On Cubs' Day of Revelry, History and the Present Began to Rhyme

History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes, it rhymes. When it does, start listening, because that might be when something momentous is about to happen. You needn't be superstitious or a sucker to have heard the rhymes Saturday, as the Cubs dedicated the new commemorative archway on Gallagher Way in celebration of the 2016 World Series championship team and welcomed several members back onto the field, along with the coveted Commissioner's Trophy.

Before they could do so, though—between the ceremony that opened the new arch and the one on the field pregame—there were brief showers, very much like an inside joke between Cubs fans and the baseball gods. The team's principals all believe that the short rain delay between the 9th and 10th innings of Game 7 led to the Cubs' triumph, because of the speech Jason Heyward gave in a crowded weight room while the tarp laid over the battlefield outside. To bring all the emotion and memory that had gathered in the green outside the gates back onto the field, 10 years later, why not have another passing downpour?

It was Anthony Rizzo, of course, who came out of the doors in right-center field last and carried the trophy through the outfield to the roar of the crowd, as he did on Opening Night in 2017. Rizzo then took up a place in the right-field bleachers, mirroring the stop in left field he made on the day last summer when he officially retired as a Cub. Then, history offered a double dose of resonance. In the bottom of the first inning, Michael Busch—the first Cubs first baseman to play even 100 games at that position since Rizzo was traded in 2021, already past 400 of them—hit his 12th homer of the season, directly to Rizzo. It was not only a serendipitous juxtaposition of past and present, but an echo of the moment on Rizzo's retirement celebration day when Moisés Ballesteros hit a home run directly to him in left field. Infamously, Rizzo dropped the Ballesteros ball, but he caught this one.

From there, the game unfolded in a way that was eerily familiar to Cubs fans old enough to remember that 2016 team well. They grinded out at-bats and capitalized on their opponent's mistakes. They played great defense. Matthew Boyd was on his game, with six uneventful innings in which the only run came on a solo homer. He didn't earn even one whiff on 17 Twins swings against his fastball, but he got 21 total called strikes and only walked one batter, striking out four.

Busch further evoked Rizzo by tracking a foul pop-up all the way to the edge of the playing field, and sprawling across the same tarp on which Rizzo made multiple highlight-reel catches to snare his own. The Cubs won in workmanlike fashion: not dominant, but never in doubt.

Alone, that doesn't mean much. The team entered play Saturday six games behind the Brewers in the NL Central race, and they still face big questions about their pitching depth. They don't have the same youth or the same capacity to smother and overmatch the other team. The 2016 team, not being actually magical, could not and did not imbue this new iteration with its seeming invincibility. 

However, the day also delivered reminders of how this team's road map to glory is similar to that one's. Nico Hoerner, mired for months in a slump that slid him down the lineup and often left the team a bit short on tough at-bats, came up with four hits in his first four at-bats. He took two high fastballs from Taj Bradley the other way for singles, as the Twins attacked what they surely believed was a persistent weakness. Hoerner had a .219 weighted on-base average (wOBA) on heaters around the top rail of the strike zone this year, before handling those two offerings so adroitly. In his third trip, when Bradley attempted to adjust accordingly, Hoerner turned on a cutter and lined a single to left-center, before going back to shooting it the other way in the seventh against reliever Mike Paredes. If Hoerner gets back to hitting .300 and running a high OBP for the balance of the season, the lineup will regain the last bit of dynamism it had lost when the team plunged into such a tailspinb in May and June.

Meanwhile, beyond Busch, the club played stellar defense. Hoerner made a great stab on a one-hop rocket toward right field by Twins shortstop Ryan Kreidler. Later, on another blistered one-hopper bgy Twins left fielder Trevor Larnach, Hoerner recovered after an initial bobble to take away another hit. Ian Happ made a diving catch coming in on a ball in left field. Alex Bregman started a solid around-the-horn double play to escape a budding jam. Even when Pete Crow-Armstrong couldn't make a diving play in the gap in the top of the ninth, the result was two outs, after a quick recovery and good throw by Crow-Armstrong and with the assistance of dreadful Twins baserunning. The championship-winning team dominated by giving the opponent no oxygen on balls in play; this one has to do the same thing. For one day, at least, they did plenty of it.

Jed Hoyer is not Theo Epstein, and perhaps Carter Hawkins isn't even Jed Hoyer. They haven't built as robust a winning team as their predecessors did, and the arrival of that championship team on the scene for a day of mingling between the present and the past doesn't fix everything. It merely underscores the chance that still exists, for the 2026 Cubs (or some close succeeding version) to do what that team did. The blueprint is the same. They have great leadership, even if their big offseason signee and nominal leader is having a tougher year than anyone hoped. They have the rudiments of an elite run-precention team, even if they lack a true closer. They have a deep lineup that is learning to wear opponents down, even if it doesn't slug at quite the levels of some of the other top offenses.

Joe Maddon was in attendance Saturday. The title-winning year was his third at the helm of the Cubs; this is the third season of Craig Counsell's tenure. Like Maddon, Counsell left a small-market team to take over a team who could burnish his resume in the one way in which it still needed burnishing: by adding a World Series to it. Whether Epstein and Hoyer should have felt quite as much urgency to complete their task as they did that summer 10 years ago is open to debate. They emptied the tank and the farm system to get to the mountaintop. That team was clearly worth at least some of that. This team isn't clearly anything, but you can make the case that they're worth the same gamble. They have, if nothing else, an excellent chance to play on past Game 162. Saturday brought several reminders of how special it will be if they make a deep run into the postseason. It also highlighted the importance of making some additions to the roster before it attempts to do so,