The World Series this year feels a little like Noah’s Ark, or John Woo’s Face Off—lots of stuff in twos. Like Theo and Terry. The Chicago Cubs president of baseball operations Theo Epstein built the long suffering NL franchise into a winner, just like he did with the Boston Red Sox, which won the 2004 and 2007 World Series under Terry Francona, who will be in the opposing dugout Tuesday night filling out the lineup card for the Cleveland Indians.
There are two young star infielders, Indians shortstop Francisco Lindor and Cubs second baseman Javier Baez, who were both raised in Puerto Rico, played against each other in high school in Florida, and were selected with consecutive picks in the first round of the 2011 amateur draft.
Indians left-handed reliever Andrew Miller was a bullpen mate of Cubs left-handed closer Aroldis Chapman in the Bronx before the Yankees dealt them for prospects. (Yankees fans will be happy to hear that Gleyber Torres, who came over in the Chapman deal, was just named Arizona Fall League player of the week.)
But the big parallel is that both of these franchises have a long history of losing that nearly predates The Great Flood. The Cubs last won the crown in 1908, beating the Detroit Tigers 4 games to 1, and the Indians took it in 1948, handling the Boston Braves—yes, Boston Braves—4 games to 2. A lot has happened since 1908. Like two world wars.
In 1948, Elvis had just hit puberty.
There are lots of fun features in the papers about what the world, America, and baseball looked like before the advent of electric light and the good people of Massachusetts stopped burning witches at Fenway Park. Did you know that since the Cubs last won, the club has had 58 managers, including all three members of the famous infield trio of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance? Bob Hope used to own a small stake in the Indians—remember when he showed up on I Love Lucy and the incorrigible ginger comedienne dressed in the Tribe’s flannels? Thanks for the memories!
Back to the present. I’m partial to infielders, of course, but Lindor and Baez are especially amazing. Here’s a video of Baez’s defensive highlights from the 2016 season—make sure you check out the one where he makes no attempt to turn back to the infield to catch a pop-up but positions himself under it with his back to home plate. And here are the Lindor highlights—watch him pick up the ball in the hole and make a throw on the move. He’s already established himself in the same line as Ozzie Smith, Omar Vizquel, and nearly, but not quite yet, the man himself, Dr. Hole, the paradigm of all great defensive shortstops, Mark “the Blade” Belanger.” But Lindor has a lot of pop in his bat with 15 home runs and 78 RBI for the season.
Lindor and Baez are friends, too. They played against each other in what is now a legendary 2011 prep game that drew more than 150 major league scouts and other organized baseball executives. “It was a special night,” said Tom McNamara, then the Mariners scouting director, of the February 2011 match-up, as Joel Sherman reported in Sunday’s New York Post. “We go to hundreds and hundreds of games. That one I remember.”
“It wasn’t so much a game,” remembers Tim Layden, Lindor’s high school coach. “It was a coronation for the two of them that spring.”
“That was the biggest stage both of them were going to play in that year,” said Ray Montgomery, then the Diamondbacks scouting director. “And they both performed, and both did all they can do to impress.”
A few months later, Lindor was selected by the Indians with the eighth overall pick in the amateur draft, and Baez went to the Cubs with the next selection. That was a year before Epstein took over the Cubs, when there was concern that Chicago’s National League franchise was too big a rock for anyone to keep pushing up the hill.
“When he took the Cubs job,” ESPN’s Tim Keown wrote in 2014, “Epstein predicted that everyone would love him at the beginning but that by year three or four, affection would turn to expectation. People would start to wonder when—or if—his magic would be visible above the surface. The third year, this year, would come with the impatient finger-drumming of a fan base eager to see results in Wrigley, not Class-A Kane County.”
This is Epstein’s fifth year, and the Cubs go into the Series with the best record in baseball, 103-58. They have speed with Baez and shortstop Addison Russell, and power coming from third baseman Kris Bryant and first baseman Anthony Rizzo. The pitching staff led the league in shutouts and earned run average, with Cy Young candidate Kyle Hendricks in the starting rotation, and Aroldis Chapman coming out the bullpen as one of the game’s top closers and its hardest thrower. Chapman’s fastball, topping out around 105 MPH, ranks number one in a Fangraphs feature about the 2016 World Series’ 10 nastiest pitches.
The fourth-nastiest one belongs to Indians closer Andrew Miller: his slider. Miller and Chapman were with the Yankees till late in the summer, and the success of their new clubs is evidence of Chicago’s and Cleveland’s acumen—without their big left-handers, they might not be playing for the title.
For some weird reason the Cubs are sentimental favorites, as if they deserve credit for failing this year to put a mediocre team in the field as they have for over a century. You’d think that with players like Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Fergie Jenkins, Lee Smith (no relation…), Andre Dawson, and Ryne Sandberg, to name a few, they might have won a Series just by chance, or by the inertia of every other club, but they’ve been an extraordinary model of consistency. And now we’re supposed to celebrate?
Cleveland sports fans have had a much better year than anyone deserves. The Cavaliers won the NBA crown, the Indians are in the Series—and Johnny Manziel was released from the Browns! The Tribe is going in without one of its top starters, Carlos Carrasco, and number-two starter Danny Salazar is ready but tender, not having pitched in a real game since September. The Indians ace is right-hander Corey Kluber, who gets the
nod Tuesday night in Cleveland against Cubs southpaw, and postseason veteran, Jon Lester.
For the Tribe to hold off the Cubs bats over the course of a best-of-seven game series, they’ll need right-hander Trevor Bauer, tentatively scheduled to start game two, to recover fully from an injury to his hand sustained while repairing a drone. (Yes, really.) The mechanical engineering student from UCLA told the Wall Street Journal how he got hooked. Bauer relayed that “in 2013, he saw a video of drones racing, and it reminded him of one of his favorite scenes in Star Wars on the planet Endor, where Luke and Leia Skywalker use speeders to escape stormtroopers in a forest.”
Kind of like these two clubs have built themselves from scratch—and now find themselves four wins from a championship.
