That’s where they are. After five games of the National League Championship Series. One win away. Again.
In case you’re not up on your Cubs lore, the year you’re reaching for is 1945, that being the last time the Cubs inched this close to the World Series and then did not have something terrible happen to them or do something terrible to themselves. To risk the obvious, there will be lifelong Cubs fans of a reasonable age in the ballpark Saturday night expecting to witness a party their parents never saw, that their grandparents might have a vague recollection of, that anyone who was there might impolitely point out: the heartbreak merely waited another 10 days. (And went back another generation or two.)
Anyway, that was then. And that’s the context, likely unnecessary given the sound of so much footwear being scuffed through Wrigleyville every fall, but there it is nevertheless. These Cubs, Theo’s Cubs, Maddon’s Cubs, the Cubs of Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant and Grandpa Rossy and Jon Lester, of young and old, of 101 losses just four years ago and 103 wins in 2016, are nine or so innings away from … something.
They beat the Dodgers on Thursday night, 8-4. From about the time it was decided their offense was gone forever and 1908 would have to stand, the Cubs scored 18 runs in 18 innings and let in six, which is a fairly convincing way to go from a game down in the series to a game up, with a game or two waiting at home.
In the ninth inning, from behind the Cubs’ bench, a chant rose up from a thinning crowd. As hundreds of taillights glowed behind the left- and right-field bleachers, fans in a more purple-y blue shouted, “Let’s go Cubbies! Let’s go Cubbies! Let’s go Cubbies!” The cries went unchallenged in a stadium that’s working on a generational World Series slump of its own. Recorded four hours, 16 minutes after the first pitch, the final out brought a sustained, “Hurrah!” 1,800 miles west and 42 hours short of Wrigley Field and Game 6, of Clayton Kershaw vs. Kyle Hendricks, of the only thing that can come before the World Series, which is the brink of the World Series, which is where they stand.
“Obviously it feels good,” said Cubs manager Joe Maddon, who eight years ago steered the Tampa Bay Rays to their sole World Series appearance. Those Rays led the American League Championship Series, three games to one, then hung on the brink of the World Series for three games.
“You’d much rather go home under those circumstances,” he said of the Cubs’ three-games-to-two advantage, “than any other, and you want to get it done as quickly as possible. It’s going to be a formidable event. Our guys will be ready for the moment. I promise you that. It’s great. The city of Chicago has got to be buzzing pretty much right now. I expect a sellout at Wrigley.”
He chuckled at the understatement.
“It will be a lot of fun,” he said. “So yeah, we’re not going to run away from anything. It’s within our reach right now. But I so want us to go after it as though it’s, again, I hate to say it, but Saturday. Let’s just go play our Saturday game and see how it falls.”
Their Thursday game was good enough, just as their Wednesday game had been. In a series that leaned early to the Dodgers, in the middle to the Cubs, and has turned on a couple Joe Blanton sliders and a hail of Jon Lester sinkers and the play of a 23-year-old second baseman named Javier Baez, what remains is for an entire city to lean over the rafters of a century-old stadium. What is to become of these Cubs? How will they win? How can they lose? Is the beer cold?
Predisposed to hardball sadness, soon to be measuring two-games-to-win-one against the great Kershaw and, perhaps, the treacherous Rich Hill, Cubs fans first sat through a taut Game 5 they’d handed to Lester, the veteran left-hander. He is a wonderful pitcher with a single, flighty flaw, that being a resolute inability to deliver the baseball to a base. It’s not a thing until it is, and generally the talk around it outweighs the actual consequences, but take 108 years of nervous energy and flip an ounce of a pitcher’s anxiety at it, and a 1-1 game in the sixth inning may as well be a bungee jump from the stadium lights.
The game, after all, wasn’t drawn for sentimentality.
It’s why the guy who runs your fantasy league or serves your martini or manages your portfolio, ask him, probably has a story about the day the curveball came into his life, ruining his first career aspiration. Generally, baseball ends there, in the heart of the child on a weedy park and rec ground.
Those who survive discover other cruelties in the game, run aground somewhere after the curveball and before the scholarships come or the money arrives. And then a handful stand in the middle of a diamond in the third week of October, two wins from the World Series, and the fact is the game remains ready – eager even – to bury them in disgrace. In humiliation. To tap that grain of insecurity onto the table so everybody can have a look.
Which brings us to Lester, Dodgers hitters and baserunners, and Game 5 of the NLCS.
Lester is a big, strong fellow who can hike up his fastball to 95 mph. He’s mean, too, the way a pitcher ought to be. And clutch – 3-0 in the World Series. Has the rings to prove it.
So it also brings us to seven innings the Cubs had to have, seven innings in which Lester snarled and hollered and allowed a single run over 108 pitches. He was masterful. Pitching for a town that knows a thing or two about quieting a shaky hand, for a team that carries that burden, Lester pitched around the fake bunts and real bunts and dancing baserunners and delivered the Cubs to what could become one of the great weekends anyone can remember.
You know, assuming the weather holds.
“We all know what we have in front of us,” Lester said.
They’re likely familiar with what’s behind them, as well. So here they are. One win away. Again.
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