What more do we need to see from the Chicago Cubs?
What more can we learn about the best team in baseball?
If you’re not convinced now that this Cubs team is good enough to break the vex of 108 years and win the World Series, you’re going to miss the parade floats going down State Street.
Saturday night was another sign — another telling moment of what’s looming in the not-so-distant future — as the first-ever pinch-hit grand slam in postseason history lifted the Cubs to an 8-4 win over the Dodgers in Game 1 of the NLCS.
The Cubs are now three wins away from winning the team’s first pennant since 1945 and seven wins away from the team’s first World Series win since 1908.
That’s a long way to go, but given the events of the last two games, how can you not believe that fortune isn’t on the Cubs’ side?
They reached the NLCS with an incredible, improbable ninth-inning rally in San Francisco, erasing a three-run deficit and taking the lead with only three outs to play.
Saturday, they found themselves in a similar tough spot — after Chicago’s bats fell flat following Javier Baez’s steal of home in the second and the Dodgers tied the game in the top of the eighth.
How would the Cubs — a team for whom pressure is magnified in ways other teams can only imagine — respond to the distress?
How about one of the seminal moments in franchise history?
This team might be one of the best that’s ever played. The involuntary response to some of their incredible play is to chuckle. What else can you do but laugh?
Whether it’s one of their three ace starters, or elite relievers on the mound, they pitch with dominance and poise; the Cubs’ defense is jaw-dropping, stealing outs all over the diamond with a series of unimaginably difficult plays; and the bats — while somewhat quiet for the moment — can awake at any minute and create a landslide.
The Cubs have absurd talent and more depth than any team in the playoffs by a significant factor.
They can beat you in so many ways, it’s almost unfair.
The Cubs have been cutting it close as of late, but playing tight games — the contests that history has deemed the team’s kryptonite — can be viewed as a positive.
The Cubs aren't collapsing under the pressure, they're winning those close-call games, save for that extra-inning loss in Game 3 of the NLDS. If there’s any team in baseball that’s supposed to crumble under the pressure, it’s Chicago. Instead, the tighter the circumstances, the bigger the response has been. That’s a flip of the script that makes the impossible seem inevitable.
The baseball gods keep throwing major questions at the Cubs, seeing how they’ll respond. These are the questions that would trip up a lesser Chicago team, but so far, this Cubs squad is acing their tests.
This Cubs team is different — you don’t need to see anything more to know that.
But you should keep watching — and laughing — because you would be a fool to miss a single moment of this incredible run.
