The Mets and Cubs Are Favorites. Could This Possibly Be Real?

It's opening day and the Mets and Cubs are league favorites, hard as that is to believe.

- Will Leitch

ON OCTOBER 14, 2003, I sat in an In wood apartment, listening to game six of the National League Championship Series between the Cubs and the Marlins on the radio. The Cubs were leading 3-0 and were five outs away from their first World Series in nearly 60 years. My father called me. He, like me, is a die-hard Cardinals fan, and, also like me, he was struggling to wrap his mind around the fact that the Cubs—the Cubs!—were about to reach the World Series. It felt like, when the last out happened, the Earth would careen off its axis and begin barreling toward the Sun; it felt like the apocalypse was upon us. “We should watch this moment,” he said. “In case this is the end.” I agreed, so I sighed and turned on the television. I, and the rest of the planet, was about to meet a man named Steve Bartman, who’d reach over the railing to catch a foul ball and, in the minds of Cubs fans anyway, change history. That date, that evening, is the last time I can remember fans of either the Mets or the Cubs—the two most beleaguered major-market franchises in sports—feeling overwhelming confidence about anything. (Even with that terrific Mets team of 2006, the one that won 97 games with an impossibly young David Wright and Jose Reyes, Mets fans always felt the fear of disappointment.) In this case, Cubs fans knew they were going to the World Series; this was the team that was going to break the curse, the team so good that it forgot it was wearing a Cubs uniform. Cubs fans never saw what happened next coming: The Marlins, given an extra out, made that dramatic comeback. It was the last time the Cubs or Mets really got cocky.