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Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the Chicago Cubs. But they can't go because that would spoil their custom of never going. It is an irreconcilable paradox.
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Bill Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away)
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Listen, you have to understand something. In all of the history of professional sports, the Cubs are the ultimate symbol of complete failure. The championship of baseball is something called the World Series, and it’s been so long since the Cubs have won it that no one who is alive could remember the last time they won it. It’s so long that no one alive knew anyone who was alive when they won it. We’re talking centuries of abject failure here.
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John Scalzi (The Human Division (Old Man's War, #5))
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(Cobb brought as his guest Tigers third baseman George Moriarity, who during the 1935 World Series as an umpire would distinguish himself by stalking over to the Chicago Cubs dugout and threatening to eject the entire team after some players had made anti-Semitic remarks to Tigers star Hank Greenberg.) The next day Cobb broke his rule about
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Charles Leerhsen (Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty)
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some people might argue that a fan who roots for a losing franchise isn't a very smart fan, but you have to be pretty crafty in the head to continually enjoy cubs baseball. who do you think is smarter? the Yankees fan who can't be happy just getting to the World Series? or the Cubs fan, who can somehow manage to have the best summer of his life watching his team finish 17 games out of first place
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the heckler
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Boston and Chicago are two great seats of mathematical research located in major American cities. Until they won in 2004, if you asked a baseball fan in Boston what they most hoped to see in their lifetime, they would have answered a World Series win for the Boston Red Sox. Chicago Cubs fans are still waiting. Ask a mathematician in either of those cities or anywhere else in the world what they would most hope to see in their lifetime, and they would most likely answer: "A proof o the Riemann hypothesis!" Perhaps mathematicians, like Red Sox fans, will have their prayers answered in our lifetimes, or at least before the Cubs win the World Series.
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Stephen Hawking (God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History)
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If we can’t go in,” Sianis announced, “the Cubs will never win.” Wrigley’s private security guards blocked the way, and the Curse of the Billy Goat was born. The Cubs lost Game Four and went on to lose the Series. They had been in seven World Series since 1908 and lost them all. They wouldn’t reach another World Series for more than seventy years. But as George Will would note, “Cub fans like to say that any team can have a bad century.
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Kevin Cook (Ten Innings at Wrigley: The Wildest Ballgame Ever, with Baseball on the Brink)
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He put a Cubs World Series hat on his grandfather’s grave and felt like a lunatic until he saw he wasn’t the only one—little spots of blue dotted the cemetery and made his chest squeeze.
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Jennifer Close (Marrying the Ketchups)
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I thought I was going to miss it. I'd be at Chris Pratt's house when the first pitch was thrown. He'd be cooking tacos made with the meat of a wild boar he himself had killed. I'd be eating those tacos and interviewing him. That was the conceit of the story. But after twenty minutes, I could tell that he was a good guy and would understand, so I told him everything - the press pass, the tough choice, the Cubs, the precipice - "Down three games to one in the Series? Not many people come back from that, mate" [see previous chapter] - and he insisted we drink tequila, turn on the big TV and watch the game. He said he was partial to the Cubs, "because if they win, anything is possible.
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Rich Cohen (The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse)
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I ran into Chris Pratt a few months later. He was surrounded by reporters and focused on selling a movie, but he shouted when he saw me: "Hey, dude! The Cubs! The Cubs! Our prayer worked!
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Rich Cohen (The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse)
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If the Cubs win the World Series, the playing of the sport must be discontinued. The leagues disbanded, the players sent home, the stadiums destroyed. Professional baseball really began with the team that became the Cubs. Early in the twentieth century, that team won and won and won and then, for whatever reason, stopped winning. They set of on a 108-year trek through the wilderness, plumbed the depths of defeat, then somehow found their way back. 2016 was 1908 all over again. The historic arc of the game could finally be recognized. It's a story that begins and ends in Chicago. If they won Game 7, that story would reach its obvious conclusion. Disband and go home. Anything beyond this point is postscript.
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Rich Cohen (The Chicago Cubs: Story of a Curse)
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the Cubs would never win another World Series because they weren’t nice to his goat!
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David A. Kelly (The World Series Curse (Ballpark Mysteries Super Special #1))
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Old Man's War (Scalzi, John) - Your Highlight on page 60 | Location 896-897 | Added on Saturday, April 25, 2015 10:20:46 AM “What pissed me off was the one where they got me all pissed off,” Thomas said. “I swear I was going to clobber that guy. He said the Cubs ought to have been demoted to the minor leagues after they went two centuries without a World Series championship.
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Anonymous
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The Cubs are a major league baseball team based in Chicago. Apparently, the team was once cursed by a goat and is doomed now to never win the World Series. The 71 seats [auctioned by the Chicago Board of Exchange] are adjacent to the Cubs' dugout on the third-base line. This is an unnecessary detail needed to give color to what would otherwise be a dull and uninspiring narrative.
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Rakesh V. Vohra (Principles of Pricing: An Analytical Approach)
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the Cubs ought to have been demoted to the minor leagues after they went two centuries without a World Series championship.
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John Scalzi (Old Man's War (Old Man's War, #1))
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my research yielded one profoundly disturbing fact that he would probably have preferred had remained hidden: Blomberg still holds out hope that his beloved childhood heroes, the Chicago Cubs, will win the World Series in his lifetime.
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Lee Strobel (The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus)
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Their 108-year wait for another title was the longest championship drought in sports. The last time they did win the World Series, in 1908, occurred in the lifetimes of Mark Twain, Florence Nightingale, Geronimo, Winslow Homer, and Joshua Chamberlain, and in a world when the Ottoman Empire still existed but the 19th Amendment, talking motion pictures, electrified traffic lights, and world wars did not.
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Tom Verducci (The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse)
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A book never written: “Chicago Cubs, World Series Champions!” by Ben Waiten
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LOL Books (Just Kidding About Sports!: LOL Sport Jokes, Riddles, Brain Teasers and Puns for Sports Nuts (Just Kidding Joke Books Book 1))
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Then she pointed across the rolling hill to the most famous grave in the [All Saints] cemetery, which is where she was headed next, to pay respects to Harry Caray before going to watch the game. His stone has green apples on top, an inside joke referencing a quote about the Cubs one day making it to a World Series just as surely as God made green apples
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Wright Thompson (The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business)