Feb. 21--Spring training wasn't even officially underway yet. Kyle Schwarber simply had rolled into Arizona early, like so many of his Cubs teammates, hoping to get acclimated and looking to squeeze in some extra swings.
But if Chicago needed a reminder of the hype that's ahead this baseball season, the Cubs' stocky slugger did his part last week, swatting a batting practice home run that sailed so far out of the ballpark it spidered a car windshield in the parking lot.
We learned this, of course, because a fan, Peter Gesler, photographed the damage, slapped it on Instagram and now -- in addition to an insurance claim and a relationship with Safelite -- has a post that has been liked more than 14,000 times.
Later, Gesler wrote on Instagram that he was sitting behind home plate when Schwarber sent the baseball whistling through the desert and "saw the trajectory, heard the impact and thought 'Uh-oh.' It was a bomb and a dumb place to park."
On Friday, Schwarber shrugged off his newest legendary bomb.
"Don't park your car out there, I guess," he said. "I mean, what do you do? What do you say? It's just a home run. Happens to hit a car. Sorry."
No apologies necessary, Kyle. Just be forewarned, the cameras will be everywhere this season. The hype too.
We haven't even hit March and already Cubs fever is spreading so rapidly that the Center for Disease Control soon may need to issue a warning with symptoms, dangers and guidelines for coping.
A hundred victories this season? Why the heck not? Certainly seems within reach for a team with so much talent, so much cohesiveness and so much positive energy.
A World Series trophy, the franchise's first since 1908? It could happen. This year.
But in addition to the National League minefield that the Cubs will have to navigate to get back onto October's playoff stage -- we see you Giants, Mets, Pirates and Cardinals -- the team may face its biggest challenge in dealing with all this expectation and build-up.
Last season's success lends confidence plus experience under pressure. But even in a year in which they went 97-65, cruised past the Pirates in the wild-card game and later throttled the Cardinals to reach the NLCS, the Cubs weren't exactly a huge story until maybe early August when they became white hot and surged from five games above .500 to 22 above in the span of four weeks.
This year? The commotion already has welcomed the Cubs to Mesa. And now it's among manager Joe Maddon's chief responsibilities to regulate the circus, to keep the fun flowing and the daily goals in focus without allowing the excess attention to become an energy suck.
Everything these Cubs do will be engulfed in hyperbole. Every Jake Arrieta shutout, every ninth-inning triumph, every Kris Bryant slump and every four-game losing streak all will seem to mean more than they really do.
The euphoria will seem more intense, the stumbles more disastrous.
That's life on this pedestal, a character-testing reality check that will last for eight months.
As Schwarber's mid-February home run blast showed, the 2016 Cubs already have gone viral. It's their task now to find comfort in that space.
dwiederer@tribpub.com
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