There are moments in sports that are not merely games. They are exorcisms. They are the collision of history, hope, and heartbreak, compressed into a single swing of a bat, a single throw from the outfield, a single rain delay that felt like the universe holding its breath. For the Chicago Cubs and the legion of fans who had known nothing but disappointment for 108 years, Game 7 of the 2016 World Series was all of that and more. It was the end of a curse. It was the breaking of a spell that had haunted a franchise since the days of Teddy Roosevelt. And it began not in Cleveland on that chilly November night, but months earlier, in the warmth of spring training, when a group of young men who did not yet know they were legends first gathered under the watchful eye of a manager who wore his genius as casually as a windbreaker.
The Architect and the Alchemist
Joe Maddon arrived in Chicago in 2015 with a reputation as baseball's mad scientist, a man who wore tinfoil hats, brought zoo animals to the ballpark, and ran his clubhouse like a cross between a think tank and a traveling carnival. He was exactly what the Cubs needed. For years, Chicago had been a place where talent went to wither under the weight of expectation. The ghosts of 1969, 1984, 2003—they all lived in the ivy-covered outfield walls of Wrigley, whispering doubt into the ears of every player who put on the blue pinstripes. Maddon's first act was not to change the lineup or the pitching staff. It was to change the air. He brought in a magician. He brought in a therapy dog named Wrigley. He scheduled themed road trips and kept the mood so light that his players forgot they were supposed to be cursed.
But beneath the whimsy was a razor-sharp baseball mind. Maddon understood analytics better than most of the Ivy League graduates front offices were hiring by the dozen. He understood matchup advantages, platoon splits, and the value of defensive positioning in an era when shifts were still considered exotic. And he understood something even more important: that the 2016 Cubs had a core of young talent so extraordinary that, if managed correctly, they could be the best team in baseball for years to come.
The Core: Bryant, Rizzo, and the Kids Who Would Be Kings
Kris Bryant arrived in the majors in 2015 with a swing that scouts had called "generational." The kid from Las Vegas—whose father had been a minor league outfielder in the Red Sox system—had size, power, and an almost unsettling calm at the plate. He could hit the ball 450 feet to any field, and he did so with the quiet confidence of someone who had known he belonged since he first picked up a bat. Bryant won the National League Rookie of the Year in 2015 and opened 2016 as the presumptive MVP. He was 24 years old and already the face of a franchise.
Anthony Rizzo was the heart. Diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma as an 18-year-old prospect in the Red Sox organization, he had beaten cancer and arrived in Chicago via trade, a lanky first baseman with a sweet left-handed swing and a personality that filled every room he entered. By 2016, Rizzo was the Cubs' captain in all but title. He was the one who gathered the team for meetings, who spoke to the media after tough losses, who absorbed the weight of the city's expectations without ever seeming burdened by them. He hit .292 with 32 home runs and 109 RBIs that season. But his numbers, impressive as they were, never captured what he meant to the team.
Around Bryant and Rizzo, Theo Epstein—the genius architect who had already broken the Curse of the Bambino in Boston—had assembled a supporting cast that seemed almost unfair. Addison Russell, the 22-year-old shortstop acquired in the Jeff Samardzija trade, played defense like a young Ozzie Smith and showed flashes of power that suggested he could be a star. Javier Báez, with his impossible tag moves and his bat-flipping swagger, brought an electric energy that made every routine play feel like a highlight. Kyle Schwarber, the 240-pound catcher-turned-outfielder who had made his name with tape-measure home runs in the 2015 postseason, missed almost the entire 2016 season with a torn ACL and LCL suffered in a collision with Dexter Fowler in the outfield grass. The injury was supposed to end his year. But Schwarber—stubborn, powerful, and determined—had other plans.
And then there was Dexter Fowler, the leadoff man and center fielder, the stabilizing force at the top of the lineup who set the table for everyone else. Fowler had nearly signed with the Orioles in the offseason before a late change of heart brought him back to Chicago. That decision, made on a whim, may have been the most important move of the entire season.
The Summer of Dominance
The 2016 Cubs did not just win games. They obliterated opponents. Through the first four months of the season, Chicago played baseball at a level rarely seen in the modern era. By the All-Star break, they were 53-35 and led the National League Central by seven games. But it was the way they won that turned heads. They scored runs in bunches, they pitched with precision, and they played defense that bordered on acrobatic. Jake Arrieta, coming off a Cy Young season in 2015, continued to pitch like an ace even if his numbers regressed slightly. Jon Lester, the veteran left-hander signed to a massive free-agent deal in 2015, pitched to a 2.44 ERA and threw 202 innings of masterful control. Kyle Hendricks—the bespectacled Dartmouth graduate with an 88-mph fastball—became the unlikeliest ace in baseball, leading the National League with a 2.13 ERA and a 0.98 WHIP.
The bullpen, which had been a weakness in 2015, became a strength. Aroldis Chapman arrived in a July trade from the Yankees, his 103-mph fastball turning the eighth and ninth innings into a formality. His acquisition was controversial—Chapman had served a 30-game suspension in the spring under MLB's domestic violence policy—but Epstein and the front office judged that the championship window demanded a move that would shorten games. It was a cold calculation, the kind that executives make in private and defend in public. And it worked.
The Cubs won 103 games in 2016, the most in baseball and the most in franchise history since 1910. They scored 808 runs, allowed 556, and finished with a run differential of plus-252. Every advanced metric pointed to dominance. The postseason was not a hope. It was a coronation waiting to happen.
The Playoffs: Walking Through Fire
The National League Division Series against the San Francisco Giants—the odd-year dynasty that had won three titles in five seasons—was supposed to be the Cubs' first real test. Instead, it was a formality. Chicago swept the Giants in four games, and in the clinching Game 4, the Cubs exploded for six runs in the top of the ninth inning at AT&T Park, turning a 5-5 tie into an 11-6 victory. The Giants, baseball's most resilient postseason team, had no answer. The Cubs would not be haunted.
The National League Championship Series was a different beast. The Los Angeles Dodgers had Clayton Kershaw, the best pitcher of his generation, and the Cubs had to beat him twice to advance. They did it the hard way. Game 6 at Wrigley Field was the kind of game that cities remember for generations. The Cubs trailed 5-2 in the bottom of the ninth, facing elimination, and the crowd at Wrigley had the hollow, sick feeling of another October ending. But then came the rally. A single. A walk. A double. A groundout that scored a run. And then, with the score 5-4 and two outs, a wild pitch from Dodgers closer Kenley Jansen that allowed Willson Contreras to race home from third base, tying the game at 5-5.
The roar that erupted from Wrigley Field that night was not the sound of relief. It was the sound of disbelief. The Cubs, the cursed Cubs, were not supposed to come back. They were supposed to find a way to lose, as they always had. But this team was different. And when Báez scored the winning run in the bottom of the eighth inning of an extra-inning thriller—the eighth, not the ninth, because the game had moved to the tenth—the Cubs had clinched their first National League pennant since 1945. The city of Chicago erupted. The ivy-covered walls of Wrigley Field had witnessed history.
"We're not done yet," Rizzo said in the champagne-soaked clubhouse. And he meant it.
Game 7: The Rain That Changed Everything
Cleveland's Progressive Field was cold on the night of November 2, 2016. The temperature hovered around 40 degrees, and a steady wind blew in from Lake Erie, turning fly balls into adventures and freezing the breath of everyone in the stadium. The Cleveland Indians, winners of 94 games and possessors of their own dynastic pitching staff, were not supposed to be here. Their season had been defined by injuries and resilience. Their manager, Terry Francona, had already broken one curse—the Red Sox's 86-year drought in 2004—and was now trying to break another.
The game itself was chaos from the opening pitch. Dexter Fowler led off with a home run, the first leadoff home run in World Series Game 7 history, and the Cubs seemed to be in control. But the Indians battled back. Carlos Santana homered. The score seesawed. By the time the fifth inning rolled around, the Cubs led 5-1 and the champagne was being chilled in the visiting clubhouse. That lead evaporated in the sixth inning, when the Indians scored three runs on a two-out rally capped by a Rajai Davis double that sliced the gap to 5-4. The sellout crowd in Cleveland was on its feet, screaming, believing that the same destiny that had always favored the Indians in 2016 was about to strike again.
And then came the eighth inning. With the Cubs clinging to a 6-4 lead and one out, Rajai Davis—the veteran outfielder who had spent his entire career as a role player—stepped to the plate against Aroldis Chapman, who had already thrown 42 pitches over the previous two nights. Chapman's fastball had lost a few ticks, but it was still 97, 98, 99 mph. Davis, 35 years old and never known for power, took a 2-2 fastball and drove it over the left-field wall. Tie game. Progressive Field exploded. The curse was alive. The Cubs had found a way to lose again.
And then came the rain.
At 11:25 PM Eastern Time, with the score tied 6-6 in the top of the ninth inning, the umpires called for the tarp. The game was suspended. The stadium went quiet. The crowd, which had been roaring just moments earlier, collectively exhaled as the grounds crew scrambled to cover the infield. The rain fell in sheets, driven by a wind that howled through the empty stands of Progressive Field. It was Cleveland in November, cold and wet and miserable. And for the Chicago Cubs, it was either the cruelest joke the baseball gods had ever played or the greatest gift they had ever received.
In the Cubs' clubhouse, the players sat in silence. Some stared at the floor. Some pulled out their phones. Some went to the spread of food that nobody touched. Maddon walked through the room, calm as always, his message simple: "We've got this. We're the better team. We'll finish this." But even Maddon, with all his optimism, must have felt the weight of history pressing down on him. Every Cubs fan who had ever lived—every grandfather who had passed down the stories of 1969 and 1984 and 2003—was watching. The entire city of Chicago, the North Side and the South Side, the lifelong fans and the bandwagon jumpers, was holding its breath.
The rain delay lasted seventeen minutes.
Seventeen minutes that felt like a century.
And then, as suddenly as it had started, the rain stopped. The tarp came off. The grounds crew scattered diamond dust across the infield. The umpires walked to home plate and gestured toward the dugouts. Play ball.
The Final Out
The top of the tenth inning was an exercise in controlled demolition. Kyle Schwarber—who had not played a game in the outfield since his catastrophic knee injury in April—doubled to lead off the inning. It was his sixth hit of the World Series, a remarkable feat for a player who had missed nearly the entire season. Maddon replaced Schwarber with Albert Almora Jr. as a pinch runner. Rizzo was intentionally walked. Then, with two outs and the bases loaded, the Indians' Bryan Shaw threw a wild pitch that allowed Almora to race home with the go-ahead run. The Cubs led 7-6.
But the inning was not over. Miguel Montero, the veteran catcher who had been acquired from the Cubs' own division rivals, the Milwaukee Brewers, stepped to the plate. Montero had barely played in the postseason. He had been relegated to the bench behind Willson Contreras, the rookie who had taken the catching job and run with it. But Maddon, always willing to trust a veteran in a big spot, sent Montero to the plate. On a 1-1 pitch, Montero blooped a single into left field that scored two more runs. The Cubs led 8-6.
When Mike Montgomery started warming up in the bullpen for the bottom of the tenth, the plan was clear: he would be the second pitcher in the inning, brought in specifically to face the left-handed Rajai Davis with two outs. But the plan changed when Davis did not come to the plate with two outs. Instead, Michael Martinez—a light-hitting utility player who had been acquired just weeks earlier—stepped in. The Cubs were one out away.
The pitch from Montgomery was a 95-mph fastball, up and away. Martinez swung and chopped the ball toward third base. Kris Bryant charged it, fielded it cleanly on the short hop, and fired across the diamond to Anthony Rizzo at first base. The throw was slightly high, but Rizzo stretched, his foot reaching for the bag as the ball settled into his glove. His foot landed on the bag a fraction of a second before Martinez's foot hit the base.
Out.
For a moment, there was silence. And then the world exploded.
Rizzo, who had beaten cancer and believed he would never play baseball again, fell to his knees in the infield dirt and buried his face in his hands. Bryant, still holding the ball, collapsed to the ground and screamed into the night. The rest of the Cubs poured out of the dugout and converged on the mound, a pile of blue pinstripes and joy in the middle of the field, as the scoreboard in left field flashed the words that generations of Cubs fans had waited their entire lives to see:
WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS
The Aftermath: A City Released
In Chicago, the celebration was immediate and uncontrollable. Hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets of Wrigleyville, climbing streetlights, standing on rooftops, singing "Go Cubs Go" until their voices gave out. The bars on Clark and Addison ran out of beer by 3 AM. Strangers hugged strangers. Grown men wept. The Chicago River was dyed blue. The parade, held on a gray November Friday, drew an estimated five million people, the largest gathering in the history of the city.
But the true measure of what the Cubs had done was not in the parade or the confetti or the championship merchandise that sold out in hours. It was in the faces of the old men and women who had waited their entire lives for this moment. It was in the stories that poured out of the city in the days after Game 7—the grandmother who had become a Cubs fan in 1945 and had never wavered, the father who had taken his son to Wrigley for the first time in 2003 and had to explain why the air went out of the stadium when Bartman reached for that foul ball, the lifelong fan who had made a deathbed pact with his son: "When they win, pour out a little of your beer for me."
The Reckoning with History
The Curse of the Billy Goat—the legendary hex placed on the Cubs in 1945 when Billy Goat Tavern owner William "Billy Goat" Sianis was asked to leave Wrigley Field because his pet goat, Murphy, was bothering other patrons—had always been more fable than fact. But fables take on power when they explain a century of failure. The Cubs had not won a World Series since 1908, when Theodore Roosevelt was president, when the first Model T was still rolling off the assembly line, when the forward pass had not yet been legalized in football. They had come close: 1918, 1929, 1932, 1935, 1938, 1945, 1984, 1989, 2003, 2008, 2015. Each time, they found a way to lose. Each time, the heartbreak was more exquisite, more cruel, more perfectly crafted to maximize suffering.
That was the curse. Not a goat. Not a hex. It was the accumulated weight of a century of failure, a psychological burden that infected every player who put on the uniform, every fan who bought a ticket, every broadcaster who called a game. The 2016 Cubs did not just win a championship. They broke a spell that had defined an entire identity. Chicago was no longer the city of "wait 'til next year." Next year had finally arrived.
What They Left Behind
The 2016 Cubs changed baseball. Their success validated the analytics-driven approach that Theo Epstein had championed, showing that a front office willing to prioritize long-term thinking could build a dynasty in a small-market-free-agency era. They demonstrated the value of position player flexibility, of defensive versatility, of a manager willing to embrace unconventional thinking. They proved that culture—the kind of culture that Maddon had so carefully cultivated—was not a soft concept but a competitive advantage.
But more than that, they gave the city of Chicago something it had never had. For decades, the Cubs had been defined by their lovable losing, the "lovable losers" tag that made the team seem endearing in defeat. But the 2016 Cubs were not lovable losers. They were relentless, confident, and unforgiving. They were everything that previous generations of Cubs teams had not been. And in the end, for the first time in 108 years, they were champions.
The final out of Game 7 is still replayed every October. The rain delay is still debated. The name "Rajai Davis" is still invoked with a mix of terror and grudging respect by Cubs fans who remember that moment when it all nearly slipped away. But the outcome is never in doubt. The Cubs won. The curse died. And in its place, a city was reborn.
The ivy still grows on the outfield walls. The manual scoreboard still clicks and whirs. The marquee at Clark and Addison still glows blue with the schedule of home games. But something changed in 2016. The ghosts that once haunted Wrigley Field were finally laid to rest. And when you walk under that marquee now, the air feels different. Lighter. Free.
Because for the Chicago Cubs, next year finally came.
Nathan Caldwell
Nathan Caldwell edits and writes multi-sport coverage for True Grit Sports, turning game notes, market movement, and key trends into readable context.