NLCS Game 4: Curses! The Mets Sweep
It’s dark in Chicago right now. It’s especially dark at Wrigley Field, and it will remain that way until next spring. The Cubs lost to the Mets tonight by a score of 8-3 and are done for the season.
Despite their bright future, it will be a winter of discontent for the supposedly-cursed franchise. That’s always the case when you enter a league championship series with high expectations, only to fall short. It’s even worse when you’re unceremoniously swept.
The beat down was methodical and severe. To many, it was preordained. After all, these are the Cubs. As Steve Goodman sang in A Dying Cubs Fan’s Last Request, “You raise up a young boy’s hopes and then just crush ’em like so many paper beer cups. Year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year.”
But to be honest, that refrain has grown old. History and hexes had nothing to do with the sweep. They lost to a darn good team. In Game One, it was a Dark Night who beat the Cubs, not a black cat. In Game Two, it was a Met named Murphy who did the damage, not a goat named Murphy. Steve Bartman didn’t reach out and cause the run-scoring wild pitch that gave New York a lead they didn’t relinquish in Game 3. As for Game 4, Chicago hosts a Lebowski Fest and Lucas Duda’s nickname is The Big Lebowski. That’s ironic as hell, but it’s not a curse.
On the off chance you missed tonight’s game, Duda crushed the souls of Cubs fans with a three-run jack in the first inning. He then drilled a two-run double in the second to put the home team in a 6-0 hole.
The early onslaught that buried the Cubs was exactly what multiple Mets were looking for. Following Game 3, Michael Conforto told me his team “can’t afford to take anything off the throttle, because they’re very explosive and you don’t want to let them get anything started.” Tyler Clippard agreed, saying, “We have to keep our nose to the grindstone, because once a team starts to get a leg up on you, momentum can shift pretty quickly.”
Momentum was a foreign word for Joe Maddon’s team all week. Chicago never held a lead in the four games, largely because they didn’t have an answer for New York pitching. They certainly didn’t have one for Daniel Murphy. The Mets second baseman went an unreal 9 for 17, and homered in each game. Curse him if you want, Cubs fans, but he had an NLCS for the ages. Along with his teammates, he’s on his way to the World Series.
As for the team that calls Wrigley home, a “Let’s Go Cubbies” chant broke out as the Mets dogpiled on the mound. It was brief — much like the just-completed series — but it was heartfelt. These are, after all, the Cubs.
David Laurila grew up in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and now writes about baseball from his home in Cambridge, Mass. He authored the Prospectus Q&A series at Baseball Prospectus from December 2006-May 2011 before being claimed off waivers by FanGraphs. He can be followed on Twitter @DavidLaurilaQA.
God damn right
Let’s go mets!
@$#!!
Red Sox – Cubs WS in 2016.
It’s not the Goat. It’s not Batman.
The curse of the Cubs goes back to the Cubs’ Frank Chance using furtive methods to steal the 1908 pennant from the Giants by screwing poor Fred Merkle. They stole that pennant and the World Series. They have not won since. The Merkle curse has been in effect ever since.
The Cubs were playing the Giants at the Polo Grounds in a fan-crazy atmosphere of a very tight pennant race. Fred Merkle of the New York Giants, as a nineteen-year-old major leaguer getting a rare start, failed to advance and touch second following Al Bridwell’s hit as Moose McCormick scored the ‘winning’ run from third. On appeal, umpire Hank O’Day declared Merkle out, and the game was a tie. At the end of the season, the Cubs and Giants had to replay the game to decide the League championship. Uncharacteristically, the Cubs won. The dean of N.L. umps, Bill Klem, often said O’Day’s was the worst call he ever saw in 40 years of umpiring. But, then, he was an off-field friend of John McGraw, the manager who ‘lost’ a pennant because of O’Day’s call.
Frank Chance (of Tinker to Evers to Chance fame), player-manager of the Cubs, had to go get O’Day and his junior partner Bob Emslie from the umpire’s dressing room to come out and make the call. Johnny Evers was standing on the bag in the middle of a bedlam crowd of Giants fans with what he claimed was the game ball. O’Day rulled Merkle out and declared the game a tie. (Chance wanted a forfeit. He claimed the game should go on but could not because of the crowd…)
The rule requiring an advance to the next base by a forced runner had been on the books, but had not been enforced in this type of situation. With crowds pouring onto the field, players typically ran for the safety of the clubhouse.
In fact, Al Bridwell says that the exact same play happened to the Cubs a few weeks before the Giants game in Pittsburgh. And Hank O’Day was the PU then as well! On that day, he *denied* Johnny Evers’ appeal. I guess in the interim, he reconsidered.
The Giants appealed to the league president, Harry Pilliam, who took a week to decide that the run did not count, the game was a tie, and it would be replayed only if necessary. (Pillium subsequently committed suicide. The pressure applied to him by New York and Chicago alike have been said to have contributed to his act.)
Well you know by now that the extra game was necessay. The Polo Grounds. October 8, 1908. Mounted police and firemen were used to try to drive off the huge crowd that was trying to get in to see the game. Tens of thousands covered Coogan’s Bluff. They lined the elevated train tracks.
Jack Pfiester actually started for the Cubs, but he was rattled early and the Giants took a 1-0 lead in the first. Frank Chance put Three Fingers Mordecai Brown, winner of 29 games that year, and pitcher of 11 of the last 14 Cubs games in to relieve Pfiester, and he settled the team down. Brown had been subjected to six death threats before the game.
Christy Mathewson, winner of 37, pitched for the Giants, but the Cubs won 4-3 to take the pennant.
They then beat the Detroit Tigers in 5 games to win the World’s Series, and they have been cursed ever since.
The New York Evening Journal wrote, “The Cubs will be acknowledged as champions, but their title is tainted, and New York lovers of baseball will never acknowledge them as the true winners of the pennant.
My god, this is a gruesome write-up.
The Season isn’t over guys. It just has a case of plantar fasciitis.
Cub fans, we now return to normal broadcasting.Until next time,when we meet in the Outer Limits.
I just want to say as a Mets fan, my hat is off to the Cubs fans. Some of the best opposing fans I’ve ever seen. Stayed until the last out of the last game, cheering for their team all the way. Nothing but respect for you guys. Your team has a very bright future.
Thanks! Good luck to you guys in the WS… your pitching has a bright future as well.
This was fun – let’s do it again, same time next year?
Incorrect. Cubs are cursed.