Cubs World Series shirts Cubs vs Indians World Series Game 7 Highlights. Cubs win the World Series. Throughout more than a century of baseball in America, where teams have risen to championship heights and fallen to miserable lows several times over, and where cities have lost teams, gained them and lost them again, there was always the Chicago Cubs and their futility.
Sometimes the Cubs were good. More often they were just bad. But since 1908, they had not done what so many other teams had, not even through fluke or plain luck.
The United States fought two world wars, the Soviet Union grew to dominance and then imploded, diseases were wiped off the earth and technology took us from newfangled automobiles to moon rockets and beyond — and still the Cubs could not win a World Series.
Their fans trudged in and out of Wrigley Field thousands of times over the years and came to believe the team was cursed.
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But 2016 was the 108th year after their last title, and a baseball is sewn together with 108 stitches. This had to be the year.
It was.
On Wednesday night the Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians, 8-7, in a Game 7 for the ages. With that victory — yes, the following words are really true — the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.
But it just couldn’t come easy, couldn’t be won without extra drama. The Cubs carried a 6-3 lead into the eighth inning, six outs away from a cathartic victory. But a double and a two-run home run by the Indians wiped out that lead and tied the game, and the deadlock held through the ninth inning.
Then the rain came. Of course. The top of the 10th inning was delayed for about 15 minutes by a deluge. But once it let up, the Cubs poured it on in the 10th inning, scoring 2 runs to provide the cushion they needed.
It is their third title in the World Series, a competition that was introduced in 1903, but this may be the sweetest and hardest-earned championship in the history of American sports. Making it even more sweet was that the Cubs trailed in the series by three games to one.
Upon the final out the players jumped and celebrated on the diamond while thousands of visiting Cubs fans screamed joyfully in the stands. Back in Chicago, where fans in the North Side of Chicago have waited generations for this day, revelers poured into the streets for party that will probably last days.
In Cleveland, a city with its own hard-luck sports history, the wait continues. The Indians have not won the World Series since 1948, and they now own the longest drought in baseball without a title. At least the Cleveland Cavaliers, many of whom were in attendance Wednesday at Progressive Field, broke Cleveland’s 52-year span without a major professional sports title by winning the N.B.A. championship in June.
For the Cubs, whose long history is riddled with the mythology of billy goat curses, black cats and a fan who was vilified for interfering with a foul ball, theirs is now a history of winning, and their identity changes forever.
Theo Epstein knows all about that. He is the Cubs’ top baseball decision-maker, the man who put together a team and an ethos capable of dashing history’s long reach.
Prior to joining the Cubs, Epstein was the general manager of the Boston Red Sox in 2004, when that once-accursed franchise won its first World Series in 86 years. Red Sox and Cubs fans were the longest suffering at the time, and Epstein has given closure to both.
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