The 2016 Chicago Cubs: Ending 108 Years of Waiting
How a 103-win Cubs team came back from 3-1 down to beat Cleveland in a ten-inning Game 7 with a rain delay, ending the longest championship drought in baseball, with the season numbers and series results.
On the night of November 2, 2016, in Cleveland, the Chicago Cubs won the seventh game of the World Series 8-7 in ten innings and ended a wait that had lasted 108 years. The franchise's previous championship came in 1908 and its previous pennant in 1945. The team that finished the drought had won 103 games in the regular season, more than any other club in baseball that year, and then had to come back from a 3-1 deficit against a Cleveland club that was itself waiting for a first title since 1948.
The game is remembered for three things: a lead that shrank from 6-3 to a 6-6 tie in the eighth inning, a rain delay of about seventeen minutes before the tenth, and the two runs the Cubs scored right after the tarp came off. This article covers the season that led to it, the postseason before the Series, each of the seven games, and what the numbers say about the team.
The team that won 103 games
The 2016 Cubs went 103-58 and won the National League Central by a wide margin. The second-place St. Louis Cardinals were 86-76, a gap of 17 and a half games, and no other National League club finished above 95-67 (the Washington Nationals, who won the East). In the American League the best record belonged to the Texas Rangers at 95-67. The Cubs' 103 wins were the most by the franchise since 1910, when the team won 104, and they came in a year when the historical record shows 4.48 runs, 1.16 home runs and 8.03 strikeouts per team game. In 1979 the same figures were 4.46 runs, 0.82 home runs and 4.77 strikeouts, so the game had changed a great deal around the same scoring level.
| Player | Role | 2016 line |
|---|---|---|
| Kris Bryant | Third base, NL MVP | .292, 39 HR, 102 RBI |
| Anthony Rizzo | First base | .292, 32 HR, 109 RBI |
| Kyle Hendricks | Starter | 16-8, 2.13 ERA (led NL) |
| Jon Lester | Starter | 19-5, 2.44 ERA (second in NL) |
| Ben Zobrist | Utility | .272, 18 HR, 76 RBI |
The pitching was the foundation. Hendricks won the National League ERA title at 2.13 and Lester was second at 2.44, ahead of Noah Syndergaard's 2.60 for the Mets. Behind them the club had Jake Arrieta, the 2015 Cy Young Award winner, and John Lackey. The lineup was young and deep: Bryant was named Most Valuable Player in the National League, and Rizzo drove in more than 100 runs. Javier Baez, Addison Russell, Willson Contreras and Dexter Fowler filled out a roster that could score and defend.
It is worth stating plainly what the 103 wins are and are not. They are the result of a 162-game season in which the Cubs finished 17 and a half games clear of their nearest division rival. They do not guarantee success in a short series, which is why the Cubs' path through October was never easy.
What 108 years meant
The Cubs won the World Series in 1907 and 1908. They won further pennants in 1906, 1910, 1918, 1929, 1932, 1935, 1938 and 1945, and lost the World Series every time. After 1945 they did not return to the Series for 71 years. The historical record lists Wrigley Field as the club's home since 1916, and a good Cubs team arrived every few years without finishing the job, which is part of why the waiting felt so long.
Folklore filled the gap. The best known is the curse of the billy goat, from a tavern owner who was reported to have been turned away from a 1945 World Series game at Wrigley with his goat. Whether or not anyone believed in the curse, it gave fans a name for the drought, and it gave the 2016 story a shape. The comparison most people made was to the Boston Red Sox, who had ended an 86-year wait in 2004 under a general manager named Theo Epstein; the 2004 Red Sox account tells that story. Epstein took over Chicago's baseball operations in 2011 and set out to do it again.
How the roster was built
The rebuilding was slow and deliberate. The Cubs lost 101 games in 2012, an early year of the project, and assembled young hitters through the draft and trades. Bryant, Rizzo, Baez, Russell and Contreras all came up through the Cubs system or were acquired as prospects. The club hired Joe Maddon as manager after the 2014 season, and in the winter of 2014 and 2015 it signed Lester as a free agent. In 2015 the team won 97 games and reached the NLCS, where the New York Mets swept it 4-0.
The following winter was the big one. The Cubs added Jason Heyward, Zobrist and Lackey, and the roster that opened 2016 was among the strongest in baseball. That fact matters for the story, because the 2016 title is not a story of a lucky underdog. The Cubs were widely picked to win the pennant, and they did. What makes it dramatic is how close the Series came to going the other way.
October before the Series
The Cubs began with the Giants in the division series. San Francisco had beaten the Mets, 1-0, in the wild-card game. Chicago won the series 3 games to 1 and moved on to face the Dodgers, who had beaten Washington in a five-game series, 3-2.
The NLCS went six games and the Cubs won it 4-2, clinching at home. Lester and Baez were named co-Most Valuable Players of the series. It was the Cubs' first pennant since 1945, and it sent them to the Series against the American League champion. In the American League, Cleveland had beaten Boston 3-0 in the division series and Toronto 4-1 in the ALCS, after Toronto had swept the Rangers 3-0 and beaten Baltimore in a one-game wild-card playoff. Cleveland's regular-season record was 94-67, and its manager was Terry Francona.
The first six games
The Series opened in Cleveland. Corey Kluber, Cleveland's ace, pitched Game 1 and the Indians won 6-0. The Cubs evened it in Game 2 with a 5-1 win, then went home to Wrigley Field, where the first World Series game in Chicago since 1945 was played. Cleveland won Game 3, 1-0, and Game 4, 7-2, which left the Cubs a loss away from elimination, down 3 games to 1.
Only a handful of teams had ever come back from that deficit in a World Series. The Cubs did it by winning three straight. They won Game 5 at Wrigley, 3-2, with Aroldis Chapman, acquired from the Yankees in July, pitching the last two-plus innings. They won Game 6 in Cleveland, 9-3, with Addison Russell hitting a grand slam and driving in six runs. That set up Game 7 on November 2.
| Game | Date | Site | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | October 25 | Cleveland | Cleveland 6, Cubs 0 |
| 2 | October 26 | Cleveland | Cubs 5, Cleveland 1 |
| 3 | October 28 | Chicago | Cleveland 1, Cubs 0 |
| 4 | October 29 | Chicago | Cleveland 7, Cubs 2 |
| 5 | October 30 | Chicago | Cubs 3, Cleveland 2 |
| 6 | November 1 | Cleveland | Cubs 9, Cleveland 3 |
| 7 | November 2 | Cleveland | Cubs 8, Cleveland 7 (10 innings) |
Why Game 7 was in Cleveland, and why Schwarber could play
Two rules of the 2016 Series shaped what happened. The first was home-field advantage. From 2003 through 2016 the league that won the All-Star Game received the extra home games in the World Series, and the American League won the 2016 game. The Cubs had the best record in baseball, 103-58 against Cleveland's 94-67, and still opened on the road and would have been on the road for a Game 7. Beginning with the 2017 season the right went to the team with the better regular-season record, a change that would have put the 2016 Series finale in Chicago.
The second rule was the designated hitter. In World Series games played in an American League park, both teams used one, and in National League parks the pitchers hit. That is why Kyle Schwarber, who had been lost to a knee injury in the spring, could return for the Series as a designated hitter in Cleveland without having to play the field, and why his role was smaller in the three games at Wrigley, where the pitchers hit. The format also followed the usual 2-3-2 pattern: two games at the park of the team with home-field advantage, three at the other, and two more back at the first, so that Games 6 and 7 were both played in Cleveland.
Put those facts together and the comeback looks harder. Down 3-1, the Cubs had to win Games 5, 6 and 7, and the last two were both away from home. They won all three, and the difficulty of doing that is why the 3-1 comeback has been done so rarely.
Game 7: ahead 5-1, tied in the eighth
Fowler led off the game with a home run, and by the fifth inning the Cubs led 5-1. Hendricks started and Lester came on in relief, and David Ross, a veteran catcher who had announced that this would be his last season, homered in the sixth to make it 6-3.
Then Cleveland came back. In the eighth inning, with the Cubs ahead 6-3, Chapman came in, Brandon Guyer doubled to make it 6-4, and Rajai Davis tied the game with a two-run home run. The scoreboard was level with one inning left. Chapman had been used heavily in the previous games, and Maddon was second-guessed for it, though the choice also made sense: nobody saves a closer for a game that may never come.
The ninth inning ended with no further scoring, and then rain began to fall. The game was delayed about seventeen minutes. In that time the Cubs players are widely reported to have held a short meeting in a weight room, with Jason Heyward speaking, before returning to the field.
The tenth inning
Kyle Schwarber, who had missed almost the entire season with a knee injury and had returned for the World Series as a designated hitter, led off with a single. Albert Almora Jr. ran for him and advanced on a fly ball by Bryant. Rizzo was walked intentionally, and Zobrist, who would be named Series MVP, doubled down the left-field line to score Almora. After Addison Russell was also walked intentionally, Miguel Montero followed with a run-scoring single, and Chicago led 8-6.
Cleveland did not quit. Davis singled home a run in the bottom of the tenth to make it 8-7, and the tying run stood on base with two out. Mike Montgomery, a left-hander, then got Michael Martinez to hit a grounder to third base. Bryant fielded it and threw to Rizzo at first. The Cubs were champions for the first time since 1908.
It was the first extra-inning Game 7 since 1997. Cleveland, which had led the Series 3-1 and had tied Game 7 from three runs down, remained without a title since 1948. Both franchises had waited decades, and one of them had to lose.
What the numbers say
Looked at as a statistical event, the 2016 Cubs were close to ideal. They had the best record in the majors, the best ERA in the league, a most valuable player and the NL's second-best starter by ERA. The Series itself was nearly even: the Cubs scored 27 runs in seven games to Cleveland's 27 as well, by the game scores above (0+5+0+2+3+9+8 for the Cubs; 6+1+1+7+2+3+7 for Cleveland), and that suggests the title came down to a handful of plays.
The usual caution applies. A seven-game series is a small sample, and a better team still loses one fairly often. The Cubs were the better team on paper and still needed three straight wins to survive. That is the nature of October, and it is also why the format matters; the history of the playoff format explains how the number of rounds changed what a 103-win season is worth, and the World Series history shows how rare the 3-1 comeback is.
Common questions
How long had it been since the Cubs won the World Series? The last title was 1908, so the 2016 championship came 108 years later. The last Cubs pennant before 2016 was 1945.
What was the score of Game 7? The Cubs won 8-7 in ten innings, after Cleveland tied the game 6-6 in the eighth.
Who was the MVP of the Series? Ben Zobrist. Kris Bryant was the National League's regular-season MVP, and Lester and Baez shared the NLCS award.
Were the Cubs the best team in baseball in 2016? By regular-season record, yes: 103-58, the best in the majors. Cleveland finished 94-67.
Where to go next
Tradition is a big part of this story, and the Wrigley Field seventh-inning stretch is one of the best-known; read Take Me Out to the Ball Game and the traditions of the ballpark. For another World Series remembered for a single swing, see the 1988 World Series. The Cubs' current record and next game are on the Cubs team page, and the playoffs and World Series topic collects more coverage.