I don’t know if I properly processed, at the time it happened, how sad it is that Kyle Schwarber is no longer a Chicago Cub. So many people had pushed for it for so long that I guess I was kind of begrudgingly ready. Ready in the prepared sense. Not in the “I’ll be relieved when this happens” sense. And with Schwarber leaving at a moment when the Cubs were in a disastrous state and going to a fun team, I was happy for him.
But last night made me remember how cool he is.
There was a ton of (deserved) love for Jon Lester last night, and plenty of shots of Schwarber’s greatest moments, but my favorite is a private one, when he told Theo Epstein in a pre-draft interview, “It really fucking pisses me off when people say I can’t catch.”
On the one hand, you could say Kyle Schwarber didn’t work out in Chicago. On the other, you could say he absolutely raked and hit multiple enormous playoff home runs as a rookie in 2015 (the most fun of those seasons) and then came through in the most heroic manner possible in the World Series, the only World Series, the World Series that may well be the only World Series this Cubs core had.
I think that’s what made last night sad. It was a big “what might have been” night. It’s half greedy—I wanted a dynasty—but it’s also half regretful—I wish I’d soaked in how fun those teams were when we had them.
