This is an article I wrote for the school newspaper at Fitchburg State University in November of 2016. Before it got a chance to run, the election happened, and suddenly an epic end to an all-time great World Series was no longer news. Now that I have graduated, I am publishing some of my writing from the semester. I plan of writing more in the coming days. Enjoy!
It was a series with a combined 176 years of title-drought baggage, a series where the National League team was at an advantage in the American League ballpark because of their game-changing designated hitter, and it was a series in which both fan bases went into Game 7 convinced their team would lose… and they were almost both right. It was a World Series for the ages, and it had everything baseball fans could possibly ask for.
In the end, the Chicago Cubs won the deciding seventh game 8-7 in a ten inning, rain delayed, thrilling mess of a game in Cleveland, winning the World Series for the first time since 1908, but they certainly didn’t make it easy for themselves. Cubs manager Joe Maddon took starting pitcher Kyle Hendricks early in the game when he was pitching well to bring in Jon Lester as well as Lester’s personal catcher David Ross. Every head-scratching move Maddon made, though, was bailed out by his players playing well. First, Lester threw a pitch so wild it bounced of Ross’ face mask and brought in two Cleveland runs, but then Ross hit a home run off lefty reliever (and fellow 2013 World Series champion with the Boston Red Sox) Andrew Miller. Maddon will go down in history as the manager who oversaw the end of a 108 year curse in Chicago, but he also showed that managing is overrated. Theo Epstein built the team, and the players Epstein picked came up big for the Cubs, but Terry Francona out-managed Maddon and his team lost because the pieces he had to work with were simply not as good as Maddon’s.
As a Red Sox fan, this series validated so many of the baseball beliefs I have held for years. After an amazing seven game World Series that got better ratings than the NFL, it is clear that in 2016, if you were to start an expansion baseball team and build from the ground up, Theo Epstein would be your first choice to run the front office, Terry Francona would be your first choice to run the field operation, Jon Lester is the guy the guy you want taking the mound in a big game, and Andrew Miller would be the guy you want coming out of the bullpen in the highest leverage innings. The Red Sox had all those guys, and won championships with all those guys.
For the Cleveland Indians, it was a series they did not win literally, and could not win figuratively. Terry Francona had to go with a three man pitching rotation and had a much narrower margin for error in the managerial decisions he made compared to Maddon. Cleveland’s entire postseason run was predicated on a great bullpen and Corey Kluber pitching out of his mind every time he took the mound. Given that Kluber, the 2014 American League Cy Young Award winner, was coming off an injury and had never pitched in the playoffs, that was no sure thing. On paper, the Indians should not have beaten the Red Sox (who they swept) or the Toronto Blue Jays (who they bear in five games), and the fact that their season was still going in the tenth inning of Game 7 of the World Series against a 103-win Cubs team is incredible. The Indians and their fans should be proud.
In June, the Cavaliers overcame a 1-3 series deficit to beat a Golden State Warriors team that won a record breaking 73 regular season games to win Cleveland’s first major professional sports title since the Browns’ NFL Championship in 1964. The Indians themselves have not won the World Series since 1948. Against any other National League opponent, the Tribe would have been the feel-good story that baseball fans across America would be rooting for. Now, the Indians have the longest title drought of any team that has stayed in the same place (in football, the Chicago Cardinals won the NFL Championship in 1947, but moved to St. Louis in 1960, and to Arizona in 1988), and their drought is as long as the Red Sox were without winning it all when Mookie Wilson’s grounder went through Bill Buckner’s legs in the 1986 World Series. Heartbreak like this, blowing a 3-1 series lead in baseball just months after overcoming a 1-3 series deficit in basketball, it the kind of thing that will only make it sweeter when the Indians win the World Series in the future.
For Cubs fans, the thing that was never going to happen finally happened. Fans from Bill Murray to John Cusack to Eddie Vedder to 96 year old retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who attended World Series games at Wrigley Field in 1929 and 1932, are finally getting a taste of baseball championship glory. That’s pretty cool to see. There is no fan base that has suffered nearly as long as Cubs fans did, and as jaded as I might be, it’s hard not to enjoy this one.
Dave's Words 