And so, the night after the unthinkable happened, it has come to this…
The Cubs are going home for the winter.
With an optimist’s point of view, maybe it was best to give the players an extended rest after three consecutive seasons of deep playoff runs and an atrocious end-of-year schedule that pretty much killed the team. It gives extra time to rest injuries (Kris Bryant‘s shoulder, Pedro Strop‘s hamstring, the various pitching aches including Yu Darvish and Brandon Morrow) and to do as Theo Epstein and the players said:
Theo: "If we're being totally honest…there was a lot to grind through and there is a lot to be proud of, but we could've done more from Game 1 to Game 162.