The Cubs victory that was 71 years in the making – Yahoo Sports

CHICAGO – There’s still time for despair. But enough about that.

You should’ve seen them, the Chicago Cubs, running around and shrieking in each other’s ears, celebrating one season and honoring about a century’s worth of others, loving the whole damned thing. That’s right. It will be said these Cubs, these very Cubs, have rubbed out a long, dreary history of bad baseball, dumb baseball, unfortunate baseball, some might suggest wholly deserved baseball.

No. No. No.

For if not for the past 71 years, and plenty would argue the past 108 years, there would be no Saturday night, Game 6, National League Championship Series, Wrigley Field vibrating with hope and affection and dread and the kind of scary stuff that comes with the lifetime commitment that is a Ron Santo shirsey and an uncommon regard for Old Style beer.

The Cubs, these Cubs, are going to the World Series in 2016, that having been decided in a 5-0 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers. At 9:45 p.m. local time, with a double-play grounder, they laid a hand on the generations of folks who’d mused about tomorrow and next year and someday. The somedays came and went like the seasons, like the players, like the trap-door opportunities, until a cool, perfect, fall night when 42,386 people, when millions of Cubbies afflicted, looked at one another and thought, “Holy crap, it happened. I mean, it did happen, right?”

For forever, it seemed, this was going to be somebody else. Jon Lester dashed across the field into the dugout, both forefingers pointed to the sky, a stubbornly full Wrigley cheering the ace pitcher who once was Ferguson Jenkins. David Ross stood on a platform in shallow center field, twirling, gazing out at so many people. They were in the bleachers, in the top deck, on that rooftop and that one and that one over there. His eyes reddened, he leaned into a live microphone and bellowed, “Chicagooooo!” and they cheered the crusty catcher who once was Jody Davis. Kris Bryant heard the MVP chants and he grinned and his eyes shone and the people swooned over the third baseman who once was Ron Santo. Round it went. Javy Baez stood where Ryne Sandberg was going to stand. And Addison Russell in Ernie Banks’ spot. Ben Zobrist, the left fielder, in a place warmed forever by the man smiling in the midst of it all, his hands clasped behind his back, his hair gray, his shoulders still broad.

“Oh man,” Billy Williams said. “Finally. Finally.”

He’d been a Cub for 16 years. He went to the Hall of Fame. He retired with seven postseason at-bats, all for the Oakland A’s.

“Oh man,” he said again. “This is something. In my lifetime, to see this. I’ve been standing here thinking of guys like Ernie and Ron and all those guys who tried so hard. They’re not here to see it. But I’m here to see it for them.”

He glanced into the night sky and then across a diamond crowded with Cubs.

“This is the year,” he said as if it had only just occurred to him. “We’re in the World Series. How sweet is that?”

Yeah, and this was going to be Jim Frey or Don Zimmer or Dusty Baker or Lou Piniella, and instead it was the small-town guy with the snowy hair and clunky glasses and long view, he on the top step that brings managers to their knees, he following that last ball – Addison Russell to Javy Baez to Anthony Rizzo – and simply finding himself grateful.

“It’s everything you think it is,” Joe Maddon said. “You stand out on that platform afterwards and you’re looking at the ballpark and the fans and the W flags everywhere, and truthfully I do think about everybody. I think about the fans and their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents and everything that’s been going on for a while. … I think about my wife, Jaye, my kids, my mom back in Pennsylvania, my dad who wasn’t here. Those are the kinds of things you think about in that particular moment and it’s pretty – it’s overwhelming and it’s awesome.”

He’d put four men on his lineup card aged 24 or younger. He’d given the ball to Kyle Hendricks, who’d won 15 big-league games in his life, then 16 this year, and then he shut out the Dodgers for 7 1/3 innings in a game nobody here would ever forget. From day one he’d asked every single one of them to embrace the target, that being them, because they would be the best team in the game, and all that was left was to play seven months to prove it, with still four wins left undone.

“Make Someday Today,” one of his T-shirts read, a casual reference to all the somedays that had passed, a challenge for those that lay ahead. All of which made for inspirational T-shirts, none of which would mean a thing if they never required wringing out. And that meant playing the game today, and not the games of 108 prior years, and that meant carrying the fight of today, releasing the burden of a century.

“Walkin’ in the clubhouse today, you could see it in the guys’ eyes,” center fielder Dexter Fowler said. “They were ready.”

They scored twice in the first inning against Clayton Kershaw, because curses don’t die against No. 5’s, because that’s not allowed. They scored again in the second inning. Again in the fourth, and the fifth.

“We were just trying to make him feel uncomfortable,” Fowler said, the crowd warming into another rendition of “Go Cubs Go.” “We’re at home. We’re comfortable.”

By the final games of the NLCS, in opposition to the forces of the past century or so, it seemed the Cubs were being drawn toward the World Series. Like they could hardly have stopped it if they’d tried. Following consecutive shutouts, they’d retaken the batter’s box. They’d retaken the mound. They’d become the better team, the one that played every inch of every game, while the Dodgers had committed fielding errors, blundered on the basepaths, and hung sliders.

“You know what,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said, “I think that they beat us. We made mistakes. You hate to have sour grapes, but the better team won the series.”

Previously repelled by late October baseball, deterred certainly by the NLCS and usually long before that, the Cubs had re-situated their legs beneath them. Then, on televisions bolted behind bars and dangling from ceilings in The Cubbie Bear, Murphy’s Bleachers and Harry Caray’s Tavern, they had restarted the journey.

So, home runs by Addison Russell and Anthony Rizzo, a four-run fourth and a five-run sixth in Game 4. So, three hits from Javier Baez and a five-run eighth in Game 5. And the systematic ruin of Kershaw and the Dodgers in Game 6. They are sure this all began in the fourth inning of Game 4, by then scoreless across 21 innings and almost surely drifting back to Octobers past, when their cleanup hitter, Ben Zobrist, bunted for a hit. Just some goofy 40-foot roller along the line at Dodger Stadium that in the moment looked sad and purposeless. Instead, the Cubs scored 23 runs in what was left of the series, the Dodgers scored six. The Cubs soaked their clubhouse. The Dodgers sat on a bus waiting for people to clear the streets, which might’ve come by dawn.

Sure, another team awaits, the Cleveland Indians, who’ve suffered some generational defects of their own. And nothing’s over, really over, until they put a World Series banner over this old joint. There’s still time for despair, but not on this night. They’re better than that, better than anything anyone around here has seen in a very, very long time. Ask anyone, starting with the old lady who watched it all from her green chair, field level, holding a T-shirt that read, “Just One Before I Die.”

So enough about that.