Cubs Come Back from Down 3-1 as History Prepares to Repeat Itself

The 2016 World Series didn't want to end. Game 7 began as a lopsided affair in the Cubs' favor, then was grindingly tied as formerly unhittable pitchers gave up home runs, including one to a 39-year-old backup on the verge of retirement. It endured a rain delay, went to extra innings. Thirty-six players appeared. More runs scored; the Cubs took the lead. The Indians mounted a comeback that fell just short when a roster depleted by in-game moves and one pitcher too many meant that a career .197 hitter had to bat with the season on the line.

The 2016 World Series tried to help us. Now it's over and all we have is each other, and we don't like each other. As stressful as Game 7 was for all three viewing parties—Cubs fans, Indians fans, neutral observers, innocent animals—it was also better than what comes next. Winter descends. The woods are dark and full of demons. They'll come out on Tuesday, and they have plans that will perpetuate the madness of late 2016 for years to come. As long as the World Series went on, it acted as a bulwark against tomorrow. That's over now.

Baseball has done this before, delayed The Bad Times. One of the few times Wednesday's World Series scenario—team down 3-1 forces a seventh game—happened before was in 1968, which was not only an election year, but quite possibly the nadir of American history. The fun part was the defending 1967 champion St. Louis Cardinals taking on the Detroit Tigers, a team making its first World Series appearance since 1945, when Hank Greenberg came back from World War II and blasted the Cubs to a seven-game loss so devastating they only recovered yesterday. Everything else—war and rumors of war, a thousand schisms rupturing the very sense of what our nation is—can be found in the history books.

The Cardinals had Bob Gibson at his peak with a record 1.12 ERA in over 300 innings pitched; they also had Lou Brock, Curt Flood, Orlando Cepeda. The Tigers had Denny McLain, the sport's last 30-game winner, Earl Wilson, and Mickey Lolich in the rotation; Norm Cash, Bill Freehan, Willie Horton, Jim Northrup, Al Kaline were on offense. Late in the season, manager Mayo Smith had shored up a major weakness by replacing a cast of shortstops who couldn't hit at all with center fielder Mickey Stanley. Stanley would only play 65 more innings at short over the remaining 10 years of his career, and was no slugger himself, but comparatively speaking he was Babe Ruth.

The Series was all Cardinals and Gibson at first, with the future Hall of Famer pitching a five-hit, 17-strikeout shutout in Game 1 and another five-hitter in Game 4. Facing elimination, the rotund southpaw Lolich gave up three runs in the first inning of Game 5, then held after that as the Tigers staged two rallies, one begun by a Stanley triple, for a 5-3 comeback win. In the next game, McLain, after losing both his starts against Gibson, finally lived up to his regular season record as the Detroit offense knocked around Cardinals pitching in a 10-run third inning. That brought up Game 7 in St. Louis, Gibson against Lolich. Both pitchers shut out the opposition through six, but in the top of the seventh Northrup came up with two Tigers on and two out and shot a looping fly to center field. Flood, one of the great outfield gloves of all time, misread it and broke in; it went over his head. Both runners scored, and although St. Louis third baseman Mike Shannon hit a solo home run in the bottom of the ninth, it was too late; the Tigers had come all the way back to win the World Series.

This precis doesn't do the '68 World Series full justice, of course. Kaline, who had been with the Tigers since approximately the War of 1812, was playing in his first (and, as it turned out, only) World Series and excelled, hitting .379 with two home runs. Brock was a force on the bases and at the plate, hitting .464 with six extra-base hits and seven steals in nine tries.

The Series was one to remember, but here's the catch: it was all over by October 10.

Consider the front page of the New York Times for the morning of October 10. The Game 6 recap, "TIGERS TIE SERIES WITH 13-1 VICTORY" was bracketed by two other pressing matters that it must have felt better to ignore. "JOHNSON IS URGED BY HANOI TO ACT," reporting the government of North Vietnam's request that President Lyndon Johnson take the short time he had left in office to stop bombing them and get to negotiating an end to the Vietnam War. "'If President Johnson really wants to solve the Vietnam problem peacefully, he still has enough time and power to do so,' Minister of State Xuan Thuy, Hanoi's chief representative, told the United States negotiators."

On the opposite side of the World Series story was a dispatch from the ongoing campaign season, "HUMPHREY CHIDES NIXON ON AGNEW." Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party's nominee for president, attacked the Republican nominee, former Vice-President Richard Nixon, for selecting ultra-conservative (and spectacularly corrupt) Maryland governor Spiro Agnew as his running mate. Once and future Alabama governor and arch-segregationist George Wallace was mounting a credible third-party run on the American Independent Party ticket, and Humphrey also invoked Wallace's running mate, Air Force general Curtis LeMay, a mad bomber who had just suggested using nuclear weapons to end the war. "I want you to think as I say it—President Agnew and President LeMay," Humphrey threatened. "You have no right to play with your country's destiny like that."

Like that? It was so much worse. To briefly and inadequately summarize a year that needs a book or three to do it justice: back in 1964, Lyndon Johnson had won one of the most lopsided electoral victories in American history. Going on four years later, a combination of the war in Vietnam and white backlash against African-American unrest in the cities and the Civil Rights movement in general had left Johnson a man without a country. Not only was the war divisive, but the government had been lying about it, telling the public it was going great.

Senator Eugene McCarthy, Democrat of Minnesota, entered the New Hampshire primary as an anti-war candidate and nearly beat Johnson. New York Senator Robert Kennedy, the former attorney general and brother of the late president, had been back-and-forthing in a Hamlet-y way about getting into the race, then finally he too jumped in. In late March, Johnson, outnumbered and unloved, went on television, proclaimed a unilateral halt to the bombings, and declared, "I shall not seek, and will not accept" his party's re-nomination as president.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis on April 3. The cities went up in flames. Kennedy lost Oregon's primary, won California's on June 5, and then was murdered as he was leaving the victory celebration. The country was in despair. A black New Yorker told a reporter, "Every good man we get, they kill."

In August, the Democratic Party convention was held in Chicago. It turned into a bloody running battle between Mayor Richard Daley's violent police force and protestors. Humphrey gave an acceptance speech in which he proclaimed himself the law and order candidate, which didn't help him with the resurgent left. Nixon, too, was running as a law and order candidate, but in a subtler way, claiming to speak for those Americans who found themselves unrepresented in the current system, "the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters and non-demonstrators." This was code for WHITES; South Carolina's segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond was deployed as a surrogate to sound the appropriate dog whistles.

Nixon insisted he had a secret plan to win the war, a claim that Humphrey could not counter or co-opt, given that he was Johnson's vice-president; if he knew how to end the war, why hadn't he told Johnson? Nixon not only had no clue how to end the war, at least aside from a program of unending and illegal escalation and diplomatic bank-shots that largely existed in his own mind and that of incoming National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Due to wiretaps, Johnson knew that Nixon was in communication with the government of South Vietnam through an intermediary, and that the Republican nominee was telling them to sandbag the peace talks, as they would get a better deal with him in charge. This was plainly treasonous, but Johnson felt it would be too dangerous to the Constitutional process of succession to charge Nixon publicly.

In October, Humphrey's campaign ran out of money; during the week of the World Series, he aired no commercials. The race tightened at the last minute nonetheless, as such races do. The final result was painfully close: In the popular vote, 43.4 percent for Nixon, 42.7 percent for Humphrey, 13.5 percent for Wallace. Nixon had only about 500,000 more votes than Humphrey; though the electoral college was not as close—301 for Nixon to 191 and 46 for Humphrey and Wallace, respectively. The shift of just a few ballots here and there would have changed that outcome.

The war would drag on. Watergate was just a few years away. Things wouldn't get better for quite a while, if they indeed ever have; the events of that year form a long chain to the present. All of which is to say that the 1968 World Series should have gone later. It should have lasted longer. Nine games. Twelve. Infinity.

And here we are again, 48 years later. We just experienced a tremendous World Series, one that was a gift not just for baseball fans, but anyone who appreciates drama and the visualization of what ABC's Wide World of Sports used to call "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat." So much was at stake that the series itself wasn't always a pleasant experience, but it sure beat the sense of imminent civil war, or at the very least of discord, obstruction, and stagnation as far as the eye can see. Because it was so intense, it was tempting at times to say, "Make it stop!" while peeking through closed fingers. But because it was so necessary, that's not quite right. What we would really have meant was "more, please give us more." If the Series had only continued, perhaps next week would forever stay next week.