Jesus Creed
If you add up all the season and postseason logs at baseball-reference.com, you come up with this: Since the moment Kling caught that foul out, the Cubs played 152,627⅓ innings of baseball before Wednesday, and their pitchers retired 457,882 batters. Not one of those outs added a third World Series banner to the Cubs’ collection. Now, after 10 more innings and one magical final out, all those numbers reset to zero. The third banner will fly above Wrigley Field.
On a freakishly warm evening in northeast Ohio, the number 108 transitioned from a symbol of despair into one of joy. There are 108 stitches on a baseball, the perfect sphere at the heart of a child’s game. The natural division of another circle is 108, nine cycles of the year of the monkey stringing together two worlds, the antiquity of 1908 and the digital age of 2016. The number 108 is frozen now as the moment the north side of Chicago moved back to the center of the baseball universe.
Now there are only seven numbers that matter to Cubs fans, the ones they’ve dreamed of seeing for so long while looking up from the sidewalk in front of 3633 North Sheffield Ave. Soon, new numbers will appear on that venerable greystone across the street from the right-field bleachers of Wrigley Field, preceded by Latin words that, translated, mean “Let’s go Cubs” and a counter beginning with “AC,” for “Anno Catuli,” which translates to “year of the Cubs.”
Those words and numbers: Eamus Catuli! AC0000000.
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