Hold your head high, Chicago.
This city has long been punching up, almost apologizing for itself as it jabs, but get your chin up; the Chicago Cubs are World Series champions.
That means every major sport has now claimed at least one title in most of our lifetimes—a Super Bowl, six NBA championships, three Stanley Cups, a World Series on the south side and, at last, another on the north side. This is a city heavy with bling, and it’s time for a little swagger.
This city is rich and vivacious, and as of tonight we begin a season when, for the first time, Cubs fans will experience baseball in the afterglow of a World Series championship. Perhaps they’ll even learn to lighten up a little and stop fretting the occasional series sweep, offensive slump, or June swoon. Perhaps the local media will stop wasting ink on fatalism or meaningless comparisons to past Cubs teams or the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Whatever the case, the organization is infused top-to-bottom with a drive that shrugs off slovenly self-congratulation. Now that there are finally laurels to rest on, they are going to keep punching instead. That’s the Cubs approach to the season before us. They have crossed just the first bridge to a dynasty, and there are more miles ahead. It’s what got them to the late-night hours of November 2, 2016, and what got them at last to AC000000.
Maybe the local newspapers and national press have long looked at the Cubs morbidly, but the team and the fans have always had a bit of romanticism. For the past six years, the organization has had a dichotomous easygoing focus and an open-book plan that required an acceptance that things would look very bleak at first.
And while so many have relished painting the organization with goats, black cats, and Bartman, they have all along missed the point. They’ve missed the real culture of the Cubs. They’ve missed it because the organization and the fans dictate the culture, and the culture of the Cubs has always somehow been one of optimism. Of getting up from the mat again and again.
It is still somehow Cubs-ian that, as defending champions, they’re opening on the road and against their once-greatest nemesis. The old paradigm stands up to take another swing, but it’s probably a feeble one anyway. It’s also still Cubs-ian that talk of winning consecutive World Series comes steeped in reminders of just how long it has been since that has happened. Reminders that carry a familiar tone of trepidation about decades and improbability.
But tell the Cubs more about improbability. About an absurdly small win expectancy in Game Four of the division series, about back-to-back shutouts before claiming the National League pennant, about three games to one, and about a tie game and a rain delay.
So in the new season, the Cubs are still the World Series favorites, both poetically and objectively. There are all of the things we know: the absurdly talented and young offensive core, the sterling rotation, the deep bullpen, the farm system still well-stocked to spring up another impact piece or two, the perspicacious manager, the still-vigorous front office, and the owner who shares the fan’s romanticism but is possessed of the means and the patience to make the franchise into what was once its antithesis.
And there are the things we can’t know, but still know enough to expect: players sometimes inexplicably slump, key pieces go down to injury, prospects disappoint and are forgotten, and front offices make bad trades.
But none of these carry the same weight of seasons like 1985, 2004, or even 2009. If the old Cubs context crumbled partially after 2015, it collapsed entirely after 2016.
Now that hand-wringing expectations for things to go wrong are the stuff of Cubs seasons past, this is the season for continuing to expect greatness, staying uncomfortable, and resisting the lull of complacency. And this is an organization seemingly constructed for just that. Jason Heyward might stand as a microcosm here; the precise content of his locker room speech only recently made known, but just weeks after rallying his teammates and parading down Lake Shore Drive, he moved to Arizona and started work on the next season. Like Heyward, this team started work on tonight and the upcoming weeks a long time ago, and now they’re ready to be unleashed.
So keep that head up nice and high, Chicago. This is the city that invented the skyscraper. This is the team that cemented the ethos of Theo Epstein. This is the fanbase that personified doggedness and devotion. This is the year that the dynasty begins, whether the next championship trophy comes this fall or another one in the near future. This is the year that the new banners fly. This is the year. It happened, and it’s still happening.
Lead photo courtesy Patrick Gorski—USA Today Sports