The Problem With Being Preordained
The New York Times
June 7, 2008
By Doug Glanville
The retired Cubs outfielder revisits his former team’s epic...
It seemed that the gods were finally smiling on the Chicago Cubs. After coming from Florida with a 3-games-to-2 lead in the best-of-seven National League Championship Series, the odds were in our favor. Not only were we returning home to play the final two games of the series in front of the Wrigley Field faithful, but we had our two top guns pitching for us. Mark Prior and Kerry Wood had been dominant for the last three months of the season, and they were primed for these two final tests. More importantly, all we needed to do was win one of these games to propel us into the World Series.
It was 2003. After nearly a hundred years of World Series futility, we were finally knocking on the door to secure our first championship since 1908. For quite some time, a ubiquitous cloud of bad omens and curses had been used to explain the barren trophy case. Most notorious was the curse of the Billy Goat, bestowed on the organization by a defiant goat that was denied a seat at a Wrigley Field game. For all the theories out there to explain this never-ending streak, it wouldn’t be surprising to eventually find that King Tut was responsible for it all.
So we came back to town with a high level of confidence that it was our time. The city had waited a century for this moment and everything was telling us that we could not be misinformed.
During the last stretch of the season, we knocked out all of the other division foes in fine fashion, including the reigning champs, the St. Louis Cardinals. According to what was being broadcast across the country, we were America’s team. Why else would we be placed this close to glory but to win what was rightfully ours? We were due. The math was in our favor, and the idea that a cruel joke could only be played on one organization but for so long gave us power. We also had a good team, the right manager . . . and two of the best pitchers in baseball poised for the showdown.
Chicago was in a complete frenzy. I had never been part of a true entourage until this moment; our buses were escorted by police forces and sirens. Our last series had me hanging out in Los Angeles with John Cusack and a few other Hollywood stars who were Cub fans. At one game back in Chicago, I remember my brother sitting next to the actress Marg Helgenberger from the television show “CSI” and later saying that she had the bluest eyes he had ever seen in his life. We were everywhere.
I’d even had my 15 minutes of playoff fame, helping the team win Game 3 of the series with a pinch-hit triple. It was clear that every single player on the team was important, including a guy like me who came off the bench after sitting on it for three hours. With contributions coming from all sources — including the Chicago Police Department — it was obvious that we had been anointed.
The problem was, the Florida Marlins thought the same thing.
They had their own reasons for feeling that way. Their manager, stodgy, cigar-smoking Jack McKeon, had been brought in at mid-season to right a wrong ship, and as the most senior manager in the league had shown a lot of whippersnappers that he knew how to run a young team. The Marlins barreled their way to the wild card berth in the playoffs fueled by fire and brimstone.
So what happens when two forces — destined, tired and playing awfully good baseball — collide in Wrigley Field?
We felt, we’re the home team. And on paper, the scales were heavily tipped in our favor since, unlike the Marlins, we not only won our division outright but had the benefit of experienced players. The Marlins were a bunch of kids. Two reasons why our championship was inevitable.
Enter Game 6.
Mark Prior was cruising along with glove-popping momentum and stupefying mound presence. His body language oozed, “I am just the conduit of Cub destiny,” which told us not to worry, we were home, and we were in control.
With one out in the eighth Florida’s pesky second baseman Luis Castillo kept fouling off good pitches from Prior until he finally sliced one that, judging from its spin and trajectory, had a chance to come back into play. So our left fielder Moises Alou chased it down and jumped for it as a spectator — a Cubs fan named Steve Bartman — reached up to try to catch it. Bartman beat him to it and it was ruled a foul ball. This became known as “The Steve Bartman Incident.”
I was deep in the dugout, so I barely saw a thing from that angle, but I watched the replay from the locker room ad nauseam. Prior waited. Maybe too long, as Alou and eventually manager Dusty Baker argued for fan interference.
After Alou and Baker relented on their debate with the umpire, a “momentum changing” fog rolled in, the kind only San Francisco can brag about, and in a flash the wheels came off our campaign bus. With only five outs separating us from glory, we went from popping champagne to popping our eyes back in our heads from utter shock. A 3-0 lead in the eighth inning turned into an 8-3 blowout loss in a matter of minutes. The game was whisked away from our clutches; champagne would have to wait until tomorrow.
We told ourselves that “it’s just baseball.” I mean, after 1,700-plus professional games, I had seen a lot of strange losses, so in theory, this one just went into the Top 10 as the quickest change from total control to total chaos. Not to worry: we still had Kerry Wood in our back pocket for Game 7.
Also, we were the chosen team. It was still our time. It had to be.
We battled hard in Game 7, but we just could not get a lead. We seemed to be on our heels the entire game and finally the Marlins emerged on top to head to the World Series against the Yankees. Some of my teammates sat in a dugout trance, refusing to believe what they were seeing, as if certain there was an inning that somehow got skipped. I chose not to linger. It was too hard to watch the Marlins piling on top of one another in celebration.
I also understood that — despite the fact that we were sure that it was our year, our destiny, our time to finally break the Cubs’ cycle of despair — sometimes things outside our control run the show. But to be that close, and to be so sure that we had the touch of an angel defying devilish sabotage, made it that much harder to swallow. It was ours and now it was theirs and that made it wrong.
But once that scoreboard lit up the final score of the game, it was official, it was over, there were no heroics left, the rules of our game told us that the Marlins had more runs than we had when all was said and done. And hard as it was to feel like we had come so far and finally undone the curse of the Billy Goat (or the hand of Steve Bartman), we had to accept that it was just Florida’s time.
And all we had left was to graciously congratulate them on their victory.
Doug Glanville, who played nine years in the major leagues for the Cubs, Phillies and Rangers, is writing this guest column during the 2008 baseball season. Glanville served on the executive subcommittee of the Major League Baseball Players Association and is currently a consultant with Baseball Factory, a high-school player development program. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 with a degree in systems science and engineering.
New York Times 06/07/2008
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