It's the End of the World As We Know It

[Forever Fulham]

Just a silly ramble.  To those of you unfamiliar with North American sports outside of round football, the Chicago Cubs have been the one major league baseball team that for years was considered cursed.  No World Series (hah, typical overreach, that.  A couple of Canadian franchises does not a "World" series make, but I digress) for ever and ever. And the Cubs were one of the original teams in the league.   But not only are the much maligned Cubs in the World Series this year, they have come back from a best of 7 series 1-3 deficit against the improbable Cleveland Indians to tie the series up last night. 3-3.  Final game in Cleveland. 

You know Chicago is a big city.  City of Big Shoulders.  The Windy City.  If you could ascribe a gender to Chicago, you'd reflexively say 'male'.  Just because.   There's a joke that goes, "You know how many Chicagoans it takes to screw on a lightbulb?  "No.  How many?" 
"Six.  You got a problem with that?" (said menacingly)    Anyway, grown men are chewing their nails to the nub in Chicago over this series.  This is rare air time.   About 7-10 years ago, the Cubs made the playoffs and were looking pretty good.  They seemed to be on a roll.  Until a long fly ball hit deep enough to be a home run, but possibly low enough to be caught by the Cubs outfielder was caught by a certain fan in the stands.  The outfielder thought the fan had obstructed his clear opportunity to catch the ball, end the inning, with the team on its way to likely advance to the next round of the playoffs.  This has been an issue of much debate over the years.  Could he have caught it but for the fan's actions.  Pick your side.  It doesn't matter.  Damage to psyche done.  The outfielder's face captured on screen, indelibly etched in the viewers' minds:  Disbelief.  As if he was silently shouting, You're a Cubs fan?  What have you done?  How could you...  Everyone who saw that moment (and the news showed it over and over again) felt what that outfielder must have felt.  Shock. Disgust.  A sense of betrayal (if you were a Cubs fan... and at that moment, everyone felt a kinship).  You don't want to know what they did to that baseball. 

So when the Cubs lost Game 1 of the World Series in Cleveland, fans kept their calm.   OK now.  Settle down.  It's our time.  Game two: Cubs win.   Normalcy returns.  Fingernails start to grow back.  Then Cleveland won Games 3 and 4, taking a 3-1 games lead into the best of 7 series.  Full freakout mode. Like a Fulham team that couldn't score for trying, Chicago's bats went silent.  The great hitting team couldn't produce hits.  I don't recall if any World Series has been won by a team down 3 games to 1.   Perhaps it's happened.  Maybe.  Once.  Don't know.  I don't watch baseball anymore.  Not for decades.  Bores me.  But then Chicago won the 5th game.  then the 6th.  Forcing a final Game 7.   The camera would regularly sweep the stands for fan reactions.  Crying.  Praying.  Clenched fists.  Screwed up faces.  Some couldn't bear to look.  They stared at their feet.  What a display of range of emotion.  Poor long suffering fans. These are the real fans.  The ones who followed their team since childhood, whose parents were fans.  And they always underperformed.  My dad spent some early years in his youth in Chicago.  He never spoke about the Cubs or ever declared his affinity for them.  But I remember him sitting at the kitchen table with the newspaper in the morning, before he left for work.  I could see his finger slowly tracing down the Box Scores in the Sports section of the paper and linger on the Cubs line.  Never a word about it.  Just look and move on.  One of the most storied fields, Wrigley (the gum maker), in the world.  One of the very few original stadiums left.  Where am I going with all this you wonder?  What could it possibly have to do with Fulham?   This is McBride's childhood team.  Like so many Illinois natives, he's hoping the curse will finally break.  So this is a shout out for Brian McBride (and my dad).  Go Cubs!



                     Mcbride headshot.jpg

[H4usuallysitting]

I have no idea what any of the above means......

[Snibbo]

I thought this was going to be about president Trump ;-)

[tslyon]

Go Cubbies!!!!  Fly the W.

Thanks for the football interlude...

Cheers,

Steve

[Ichabod Magoo]

Chicago is a great city but ... the murders and politicians scare the hell out of me.

[tslyon]

But the baseball is amazing!!!!  Congrats Cubs!!!!

[VicHalomsLovechild]

We'll I hope they do it for Brian McBride, your dad and you. If it comes off you'll have to teach them the "We won it one time" chant

[Vinnieffc]

Baseball is right up there with darts and tiddlywinks as a sport. Actually any American sport is rubbish. What's the point of basketball ? And American football ? I used to be a fan (Pittsburgh Steelers during the Franco Harris days) and it's taken me this long (early 50's) to realise that's rubbish as well. Not wishing to be argumentative with our US cousins but please feel free to convert me that these sports are irrelevant. Cheers.

[toshes mate]

That is one great OP especially since the outcome was the one all sports lovers love to love....

It ain't over until the fat lady sings....

[Forever Fulham]

Well, that was cathartic! The Cubs finally did it.  The Curse of the Goat dead and buried.  Maybe now the earth will stop getting warmer.  No one will smoke any more.  Trump will just be a bad dream I had after eating at that questionable Mexican restaurant.     Anyway, thank you for your patience.  I now return to our regular viewing.  Cubs win the Series.  Unbelievable. 

[Rhys Lightning 63]

If ever you need a pick me up, just go on Youtube and look at the fan videos of:

A) the crowd outside Wrigley Field last night
B) Fans reacting to the final out

Will genuinely bring tears of happiness to your eyes

[Logicalman]

Congrats to the Cubs.

We managed to stay up until the bottom of the ninth, and then the rain covers came out and we went to kip. Woke this morning to find they finally clinched it around 1 AM.

To put this into true perspective, the wife is a Cubs fan (born and bred) and she is also a Fulham fan. She can identify more with Fulham as a team because she is a Cubs fan, so winning the WS last night  would be the equivalent of Fulham winning the FA Cup, simple as that.

The name's origins are disputed, but often derided as being the usual over-reach of US sports in their belief that they are the best in the world. Perhaps so, perhaps not. Every country has it's own favorite sports, and with the size of the US economy having their own sets of sports (Basketball, Football, Baseball - and perhaps even add Ice Hockey into that) is more natural than one might think. The drawback is that the majority of these are confined in the main just to NA, and that reduces the opportunities for other countries to compete, but then again, American sports are set up totally different to that of truly World-played games, perhaps the greatest of these is the closed franchise-driven leagues.

Each to their own though, real footie is making headway into NA more than before with many grassroots organisations springing up and the steady influx of those from countries where it is the main sport, and many Americans are beginning to question both the format of their own sports and the intrusion of commercialism in those sports (one of the reasons I still cannot sit through a Super Bowl).

As for darts? Well it is an old sport that pre-dates footie, and is played by just as many into adulthood, and with the influx of soft-tip darts into the world, we see money again influencing another sport unfortunately.

[Holders]

Chicago twinned with Leicester?

[Supermitch]

I had a week or so in Chicago 3 years ago, great city.  Whilst there we did a tour of Wrigley Field, this is the second oldest ball park.  Lots of character, a bit like a cross between Craven Cottage and Wimbledon (the tennis, not the football), although without the "prawn sandwich" attitude at the LTA.

Got the stories about the curse as a result of someone with their goat being thrown out.  Really pleased that has been broken.  When we were there the Blackhawks had just won the Ice Hockey championship or whatever it's called and the city was really celebrating that (imagine London post 2005 Ashes), expect more of the same for the Cubs  082.gif

[jarv]

WORLD champions, yes I believe the series was named after a sponsor which was a newspaper. I cant remember the actual name...world news, daily world, world today?

[H4usuallysitting]

American football - a 60 minute game, that can last up to 4 hours

[Logicalman]

WORLD champions, yes I believe the series was named after a sponsor which was a newspaper. I cant remember the actual name...world news, daily world, world today?

It was supposed to have been the New York World Newspaper that ceased production circa 1930. This naming, apparently, was down to the headlines of the times claiming it to be a World Series, but there is little evidence that the newspaper was the original sponsor or the World Series was named after it: https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-York-World

[Logicalman]

American football - a 60 minute game, that can last up to 4 hours

you mean a 60-minute game in which the ball is in play for about 15 minutes and lasts up to 4 hours, don't you?  :005:

[Ichabod Magoo]

Baseball is right up there with darts and tiddlywinks as a sport. Actually any American sport is rubbish. What's the point of basketball ? And American football ? I used to be a fan (Pittsburgh Steelers during the Franco Harris days) and it's taken me this long (early 50's) to realise that's rubbish as well. Not wishing to be argumentative with our US cousins but please feel free to convert me that these sports are irrelevant. Cheers.

No need to convert you to liking anything.  Some people in the UK hate football and a few in Scotland and Ireland hate golf.  To each his own.

[Ichabod Magoo]

American football - a 60 minute game, that can last up to 4 hours

you mean a 60-minute game in which the ball is in play for about 15 minutes and lasts up to 4 hours, don't you?  :005:

I think you are over-exaggerating.  I believe it's closer to 18 minutes over 3 1/2 hours.   :dft011: