CHICAGO -- Hours before the Chicago Cubs outslugged the St. Louis Cardinals to an 8-6 win and took a 2-1 lead in the National League Division Series, Cubs fan Eddie Vedder was standing along the wall behind home plate, a smile from first base to third, taking in a sun-swept day that was full of possibility.
Needless to say, Vedder, like every Cubs fan, is in a giggly kind of love with this team that won 97 games in the regular season and shows no signs of stopping now.
His band, Pearl Jam, has a South American tour slated to start at the beginning of November, and he has to leave at the end of October, he said, right when the World Series begins. It is the last such fall tour he will schedule for the next “five to seven” years. Yes, even general manager Theo Epstein’s rock-and-roll confidante thought the Cubs were a year away from this kind of opportunity.
Years ago, Vedder wrote his Cubby ballad, “(Someday We’ll Go) All the Way.” Here we are in the second week of October, and the Cubs look ready to send him back to the studio.
Not to crown this team anything quite yet, especially with Jason Hammel and a cast of relievers expected to throw in Game 4 on Tuesday, but with the wind blowing out on Monday night, the Cubs sure looked like world-beaters in their first home playoff game since 2008. For the first time since Oct. 8, 2003, they won a playoff game at Wrigley Field, where the crowd was thirsty for more than Budweiser.
"It was like the fans were in on every single pitch," Cubs catcher Miguel Montero said.
Playoff ghosts were exorcised with a flurry of Cubs home runs, six in all, into a swirling wind that could seemingly carry this team back to the National League Championship Series.
Wind-aided homers happen here, but it was un-Cublike, as we say around these parts, for them to win a playoff game when ace Jake Arrieta looked like a human being for the first time in months.
If you dabble in Cubs mysticism, it seemed almost fated that Arrieta would struggle now, of all times. Few thought Arrieta would throw another complete game, but certainly no one predicted he would last only 5 2/3 innings.
“This guy has been on such an incredible roll, it just had to come to an end at some point in that regard,” Cubs manager Joe Maddon said.
But Arrieta still struck out nine and did enough to win. It helped that the top six hitters in the Cubs' order homered, setting a major league playoff record.
Three of the Cubs’ four starting rookies went deep on a night when the Cubs honored their scouts: Kyle Schwarber, Kris Bryant and Jorge Soler. They were the second home runs of the postseason for Schwarber and Soler.
Starlin Castro and Anthony Rizzo, the veterans of the rebuild, hit their first playoff homers, and veteran Dexter Fowler hit his second homer of the postseason, an insurance shot in the eighth inning.
Arrieta gave up four runs on five hits and two walks. After sitting for a long time as the Cubs scored three runs in the bottom of the fifth, he gave up a two-run homer to Jason Heyward in the sixth and left after hitting Brandon Moss. The Cubs led 5-4 at the time.
But certain doom was avoided as the Cubs added two more runs on Soler’s homer to left-center field in the bottom of the inning. The next four Cubs relievers combined to pitch 2 1/3 scoreless innings, before Cubs closer Hector Rondon gave up a two-run homer in the ninth.
“Seeing the ball fly out of the yard as many times as it did was just incredible,” Arrieta said. “The atmosphere, the fans were kind of thriving off that. It’s nice for our offense to be able to do that, get some confidence going into tomorrow.
“But yeah, I had to battle a little bit, got in some situations where some uncharacteristic things happened. They picked me up tonight, that was good to see.”
This crowd of 42,411 was giving off positive vibes from the introductions, and the Cubs felt it. This team had lost five straight postseason games at home, but the fans, many of whom presumably were around for the dark days, went home happy Monday.
“It was nuts,” Rizzo said. “Seeing those flags waving, the fans into it. It was a lot of fun, and I’m sure Wrigleyville was popping out in the bars. It’s a good day for the organization, but we’ve got to take care of business tomorrow.”
Rizzo tried to avoid it, but he gave in to the temptation of the media’s baiting questions about the idea of clinching an NLCS berth at Wrigley, something that has never been done.
“It would be fun,” Rizzo said. “That would definitely be a party to be had, clinching here. But we’ve got to come out ready to play.”
Schwarber agreed, saying, “It would be awesome.”
Yes, the Cubs are allowed to dream, too. It has been a special season already, and beating the Cardinals to advance to the next round would be a moment no one could have predicted in April. But that unthinkable moment is now in front of the Cubs, and they have to seize it. Forget all the talk about a budding dynasty.
“Honestly, we just have to enjoy these; you never know what’s going to happen in this game,” Rizzo said. “You never know if we’ll ever get back to this point. We have to enjoy this one at a time.”
Schwarber set the tone for the night when he homered in the second inning. He had just finished playing in the Arizona fall instructional league at this time last year, and now he finds himself powering the Cubs in the postseason.
The moment, as they say, isn’t too big for him or his teammates.
“I came out early and sat in the stands and just tried to visualize what it would be like tonight and kind of control the emotions and kind of see what the atmosphere was going to be like in my own head,” Schwarber said. “The fans surpassed my expectations.
“We’re expecting a louder crowd [on Tuesday], and so just being able to [clinch] it here, these fans deserve it and this team deserves it. If we keep playing like we’re playing, good things will happen.”
That’s something that has been said only a handful of times in the past 70 years here. But this time, good things just might happen at the corner of Clark and Addison.