Written by Derek Harvey at Bloguin
The Chicago Cubs hired away Theo Epstein from the Red Sox in 2011. For their fans, the journey back to competitiveness and relevance has been a long and often frustrating one. But this year finally saw the plan start to come together. The Cubs won 97 games in the regular season, which was the third best record on baseball. It’s just unfortunate they had to find that success as a part of the National League Central, where the two best records in baseball also resided.
Instead of winning a division title — something they’d have done in every other division — they were relegated to the second Wild Card. They still overcame some long odds to win the WC play-in game against the Pirates. Furthermore they bested the best team in the regular season — the 100 win Cardinals — to make it to the National League Championship Series. Here’s where things have gone wrong. The Cubs have lost each of the first three games to the Mets — arguably the weakest NL Postseason team — and face elimination on Wednesday night. Should that come to pass, a lot of Cubs fans will be asking themselves if this season was a failure after all.
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