misjudged a fly ball in the fourth inning and recovered by making an over-the-shoulder, Willie Mays-type catch, it seemed just about perfect.
It was. The Cubs got a strong pitching effort out of Matt Clement. Clinching the division title Saturday meant the Cubs will be able to rest Kerry Wood until the playoffs. He was scheduled to pitch Sunday.
For the Cubs this was sweeter than 1998, when they needed a one-game playoff to earn a wild-card berth. This is a better team than that one, which lost to the Braves in three games. This is a team that is 19-7 in September with one game left. A nice way to enter October.
Hours after the Cubs clinched, the “L” continued to rumble past Wrigley in right-center field, and the wind continued to snap the flags to attention, as if everything were normal. Chicago knew better.
On this day, in this little dot on the map, the Cubs won a division. Was it a tease? It’s a tease until the Cubs prove otherwise. But this is a town willing to be teased, toyed with, abused. You’d hate to miss the payoff.
