In “The Narrative,” Cubs Face a Storied Enemy

At this point, all of us are aware of the ironclad rule of Cubs history: nothing that happens today is so bad that it can’t be compared to something worse from the past.

The media that follows the team reminds us of this constantly. And one of the consequences of Kyle Schwarber’s injury is that it gave us a look at both how they’re going to try to make this season fit into The Great Unending Narrative of Cub Failures and what the players can do to try to prevent that Narrative from engulfing their season.

Of course, this isn’t everyone in “the media,” and to a certain extent you can understand the need to fill column inches. But still, it happens. In the wake of the news that Schwarber was done for the year, Paul Sullivan wrote a column lauding him for his “drive and determination” in the wake of profound career adversity. But even in the midst of handing out praise, Sullivan couldn’t resist calling back to the Cubs’ litany of disappointments.

“The psychological impact of Schwarber’s absence already was being felt Friday. Fans of a certain age had flashbacks to the ill-fated 1985 Cubs team that was expected to cruise to the World Series and complete the job they failed to do in 1984.”

Tell me about it. I barely noticed that Schwarber was out of the lineup because I was too busy watching episodes of MacGyver so I could learn to make explosives using cocaine and a Frankie Says Relax shirt. Were we still talking about baseball?

In this example, Sullivan lays out the central thesis of The Narrative, which is this: because bad things have happened to the Cubs before, we should expect them to happen again. And in case you were unaware of what those bad things were, Sullivan illustrates further.

“…reigning Cy Young winner Rick Sutcliffe went on the disabled list on May 20 with a partial tear of his left hamstring while running to first base, saying ‘I felt like I had been shot.’”

The Narrative connects all horrific events in Cubs history. Because of this, when a team’s outfielder is lying in a heap and being carted off the field, it’s supposed to make sense that the first thing that springs to mind is an injury to a pitcher who played years before he was born. It’s a good thing no one else affiliated with the Cubs thinks this way.

HEAD TRAINER PJ MAINVILLE: Well, Kyle, it looks like you’ve torn your ACL and your LCL.

SCHWARBER: Damn.

MAINVILLE: And it gave fans of a certain age flashbacks to a famous Cub pitcher’s injury.

SCHWARBER: OK…

MAINVILLE: So that’s why we’re going to amputate two of your fingers.

SCHWARBER: What?! Why the hell are you doing that?

MAINVILLE: Because I’m apparently the only one in this room who wants to win a championship!

According to The Narrative, if something negative happens to the Cubs, it can never be just an isolated incident. It has to be the latest calamity in an unceasing Kafka-esque nightmare that will inevitably end with a transaction line reading:

15 Day DL: Anthony Rizzo (changed into cockroach)

And the worst part of it all is that whenever the Cubs are good, it’s inevitable that they will do battle against The Narrative. In 1984, they were confronting the ghosts of ’69. In 2008, they were trying to keep the World Series drought from hitting the century mark. This year, as Sullivan’s piece indicates, it’s been decided that the Cubs will be running up against the legacy of 1985: “The Disappointing Year After.”

But that’s only the beginning. As CBS Radio’s Doug Gottlieb demonstrates in this clip, once the story goes national, it takes less than a minute to make a connection from Schwarber’s knee to the Curse of the Goat. If Sam Sianis had any foresight about that goat, he would’ve named it “Kevin Bacon.”

And here’s where The Narrative can start affecting the team: if this line of thinking is allowed to continue, it’s only a matter of time before the sports media engages in their favorite pastime: asking baseball players if a goat curse is real without once thinking “Hey wait a minute, I’m an adult.”

Since The Narrative is the default setting for both local and national media, it’s impossible to kill it. And the Schwarber injury gave the 2016 Cubs their first test at confronting this phenomenon. So how did they handle their first encounter with it? The same way they’ve handled opposing pitchers: by overwhelming it with unceasing awesomeness. The Cubs confronted The Narrative by giving us these storylines for the next three games:

Saturday: The offense jumps Zach Greinke for three first inning runs and Kyle Hendricks shuts down Paul Goldschmidt.

Sunday: Jake Arrieta crushes a 440 foot bomb.

Monday: The best you can hope for by keeping the Cubs hitless for 6 2/3 innings is holding them to five runs.

And while everyone still acknowledged the severity of Schwarber’s injury, the Cubs had made them stop talking about a team from 31 years ago. Over those three days, there was too much greatness going on in the present to concentrate on the failures of the past. And that’s the best thing the Cubs can do to handle The Narrative when it crops up throughout the year.

Schwarber’s injury is a serious piece of adversity. And it showed that segments of the media are going to jump on any difficulty to connect this year’s team of great expectations to Cub failures from the past. It’s up to the current group to show that they’re different from the Cubs that all of us grew up with. And the only way to do that is to keep winning.

Lead photo courtesy Dennis Wierzbicki—USA Today Sports.