No team has failed better over the last century but this extraordinary victory suggests the next World Series will not be far away for history’s glorious losers Baseball is a game of failures. A hitter with a .300 batting average, the traditional benchmark of a star player, fails seven times out of 10. Errors are given equal billing alongside runs and hits, a naked public accounting of imperfection consistent on scoreboards from Little League diamonds to major league stadiums. The game is a turn-based series of individual conflicts where mistakes are amplified. The difference between good and great, between winning and losing, exists in the management of the inevitable, incremental defeats that unlike other sports are not mere hazards of...
Will the Cubs end their famously long drought? On the other hand, will the Indians end their famously long drought? Surely the Cubs can’t be denied the championship. Going into the World Series, Chicago have the better starting rotation, the better lineup and the better closer. But does any of that matter? Especially when the manager in the other dugout has won two World Series and has been a master of manipulating match-ups throughout the postseason. Cleveland would be in a better position if they still had Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar, who had helped carry them to the American League Central title. Instead they must try to tame the Cubs with only two certainties in their rotation: Corey Kluber...
Yes, the NL Championship Series is not over yet, but we know how this ends. Another year, another disappointment – such is the life of a Dodger fanWhat is baseball without superstition? Rally caps, no-hitters that dare not speak their name until the seventh, and, of course, the dreaded postseason curse. For decades, the unholy trinity of baseball curses was the Cubs, Red Sox, and Indians. If you needed a shorthand for comic futility, you couldn’t go wrong with of those three hapless franchises. There’s a reason why Henry Rowengartner played for the Cubs after breaking his arm and magically developing an unhittable fastball in the movie Rookie of the Year; why the Cleveland Indians threatened to move to Miami...
We’ve seen teams go from worst-to-first in a single year before, but never an entire city. The success of both the Indians and Cavaliers is unprecedented“You know, these guys ain’t so fuckin’ bad.” It’s one of the greatest lines in American cinema (or at least one of the more memorable lines from the American sports comedy genre of the late 20th century). In 1989’s Major League, a Cleveland construction worker played by a young Neil Flynn declares that the local team is a lot better than he expected they would be. It’s a sentiment many are starting to feel about the real Indians – and Cleveland sports as a whole – 27 years since Rick Vaughn, Willie Hayes, Jake Taylor and Pedro...
Like a man whistling loudly to keep ghosts from the door, baseball’s Chicago Cubs are making nonchalant noises about their World Series hoodooWrigley Field is not your standard modern American sports facility, even though little could be more American than having your stadium named after a manufacturer of chewing gum. It is America’s Wimbledon, its Lord’s. It is the second oldest of the major league ballparks. There is a pervasive sense of history and a deep yearning that goes back 108 years, to the last time the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.Built on land originally occupied by a Catholic seminary and first named Weeghman Park after the original owner, the stadium was finally renamed in 1927, six years after...