Strange days have found us. Strange days have tracked us down.
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Thank you, Jim Morrison, a little before the time of these Cubs. Much before, really. These guys are too young to remember the Doors, or Bon Jovi or Madonna, never mind Scott Joplin, all the rage the last time …
There we go again. The only way to stop this looking back, to keep that inevitable factoid from worming its way to the front of any consideration of the Cubs, is to survive this next adventure against the Mets and then against whichever outpost the American League coughs up, foreign or domestic.
Here’s what’s strange. The Cubs should do it. The Cubs are expected to do it. The smart money says they’ll do it. Not because they were the first to get to baseball’s Final Four but because of how they got there, cocksure and laughing all the way.
The Cubs could borrow an old Mets slogan, “Baseball like it oughta be,” from back, again, before these Cubs were born, back when the Mets were drubbing the Cubs without thought, before the Mets reverted to their original function as a punch line.
The Mets still use that slogan, I guess, so what of the Cubs? Baseball like we want it to be? Baseball like it hasn’t been?
Stranger yet is that the Cubs have become the bullies, the street toughs who walk where they want, the thug who doesn’t have to ask for your lunch money, you just give it to him.
Yeah. The Cubs. Those sweet, cuddly little creatures who bring joy to shut-ins and children, Pooh and Paddington and Panda, treating their betters like pull toys, peeling away a century of scar tissue with wooden clubs that blast baseballs onto the perches of eagles, making the world wonder, whatever happened to Gentle Ben?
Excuse that last reference. Those of us who were around before emojis and gluten are a little rusty in millennial-speak.
It gets no stranger than enclosing a baseball in protective plastic to provide tangible and tactile proof of grand heroics, as if it would not be believed otherwise. The Kyle Schwarber memorial home run ball is there, at least for now, in its honored perch atop the right-field video screen to represent what the Bartman ball could not, as handy a curse breaker as ever plopped out of the Chicago sky.
How wretched it would be if that is the moment to be remembered, that it will get no better than that. Too much belief has been created to waste on symbols.
Seven games, at the max, away from the World Series. The Cubs have been there before. Closer than seven, in fact. But not with the assurance of this bunch of kids who got ready faster than they were asked to.
Had the Mets not had some share of glory during the long, dark times of the Cubs, this could be their story, as much a surprise to be where they are as the Cubs. Or maybe a tale told of the Blue Jays, not seen since the last century, or even the Royals, the prairie poor souls until just recently. Those two AL teams messed with Texas and left Texas on a gurney.
But this has the feel of Cubs all over it, as if the hard work already has been done, whipping the only two teams with better records.
Baseball is still a few strange days from simple conclusions and lazy summers, now as urgent and earnest as games with clocks and goal lines, where all the energy is piled up at the end, the concoction of bookkeepers and merchandisers. The Madness of March is replicated as the Awe of October or some such thing.
The Cubs can help baseball steal back autumn from football, certainly so in Chicago, where football offers the familiar ache of despair and basketball and hockey can tiptoe down their long pathway to spring without notice.
Strange it is that reassurances are being made that the Cubs can do it again before they have done it once.
Strange days indeed. Most peculiar, mama.
That’s John Lennon, not that I expect any of these Cubs to know who he was.
Bernie Lincicome is a special contributor to the baiduhai.