CHICAGO -- It’s the silly season at the corner of Clark and Addison, which is to say the Cubs are in the National League Championship Series and everyone is getting giggly, as former Cubs manager Lou Piniella liked to say.
There is good reason to giggle, because the Cubs are favored to beat the New York Mets in the NLCS, and no one is worried about black cats or cold bats.
Good vibes abound in Chicago because the Cubs are a really good team with two big-game pitchers and a slew of big-time bats. The manager is smart, his coaches are sharp, and the players are loose and confident. The Mets are the perfect opponent because they represent a tortured past that needs to be wiped away, and they provide a fascinating matchup for viewers, seamheads and TV advertisers.
On the field, the Cubs hitters face a worthy challenge in the young Mets pitchers, but I don't think the Cubs will sweat their opponents too much.
Everything is coming up Cubby right now, from the breaks of the games to the breaks afforded them by their opponents. They partied for two days after beating St. Louis in four games in the NLDS, and it doesn’t feel wrong. Jon Lester will start Game 1, with Cy Young finalist Jake Arrieta getting an extra day to rest after his first "scuffling" start in months.
Even the untimely hamstring injury to rookie shortstop Addison Russell -- Cubs manager Joe Maddon announced Thursday that Russell will be out for the entire NLCS -- hasn’t slowed this team’s roll. It's a big loss, but at short they'll just start Javier Baez, the slick fielder who hit a three-run homer in the Cubs’ 6-4 series-clinching win over the St. Louis Cardinals.
Yes, it’s a different world in Wrigleyville, but that doesn’t mean the outsize focus on the Cubs is any different than it was in previous playoff seasons. If anything, it’s more intense.
Players were lightly grumbling as media hovered in a cramped clubhouse on Thursday, but once a few of them talked, they were calm, confident and relaxed. One player was a little confused by the attention.
When Kyle Schwarber launched a homer into the Budweiser script sign atop the right-field video board in the seventh inning of that series-clinching win over the Cardinals, it was an authentic, goose-bumpy playoff moment.
But when TV news helicopters started flying over the sign the next day, trying to identify the ball’s location, and when the Chicago Tribune made the ball’s whereabouts its A1 story, well, those were genuine Chicago Cubs moments.
Given the stakes and the expectations, this is a city that gets a little nutty when the Cubs are good, and if this team keeps up its torrid play this weekend in New York when the NLCS begins, expect next week to be even zanier, with a World Series berth on the line.
Schwarber faced a small but inquisitive pack at his locker at the end of a 30-minute open clubhouse Thursday. Schwarber said it was “pretty cool” that the Cubs were keeping the ball atop the “Schwarboard” in a Plexiglas case, but he seemed a little befuddled by the brouhaha.
“Yeah, it’s crazy because I just look at it as just a home run,” he said. “People are kind of taking it to the next step. I was able to help the team get another run and padded the lead by another run.”
Schwarber added that he didn’t call his shot, as fellow outfielder Dexter Fowler intimated after the game, nor did he track the ball’s flight after the initial contact. He just swung hard, looked up to make sure it was going out and trotted around the bases. It was his third playoff homer in 15 plate appearances.
And no, he’s not thinking about taking the ball on a Stanley Cup-style pub crawl either.
“I’m not focused on a home run ball,” he said. “I’m focused on the next series.”
With Mets pitchers Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz and Jacob deGrom on the horizon, Schwarber better be focused. Do those names make any Cubs fans nervous? Maybe a little now, but we'll see how that changes after the weekend. Harvey starts against Lester in Game 1 on Saturday.
Back in 2007 and '08, Piniella liked to say that Chicago got too high when the Cubs were good and too low when they were bad, and he was absolutely correct. While the Cubs swept the season series from New York 7-0, they haven’t played one another since early July. The Mets are a much more dangerous team now. Before the trade deadline, they added outfielder Yoenis Cespedes, one of the early targets of the Theo Epstein regime.
The Cubs are more dangerous too. They didn't get hot until August and they haven't cooled off yet. They won a one-game wild-card playoff against the Pittsburgh Pirates and ended the NLDS in four games. A possible seven-game series would be uncharted waters, but the young Cubs can swim.
“We’ve got to be able to pace ourselves,” Schwarber said. “Make sure we don’t get too high, don’t get too low, stay the same ball team we were, and good things will happen.”
He’s only 22 with 288 big league plate appearances, but Schwarber’s maturity is representative of his teammates, who vary between feigning ignorance of the playoff pressure and embracing it.
Arrieta, who will start Game 2 in Queens, acknowledged that he has expended extra mental energy before his playoff starts. That he’s aware of it is why Arrieta is a special pitcher.
“Physically, I’m fine,” he said. “The playoff atmosphere can drain you of energy mentally, and you spend a lot of brainpower throughout the day contemplating things, thinking about different scenarios, and it can be taxing. Sometimes it can translate into some physical fatigue. I think being able to understand how to handle these playoff atmospheres and situations -- especially leading into the game -- is going to do me a lot more good going into this series.”
The Cubs are self-aware, self-assured and self-motivated. This is their series to win and their chance to make history instead of repeat it.