The Chris Moeller Archives

"It's not as easy as it looks"

The arthouse films of Ingmar Bergman and Bernardo Bertolucci are subject to frequent misinterpretation, but it’s possible that the most misunderstood flick of all-time is Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future II. This particular movie has been very much in the news this month because today, 10/21/15, marks the one 30 years into the future that Michael J. Fox’s character travels in the high-grossing sequel to 1985’s Back to the Future.

The second film in the trilogy, released in 1989, predicted that the Chicago Cubs would break their World Series championship drought, which stretches back to 1908, on that exact date. As fortune would have it, the Cubs have been playing for a trip to the World Series this month, reaching the National League Championship Series, but being swept out on the precise date tonight by the New York Mets. The movie had been treated as a harbinger of good hoodoo by championship and pennant-starved Cubs fans, thinking that this call from an earlier generation portends an end to the team's generations of unique suffering.

Here’s what those fans don’t get. It was all a practical joke at their expense. Zemeckis’ writing partner on BTTF II was Bob Gale, a native of the St. Louis suburb of University City and a Cardinals fan. If there was any successful foreshadowing at all, it was that Gale would see the Cubs beating the Cardinals in a playoff series-- an on-field development that was forced to transpire in order to allow the Cubs postseason to stretch this year to October 21st. [Let’s not forget the part the Cardinals played in the Cubs destruction, by the way. The Mets won seven fewer games than the Cubs (90 to 97) during the regular season but enjoyed home field advantage against them in the NLCS because the Cards (100) beat the Cubs in the Central Division.] Back to the Future was, after all, a comedy, and the author certainly knew that his prognostication was as outlandish a concept as a hovering skateboard.

Now to the series itself. Game 3 of the NLCS at Wrigley was the Billy Goat’s magnum opus, the most Bartman-like of Chicago postseason games since the first and last public appearance of Steve Bartman 12 years ago. In a 2-2 game in the 6th inning last night, the go-ahead run for the Mets scored on a two-out, third-strike wild pitch to Michael Conforto. In describing his failure to block the pitch after the game, Cubs catcher Miguel Montero summarized his dereliction of duty, along with 180 years of baseball, with his comment, “It’s not as easy as it looks.”

On the play that followed, Cubs outfielder Jorge Soler played a single into a ground rule double by face-planting Wrigley’s lovingly-manicured lawn and allowing the ball to bounce to the wall and get lost in Bill Veeck’s famous vines. And isn’t the ivy lovely in autumn? Incidentally, do you suppose the Cubs are planning to leave that ball in the leaves and encase it beneath Plexiglass like they did with Kyle Schwarber’s home run ball off the scoreboard against Kevin Siegrist and the Cardinals? The Cubs haven’t won a game since they pulled that stunt.

Now down a run in the 7th, and with Mets standing on first and third, a fly ball was lifted to left field. The play was routine, and was headed to a spot a good 50 feet away from any would-be-Bartmans, as the slugger Schwarber stood beneath it. The man has some eye- and ear-catching experience in high school show choir, and he can sock the baseball a mile with a stick, but alas, nobody ever taught the man how to catch a ball. In this instance, it caromed off his glove and landed at his feet as an insurance run scampered safely home for the New Yorkers. (A criminally-merciful scorer ruled this a hit.) In a less celebrated action, Schwarber then threw to the wrong base, allowing the trail runner to move to third, and subsequently score on a ground ball out that followed as Schwarber shouted expletives into the inside of his glove. Presumably it caught those.

In retrospect, Joe Maddon’s decision to assign Schwarber to the field for any extended period of time in the postseason was like putting it on the proverbial tee for the baseball gods. (He Schwarbered two more fly balls tonight in Game 4.) It echoed John McNamara’s decision 29 years ago to leave the hobbled Bill Buckner in the field in the 9th inning of a clinching World Series game for Boston. This would be a great name for a horror film about American League-style players imprisoned under National League rules-- “The Ball Will Find You.”

Cubs fans will deny being torn up over this season-ending defeat. The team has young players they say will allow them to “compete for the next decade.” Of course, that’s what they said in 1984 when Sandberg, Dernier, Moreland, and Durham were young bulls; in 1989, when Jerome Walton and Dwight Smith finished first and third in the Rookie of the Year voting; and in 2003, when Mark Prior and Kerry Wood were baby aces.  

This time it’s different, they say, because they have Maddon at the helm, largely considered baseball’s most relaxed and “coolest” manager, he of the zoo animal menageries before the game and the charter flight costume parties after. But remember the Cubs have already tried a “cool” boss in an attempt to end their suffering. Maddon’s not even close to matching the general coolness of Dusty Baker, who invented the high five as a player in the 1970s and once smoked pot with Jimi Hendrix. As skipper of the Cubs, however, Baker is linked in history really only to the early flame-outs of Prior and Wood, and, of course, to Mr. Bartman.

The Cubs still haven't won a championship since a time-- seriously-- when Geronimo, chief of the Apaches, was still living. Their pitching rotation still has three big holes in it, and since the days of top five draft picks appear to be gone for a while, those holes would have to be filled with nine-figure free agent contracts and the loss of high-end compensation draft picks. As the Cubs and their fans have trained us to do, I’ll “wait ‘till next year” to see what there is to see, but for 2016 and seasons beyond, if the Cubs hope to win it all now, they’ll be defying even the imaginations of Hollywood scriptwriters.

posted by CM @ 10:41 PM