The Chicago Cubs are eliminated from the playoffs. Whew! That was a close call! They made it all the way to the National League Championship Series, but were finally vanquished by the New York Mets. Out of respect to Cubs fans, please keep your celebrating to a minimum.
Wait, you weren’t rooting for the Cubs, were you? It’s natural to pull for a team looking to end a long title drought, of course. But the Cubs aren’t just any team. No, the Cubs are more than a team. The Cubs-as-losers is a fundamental part of American sport. The Cubs-as-losers is as baseball as peanuts and Cracker Jack. (In fact, more so since some teams have taken steps to ban peanuts due to allergies.) Once the Cubs win a World Series, if that fateful day should ever come, I ... I don’t even know what we would have left. It’s too terrible to even imagine.
Everything else in sports has changed since 1908. Talk sports with your father or your grandfather or your great-grandfather (if he’s still alive) and you’ll hear all about how nothing is the same and that things were better, or at least the very least different, in the old days. Only the Cubs losing has endured. Only the Cubs losing has bridged generations. There are maybe a few dozen people still left in the United States who were alive in 1908 for the last Cubs title. For everyone else in America, more than 300m people, you could start a real conversation by saying: “Tell me how bad the Cubs were back in your day.” What other topic is like that? Polio? That’s been eradicated since the 1950s. The Cubs were into their sixth decade of losing by then and onto their seventh since. The Cubs-as-losers is a universal language. Once that is taken away, are we left with anything more than blank stares, awkward silence and the end of the only common thread that has endured since the beginning of modern American sport? If I had a vote, I’d say “No.” (Not Fun Fact: Women couldn’t vote in America the last time the Cubs won the Series.)
Think of five things that define the American sports experience. The Cubs-as-losers has to be on every list, no? I have to struggle to come up with even four things that have existed for 100-plus years that I’d put above it.
- A ball is common to most sports.
- Running fast helps.
- Being strong helps.
- Jumping high helps.
- The Cubs always lose.
And that’s a stretch to have that fact all the way down at five. The Cubs losing is at least in there right behind the inclusion of balls, is it not? The other three – running, jumping and strength – you can take or leave, especially in baseball. I mean, the Cubs just got eliminated by a team that features Bartolo Colon.
If you had to explain baseball to a child or someone who knows nothing of the sport, you’d mention the Cubs’ World Series drought pretty early on. Telling the story of the Cubs is a heck of a lot easier than explaining the in-the-area play or why people playing a sport are wearing leather belts and shirts with buttons. Imagine raising a child in a post-Cubs title America. The thing could never understood the country you grew up in.
Some might argue that the Cubs winning would not shake the very foundation of sports. The Red Sox won a World Series in 2004 (and again in 2007 and 2013), did they not? The world has kept spinning.
Indeed it has. But Boston’s World Series title drought is nothing compared to what the Cubs have racked up. The Red Sox went 86 years without a title. That’s a long time, but it’s not Cubs long. In the 86th year of the Cubs drought, we were only to 1994. Mark Prior and Kerry Wood hadn’t even happened yet. Steve Bartman was a 16-year-old Cubs fan with his whole life ahead of him. Kyle Schwarber was a baby. Believe it or not, in 1994 many sports fans had a soft spot in their heart for the Red Sox and Red Sox fans. They wanted them to win. Indeed, 1994 was a very long time ago.
The Cubs title drought is the only one that matters. It always has been. Who has the second-longest existing drought in baseball? I don’t know and I don’t care. When Back to the Future Part II tried to come up with the most absurd sports story to throw up on a futuristic hologram, they went with the Cubs winning a World Series. They used the Cubs. In a movie that came out 26 years ago. A movie whose biggest whiff on predicting the future isn’t our lack of flying cars or hover-boards, but in forecasting a Cubs title. They used the Cubs. Not the Red Sox. Not the Toronto Maple Leafs. Not the Sacramento Kings. Not the Browns or the Eagles or the Lions for not winning a Super Bowl. The Super Bowl, by the way – that most American of mega-events – has existed for less than half the time as the Cubs title-less streak. In fact, the release of Back to the Future II is closer in history to Super Bowl I than it is to the 2015 NLCS.
It’s the Cubs. It has always been the Cubs. Before television, before most Americans had a car or knew what a plane was, there was the Cubs losing. The Cubs losing is as American as mom and apple pie. It’s the one thing that has endured. If we were ever to lose them losing, we could face a dystopia far beyond what Back to the Future II ever foretold.
Let’s all say a thank you to the Mets for beating the Cubs. Let’s all say a thank you to the Mets for saving America.
