Cubs Stay Loose at Wrigley Field

BY ESPN

More than any other place in sports,the baseball clubhouse is a womb. Submerged inside a stadium, windowless and guarded, it allows the men who play the game to bathe in the sanctity of their profession. As an outsider, walking into one always feels like a covert act.

The Cubs' brand-new 30,000-square-foot clubhouse is a grocery-store-sized monument to comfort, status and excess. In the middle of the main room is a circular conversation pit with leather seating and a projector beaming the Cubs' logo onto the ceiling, giving the space the feel of an underground planetarium. The lockers circle the room, each one precisely 60 feet, 6 inches from the logo.

It's disconcerting to walk through the 102-year-old ballpark, descend a staircase, make a left and a right and find yourself in this room, staring at the Cubs-blue mood-lighting panels that separate each locker and looking up to see the gallery lights that bend toward photos of children and spouses. It's like they built a Vegas nightclub beneath Stonehenge.

But the Cubs didn't stop there. As if the mood lighting and conversation pit don't provide enough of a sanctuary from reality, they created a players-only party room, a clubhouse within a clubhouse. The party room -- separate from the training room, separate from the interview room, separate from the dining room -- is reserved for wins. When those occur, and they occur often, there's a smoke machine and disco lighting and video screens hanging from the ceiling that show the head of the player of the game superimposed onto the body of some animated creature doing something or other. The player of the game gets doused with water while everyone dances and the videos play and the smoke wafts and the lights flash. Like all exclusive clubs, details are vague, but it's whispered that celebrities have been invited into the party room, and the entire grounds crew was once honored when the Cubs won a game after two rain delays.

Manager Joe Maddon and bench coach Dave Martinez started the concept with the Rays in Tampa, and they managed to get the party room built into the architecture of the renovated Wrigley. Their idea, as Ben Zobrist explains: "You win hard for 30 minutes, and you lose hard for 30 minutes. After that, it's gone."

THE CUBS' INSISTENCE on living in the present can be seen as a communal act of self-preservation. Given everything that has happened over the past 108 years, it's possible to say, without exaggeration and by whatever measure, that this is a team working under an unmatched level of expectation. The Cubs are constantly asked whether a finish other than the team's first title since 1908 will be acceptable. They could conceivably win 100 games, plow through the postseason, lose in the seventh game of the World Series and be considered failures.

How do they handle it? Easy: They ignore the mystical and live inside the cliché. It's a long grind, 162 games of trying their damnedest to end the day in the party room and trying just as hard to forget it if they don't. To them, there is nothing beyond baseball at work here. They don't care about Bartman or billy goats or 1908. They come to this glitzy clubhouse bearing the weight of their own histories, not yours. There's nothing sacred about what they're doing, no moral high ground to ascend. If they happen to win it, and in the process link you to your father and him to his, all the better.

"We understand that Wrigley Field is a special place, but I don't think anybody is worried about history or what happened before," catcher David Ross says. "If you go out and work as hard as you possibly can and play as hard as you possibly can, the only thing left is winning and losing. You don't have a lot of control over that. It's either your night or it's not."

Thursday, September 22 Scoreboard

Detroit 9, Minnesota 2

Detroit 4, Minnesota 2

Boston 5, Baltimore 3

Cleveland 5, Kansas City 2

New York Mets 9, Philadelphia 8 (F/11)

Atlanta 6, Miami 3

Tampa Bay 2, New York Yankees 0

Milwaukee 3, Pittsburgh 1

Los Angeles Angels 2, Houston 0

Los Angeles Dodgers 7, Colorado 4

San Francisco 2, San Diego 1

Friday, September 23 Schedule (All Times Central)

St. Louis at Chicago Cubs, 1 p.m.

New York Yankees at Toronto, 6 p.m.

Arizona at Baltimore, 6:05 p.m.

Washington at Pittsburgh, 6:05 p.m.

Chicago White Sox at Cleveland, 6:10 p.m.

Kansas City at Detroit, 6:10 p.m.

Philadelphia at New York Mets, 6:10 p.m.

Altanta at Miami, 6:10 p.m.

Boston at Tampa Bay, 6:10 p.m.

Cincinnati at Milwaukee, 7:10 p.m.

Seattle at Minnesota, 7:10 p.m.

Los Angeles Angels at Houston, 7:10 p.m.

Texas at Oakland, 8:35 p.m.

Colorado at Los Angeles Dodgers, 9:10 p.m.

San Francisco at San Dieg, 9:40 p.m.

Saturday, September 24 Schedule (All Times Central)

Kansas City at Detroit, 12:05 p.m.

St. Louis at Chicago Cubs, 12:05 p.m.

Texas at Oakland, 3:05 p.m.

New York Yankees at Toronto, 3:07 p.m.

Boston at Tampa Bay, 5:10 p.m.

Arizona at Baltimore, 6:05 p.m.

Washington at Pittsburgh, 6:05 p.m.

Chicago White Sox at Cleveland, 6:10 p.m.

Cincinnati at Milwaukee, 6:10 p.m.

Seattle at Minnesota, 6:10 p.m.

Los Angeles Angels at Houston, 6:10 p.m.

Philadelphia at New York Mets, 6:10 p.m.

Atlanta at Miami, 6:10 p.m.

San Francisco at San Diego, 7:40 p.m.

Colorado at Los Angeles Dodgers, 8:10 p.m.

Sunday, September 25 Schedule (All Times Central)

New York Yankees at Toronto, 12:07 p.m.

Chicago White sox at Cleveland, 12:10 p.m.

Kansas City at Detroit, 12:10 p.m.

Philadelphia at New York Mets, 12:10 p.m.

Atlanta at Miami, 12:10 p.m.

Boston at Tampa Bay, 12:10 p.m.

Arizona at Baltimore, 12:35 p.m.

Washington at Pittsburgh, 12:35 p.m.

Cincinnati at Milwaukee, 1:10 p.m.

Seattle at Minnesota, 1:10 p.m.

Los Angeles Angels at Houston, 1:10 p.m.

Texas at Oakland, 3:05 p.m.

Colorado at Los Angeles Dodgers, 3:10 p.m.

San Francisco at San Diego, 3:40 p.m.

St. Louis at Chicago Cubs, 7 p.m.