Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Chicago must move on after the NLCS loss to the Marlins.
MESA, Ariz. (AP) -- As with any bad hangover, the Chicago Cubs needed some time to recover from their collapse in the playoffs.
They were devastated to get within five outs of the World Series and still lose it all, and the hurt was so bad it was almost a physical pain. Replaying the games in their minds only added to the torture, but they couldn't help it.
"We all think about what happened in the postseason," shortstop Alex Gonzalez said Saturday. "That's life."
But that's the beautiful thing about baseball, every spring brings a new season. The calendar now says 2004, not 2003, and last year's playoffs are history.
Looking ahead
Sure, the Cubs could sit around in spring training and pout about what might have been. But they'd rather focus on this year, and winning it all.
"I already forgot 2003," manager Dusty Baker said. "You can't live the present and the future thinking about the past."
Yes, but these are the Cubs, the team that's made obsessing about the past an art form.
They've endured almost a century of futility, going without a World Series championship since 1908.
They haven't been back to the World Series since 1945, when legend has it that a local bar owner put a curse on the Cubs because he and his goat were turned away from a game.
When the Cubs imploded in Game 6 of the National League championship series, fans let out a collective groan of, "Here we go again."
"You have to [win] again and again and again and again until you filter out generations of disappointment and despair," Baker said. "It's impossible to do it overnight when it's taken however many years it's taken to get here.
"When we lost in the playoffs last year, this guy came up to me and said his grandmother told him we were going to lose. Grandma got it from somewhere."
Game 6 implosion
Chicago had a 3-1 lead in its best-of-seven series with the Marlins, and was five outs from winning a pennant. Then a fan deflected that now infamous foul ball away from Cubs outfielder Moises Alou, starting the Cubs on a downward spiral.
Gonzalez made a rare error to load the bases, fumbling a double-play grounder.
The Marlins went on to score eight runs and beat the Cubs 8-3.
The Cubs still had one more chance the next night, and Kerry Wood was pitching. But Florida rallied from two runs down to win 9-6 and advance to the World Series. What had been a citywide party turned into a wake, and the Cubs went to their offseason homes shell-shocked.
"I don't know if I'll ever forget about it completely," right-hander Matt Clement said. "But the thing was, we accomplished a lot last year.
"To think about where we were at this point last year, to think we would have done what we did last year, everybody believes it can happen, but how many really believe that it was going to happen?"
Better than expected
It's true. When last season began, who would really have thought the Cubs would be five outs from the World Series? This, after all, was a team that went 67-95 in 2002 and got not one, but two managers fired.
Chicago's 88-74 finish last year was a 21-game improvement. That's three weeks' worth of wins.
"There was a lot of question marks as to what we could accomplish coming into spring training last year," Gonzalez said. "And we proved to a lot of people that we had a lot of talent on this team and the talent to make the playoffs.
"I had so much fun getting to where we were last year, it was probably one of the best times in my career," Gonzalez added. "It was one to remember, and I'd like to repeat that. I think it'd even be better to go forward."
And like Baker said, the Cubs can't go forward if they're looking back.
While Steve Bartman, the fan who deflected the foul ball, took most of the grief for the Cubs' debacle, Gonzalez got his fair share of criticism, too. He made only 10 errors last year, led NL shortstops with a .984 fielding percentage and hit a career-high 20 homers.
But all anyone remembers is that gaffe in Game 6.
"It's easy to dwell on negative things. But the best thing to do is just realize what happened and learn from it," Gonzalez said. "There were so many things that happened in that series that I think you'd drive yourself nuts just dwelling on one of those things. It wouldn't be fair to do to the team, it wouldn't be fair to do to myself.
"Hopefully, everybody can just take out what was good out of that series and just move on."