Chicago turns Cubs blue for World Series celebration

The Chicago Cubs were the laughingstock of baseball for decades as their last championship in 1908 faded from living memory into fable.
As Major League Baseball’s other ancient dry spells - suffered by the cross-town Chicago White Sox and Boston Red Sox - were broken in the early 2000s, the Cubs’ century-long drought became an obscure, painful fact.
Team chairman Tom Ricketts, whose family bought the Cubs in 2009, addressed a sea of fans Friday at the city’s victory celebration, following the team’s 8-7 win over the Cleveland Indians in Wednesday’s deciding seventh game of the World Series, which ended Chicago’s drought at 108 years.
He posed a “trivia question” to the crowd: “How long has it been since the Cubs have won the World Series?”
At Grant Park, the central green space on Lake Michigan where local resident Barack Obama held his presidential victory rallies in 2008 and 2012, some shouted, “two days.” “The answer is zero years,” Ricketts said, “since the Cubs have won the World Series.”
Jubilant throngs estimated in the millions across the city met the team along a parade route that started at Wrigley Field on the North Side and wound along stretches of the Michigan Avenue shopping district and Lake Shore Drive.
Even the Chicago River, which is dyed green annually for Saint Patrick’s Day, was coloured swimming-pool blue in honour of the Cubs’ team colour.
At the Grant Park rally, where fans started arriving before dawn, the team organist played a few notes with the introduction of every team executive, coach and player to lend some of the Wrigley Field atmosphere, even adding flourishes to punctuate the speakers’ jokes.
Joe Maddon, the manager who has led the Cubs with a guru-like composure, carried out the World Series trophy - 14 kilograms of sterling silver, with 30 gold-plated pennants, one for each Major League team, surrounding a silver baseball embossed with latitude and longitude lines, symbolizing the world championship.
He said Friday was “Cubstock 2016.”

Ricketts the reason
Crane Kenney, a long-time Cubs executive, hinted at the reasons for the long drought as he credited the Ricketts family for finally turning the team around.
“They told us to think big and stop cutting corners,” he said. “They changed our culture.”
A key moment in the Cubs’ reversal of fortunes was the hiring of front-office wunderkind Theo Epstein as president of baseball operations in 2011.
In Boston, he had become the youngest general manager in Major League history as a 28-year-old in 2002, and received much of the credit when the long-suffering Red Sox ended their own championship drought in 2004 and grabbed another trophy in 2007.
The Cubs suffered through last-place finishes for the first three years of Epstein’s tenure, as they stockpiled top picks in baseball’s amateur draft and built what might be the strongest minor-league system in the sport.
Their young talent ripened in 2015, when the team reached the playoffs but fell one step short of the World Series.
Epstein’s grand plan came to fruition this year, when the Cubs were easily the Major Leagues’ best regular-season team and rolled through the National League playoffs. In the World Series, Chicago fell to a 3-1 deficit against Cleveland before proving their grit by winning three elimination games on the trot.
At the tender age of 42, Epstein has now guided teams out of droughts that lasted a combined 194 years.
“That parade was insane,” he told the fans Friday. “One hundred and eight years of support, patience, love for this team waiting for what happened two nights ago in Cleveland.”
One person in the audience held a “Theo 4 President” sign, four days before US elections.