My wife called it an editorial cartoon style-which that description is rather nice. I frankly ran out of time to do something stylized, so I went back to my traditional drawing style of slightly cartoonish, slightly realistic. I’d like to redraw it in the cubist style. Baez, Russell, and Montgomery were all important to the Cubs in the postseason. At some point I will be redrawing this illustration to include all five players. In retrospect, I want to include them in the drawing, for a couple reasons. Baez, Russell, and Montgomery got excluded. The area didn’t really have room for all five players, so I focused on just Rizzo and Bryant. This illustration had a specific space to fill in the scorecard, the vertical spot on the right. In fact, afterwards he admitted that he didn’t know what to do after the final out. Mike Montgomery, who pitched the final out, was left standing awkwardly.
It also included Javier Baez and Addison Russell landing after their celebration jump. The image is an iconic photo by the Chicago Tribune’s Brian Cassella. They each ran up to each other first and celebrated together. So fitting that the final play of the game was Kris Bryant throwing to Anthony Rizzo. The Cubs winning the World Series! That’s INCREDIBLE! I knew I would include the celebration scene on the scorecard, along with the words really big CUBS WIN THE WORLD SERIES! At the end of this scorecard one team was going to be the champion. But just like every game, it starts the same-with a blank slate. Game seven is so big, the scorecard needed to be printed on gold foil paper. The eight-hour workday ended up being a huge benefit to me, as I was able to get eight hours of sleep before game 7! So I called in sick to work, so I could sleep during the day. I wouldn’t be able to function late into the night on no sleep from the night prior. I needed to be completely alert for game seven. With game seven happening that night, I knew I needed to get some sleep. Then 8am hit, and it was time to go to work! The extra design flourishes on the card took me all through the night and into the morning. I pulled a complete all-nighter to finish the game 6 scorecard. I pull near all-nighters to complete them for Chicago magazine. I was even going to design it ahead of time, because the deadlines for these scorecards are so tight. One phrase I played with my head was, “Thank you Cubs for a great 2016 season” or something like that. Some games are just duds, and so I have a back-up plan just in case to feature SOMETHING, anything. I started planning in my head what I would say on the scorecard if the Cubs lost. At the start of every game thereafter, I would pull out a fresh scorecard, thinking this might be the final one. When the Indians took the series lead 3-1, the Cubs were on the verge of losing the World Series. I never really thought I would need all seven. Every day a new blog post in the series will be posted.Īt the start of the series, I printed out scorecards for seven games. Game 7 will go down as on of the most epic in baseball history: four hours, 28 minutes of stomach-churning drama that mercifully ended a drought and changed history.This is the 10th of 13 daily blog posts covering my World Series scorecards. A 17-minute rain delay washed away the panic, then World Series MVP Ben Zobrist smacked an RBI double for the lead and Miguel Montero singled in Anthony Rizzo for a 2-run cushion that would be sorely needed as the Indians would not go quietly in the tenth.
In the eighth, Rajai Davis of the Indians™ erased the Cubs lead with a 2-run home run which sent the game to extras and Cubs fans to hysteria. The winner-take-all Game 7 featured drama and tension throughout, including two ties and an extra frame of baseball. The Cubs came back from a 3-games-to-1 World Series deficit to end years of frustration, but it was no easy feat. The definitive 2016 World Series™ Game 7 is presented in its entirety, preserving the complete, unedited footage of the game for which Chicago Cubs fans had been waiting 108 years! And that was epic, wasn't it?" – Tom Ricketts, Chairman of the Chicago Cubs™