The weekend began with the arrival of a team that had lost as many games (17) as the Braves had won. The gulf between these clubs is immense, but here we note: It wasn’t so long ago – 2013, to be exact – that the Braves won as many games (96) as the Cubs lost.
In October 2011, Theo Epstein left the Boston Red Sox, a long-suffering franchise he’d helped steer to two World Series titles, for a longer-suffering franchise. (As anyone conversant with the Curse of the Billy Goat and poor Steve Bartman knows, the Cubs haven’t won it all since 1908.