"The story of [Carl] Edwards' signing will sound like an apocryphal tale if he one day makes the big leagues," Baseball America once wrote, three years before Edwards did in fact make the big leagues and four before he was standing on the mound in the 10th inning of Game 7 of a World Series. Here's the story, condensed, and you can believe it if you choose:
Edwards was a rail-thin right-hander who threw in the mid-80s and never joined the showcase circuit for draftable and recruitable high schoolers. An area scout for the Texas Rangers, Chris Kemp, found him playing in an adult league and recruited him to pitch at a junior college where Kemp coached. The Rangers drafted him in the 48th round, and Edwards ditched his college commitment. Besides Edwards, only one other player drafted in the 48th round that year has made the majors, for all of four innings. The next year, there was no 48th round.
They'll say of the game we all just watched that you couldn't make it up if you tried, but in fact no fiction writer would tell it this way. Fiction likes to prophesy its heroes, to plant little hints and foreshadowing so that we know who we should be paying attention from the start. It's the Law of Conservation of Details: We can't possibly keep 7 billion characters straight, so the author limits our view to The One. This right here is the hero that fiction would give us:
Kris Bryant smiling as he fields and throws for the final out is the greatest. pic.twitter.com/8bAU1ayKbJ
— Mike Cole (@MikeColeNESN) November 3, 2016
Kris Bryant, one of the best high school hitters in the country when he was 18, the best college hitter by a mile when he was 21, the greatest minor leaguer in the world when he was 22, the best rookie in the world at 23, the best player in -- well, in the National League, at least, at age 24, and the smiling face of this Cubs championship. A worthy hero.
He was not, though, the MVP of this series. The MVP of the series is an absolute miracle: After high school, Ben Zobrist "had no offers to play college baseball. A trip to Bob Schlemmer's Central Illinois Exposure Day at Illinois Central College" -- what are we even talking about here? -- "after graduation brought one offer from Olivet Nazarene University, an NAIA school in Kankakee. 'I'll never forget that,' Schlemmer said. 'He signed his letter-of-intent right on the picnic table.'" The guy's career almost ended because his dad wouldn't pay $50 for him to go to a tryout.
He was drafted in the sixth round, a round that would produce one other major leaguer you miiiiiight remember, the reliever Cla Meredith. The round produced 45 wins above replacement level in the majors, of which 42 are credited to Zobrist, a player who had three career home runs before his 27th birthday. He's 35 now, and about 10 minutes before Edwards came into the game he slapped a double down the third-base line to drive in the go-ahead run in perhaps the greatest Game 7 in World Series history. He is a miracle.
Rajai Davis: Miracle. Thirty-eighth-round pick. Didn't have a regular job in the majors until he was 28. Didn't hit his 13th career home run until he was already 30. At age 35 this year, he led the league in stolen bases and knocked 13 homers in a single season, if you include the tying dinger off Aroldis Chapman in the eighth inning of the greatest Game 7 in the history of baseball.
That home run matched the bomb hit by David Ross, a seventh-rounder whose career somehow outlasted all but one first-rounder (CC Sabathia) taken the same year. It's probably fair to say that Ross is in the majors this year entirely because he's a great guy and a good friend, and because Jon Lester's UCL didn't snap before the season began. Yet there were games in this series when he looked like the best player on the field, and in what was essentially a bonus game for his career -- Eddie Vedder sang him into retirement three days ago! -- he reminded us that he has homered more often (per at-bat) over the past five years than Prince Fielder and Adrian Gonzalez. Miracle.
Ross also drew a walk Wednesday off Cody Allen, who otherwise threw two hitless innings to complete one of the great postseasons we've ever seen from a reliever: 13⅔ innings, scoreless, 24 strikeouts, against the best, second-best and maybe fifth-best offenses in the majors. There he was, when Corey Kluber finally caved in after starting yet another game on short rest, after Andrew Miller's slider finally started to show its exhaustion, when there was nobody left -- there was Allen, as dominant as ever and pushing this tie game into extra innings. Twenty-third-round pick. The only player from that round to make the majors. Miracle.
Most of the players we see in the majors were the best player on every team they ever played on, but that's not universally true. In the era of showcases and travel-ball teams, where the best teenagers from around the country get funneled into the same weekend tournaments, a player like Zobrist will reach a point where he's no longer special. If he's lucky enough to be drafted, he'll look around his minor-league clubhouses and see just how special he isn't. Baseball is extremely good at finding the couple hundred best young players, calling them a cohort and turning them into Kris Bryants. After the sorting is over, though, there are 7 billion people left over, and from those 7 billion come the stories.
In a baseball memoir called "Odd Man Out," a former minor leaguer named Matt McCarthy writes about the year he spent playing short-season ball. McCarthy was drafted in the 21st round and signed for $1,000, and at one point he and his teammates complain about the special treatment that a first-round pick always gets.
"When Joe has a good game, the coaches or writers or fans or whoever will nod their heads and reaffirm what they already know to be true ... that Joe's a star in the making. But when one of us does good, people will think it's luck or something because we're not one of the chosen few predicted to make the big leagues."
"And if Joe does bad," said Blake, picking up where Heath left off, "they'll just chalk it up to him having a bad night. But if one of us goes out and gives up six runs, well ... that's what people expect because nobody's countin' on us to make it anyway. It's all a self-fulfilling prophecy."
In many ways, this is true. Every late-round pick can tell you about the playing time he lost, or the promotion he didn't get, because a lesser player was a better prospect. The game is not entirely fair to 48th-round picks when they're 22.
But there comes a point when it gets to be totally fair. Davis, that 38th-round pick, got to bat against Aroldis Chapman, the hardest throwing pitcher ever and a player who signed a contract coming out of Cuba that was 30,000 times more than the one Davis probably signed coming out of college. There are no separate leagues for the prospects and the non-prospects. Eventually, they face one another, and no matter how hard Chapman throws it, there is no scout, coach, writer or doubter who is allowed to tell Davis not to spin on it and send it into the happiest landing spot that Progressive Field has ever offered. Zobrist got to drive in Bryant, the obvious hero of our story, to give the Cubs back the lead, and Edwards got to come in to protect the lead in a game that will one day sound like an apocryphal tale.
"It's been 108 years of love, support and patience waiting for a team like this to make it happen," a soaked Theo Epstein told a soaked Bill Murray after the game, and if he'd been surrounded by a million Cubs fans instead of in a closed-off clubhouse it would have been the line that brought the biggest cheer.
We wonder, sometimes, why we do this ritual, the every-night-at-7:05 ritual with the occasional October if we're lucky enough. We wonder why this weird sport with its weird rules and its odds stacked so solidly against our team makes us so happy. We wonder, especially, why we draw such pride and satisfaction from events we are not even actually participating in. We are not the players. We do not cause these events. Why? Why do we do this:
my grandpa has been waiting 81 years for this😭 #GoCubbies pic.twitter.com/K5GIl4TpZr
— clare (@_claremoser) November 3, 2016
Here's part of why: Even if we know we are not the players, we know that the players -- at least the Zobrists, the Davises, the Allens, the Edwards -- are us. "It's been 108 years of love, support and patience waiting for a team like this to make it happen," Epstein said of himself, but it's just as true for the fans, and it's just as true for the players. None of what happened Wednesday was ever guaranteed, and none of it was ever impossible.