On The Pivotal Night The Cubs Were The Cubs

Any Cubs fan who was a veteran of the 1969 campaign was asking only one thing Tuesday night: to crush the Mets. Was that too much to ask?

Bad enough, yet he homered again in the third inning Tuesday night against Kyle Hendricks with two outs and nobody on, a perfect time to stick one in his ear and then walk him.

That might put the Cubs down 3-0, right where head honcho Theo Epstein might want them, considering his 2004 curse-breaking Boston Red Sox went down 3-0 to the New York Yankees, only to pretty much run the table after that, but it does’t give a Cubs fan much heart.

In the end, rain fell, but that didn’t ruffle the Mets, either. And when the game was over and the Cubs’ grounds crew executed a perfect rolling out of the tarp to cover the infield—they had to roll back a corner because they had forgotten to cover the home-plate area with an extra layer of covering.