"Then the rain delay wouldn't have affected Shaw."īecause of the delay, Shaw, who by that point was into his 77th inning of work of the season, had roughly a 30-minute break between pitches. "If I would have gotten Ross out, I could have finished the inning," Allen says. The Indians had done their job to maintain the momentum from the Davis homer. Heyward stole second and advanced to third on a throwing error by catcher Yan Gomes, but the Indians caught a break when Joe Maddon had Javier Baez bunt with two strikes, resulting in a foul ball for strike three.
"I literally wasn't able to feel my legs," says Allen, who at that point had recorded the last four outs for the Indians. Then, Cody Allen throws the first pitch of the ninth to David Ross. "Everybody on our side," Davis says now, "felt everything shift in our direction." Davis is shown glancing into the heavens with the dazed expression of a man who can't believe what he just did. In the broadcast feed from the start of the ninth, interspersed with the images of Indians fans excitedly stirring in the stands, there is a shot of a sweating, stunned Aroldis Chapman sitting in the Cubs' dugout and a quick cut to Davis, whose heroic homer had tied the tilt at 6 mere minutes earlier. This is the story of the ninth inning and the three small moments that, if altered ever so slightly, would have created an entirely different conversation on Michigan Avenue that winter day and at Progressive Field this week. But in pure baseball terms, it's an inning that allowed the Cubs to steal the Tribe's thunder and seal the way we think about 2016. The inning in-between Rajai Davis' moment of game-tying glory and Jason Heyward's Knute Rockne-like role in the visiting weight room gets lost in the shuffle of the Game 7 narrative. This is the story of what happened just before the rain put a pause in the proceedings.
To many, that difference emanated from a 17-minute rain delay that's been romanticized in Cubs lore as the long-suffering franchise's moment of spiritual awakening and literal cleansing, en route to the 8-7 triumph in the 10th. "I think we're all kidding ourselves if we think the difference between the winning and the losing is big," Hoyer says. Had that happened, the sense of urgency currently surrounding a small-market Cleveland club with the longest active championship drought in the game would instead apply to a Cubs team perhaps still trying to shake the curse conversation.
In another world, with another swing on a hanging slider, Kipnis would have represented - to Hoyer and to all the other Cubs fans walking Michigan Avenue that day - not just an October opponent but the embodiment of an unkillable curse, the Chicago kid who lived on the same street as Steve Bartman and grew up to keep the billy goat breathing. The unspoken but understood undertone of the Kipnis-Hoyer conversation and this Cubs-Indians reunion is how thin the line separating these squads really was. "At the core of it," says Kipnis, "we're still baseball kids who know how great that Series was."
So it was in that Streeterville scene in which a ring-bearer and a runner-up could converse cordially, and so it will be on Tuesday and Wednesday nights at Cleveland's Progressive Field, where the Indians and Cubs will have their first formal meeting since one of the greatest games any of us has ever seen. Shared respect emanates from being on separate sides of an enrapturing experience like 2016's four-hour, 28-minute Game 7.