- AP Photos
- Cubs rookie Javier Baez has some of us daydreaming about—dare we say it?—winning baseball.
I received a text the other night from my friend and colleague Ben Joravsky, and strangely enough it wasn’t about Rahm Emanuel.
And after a week in the majors, Baez is striking out more than one of every three times he steps to the plate.
I always enjoyed the movie version, starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, the aging rookie with a mysterious past whose talent and grace transforms a team from doomed to triumphant. The ending is magical: unlike Mighty Casey, Roy does not strike out, and we can all feel the glory with him.
I’ll date myself by noting that was the summer of 1989, when the Cubs surprised everyone by winning 93 games and a division title—their second in five years. Then the San Francisco Giants ushered them out of the playoffs, four games to one, and my spirits sank. I understood this was not a team built to last. Andre Dawson and Rick Sutcliffe were getting older. Mike Bielecki would never win 18 games again. Ryne Sandberg couldn’t do it all.
