Commentary: The last pennant before Armageddon?

By Peter Kravitz

The film Back to the Future Part II predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series in 2015. They didn't. However, there is prophetic connection to the Cubs' finally reaching their first World Series in 71 years.

W.P. Kinsella, whose novel Shoeless Joe inspired the film Field of Dreams, published a short story 32 years ago where the Cubs meet the Dodgers for the National League pennant. A Cubs NLCS victory will lead to the world's destruction.

"The Last Pennant Before Armageddon" describes how Cubs' fans, so frustrated with their team's failure to reach the World Series since 1945, lobby God for divine assistance.

The story's fictional Cubs' manager, Al Tiller, dreams that deceased Cubs' fans, players, and even Chicago luminaries like Mayor Richard Daley and gangster Al Capone (though "he had always thought of Capone as a White Sox fan") plead with God, who finally says, "When the Cubs next win the National League Championship, it will be the last pennant before Armageddon."

Kinsella, a Canadian who died at 81 this September, was fascinated with how "the timelessness of baseball . . . makes it more conductive to magical happenings," as he wrote in the introduction to the short-story collection The Thrill of the Grass, where "The Last Pennant Before Armageddon" appeared.

Kinsella's Cubs-Dodgers NLCS occurs in the early 1980s, when the world is threatened by a fictitious U.S.-Soviet confrontation over Sri Lanka.

Yet humanity survived the Cold War and with the Cubs well into their World Series, it appears that the world is safe, despite on-going natural threats like global warming, killer asteroids, and super volcanoes.

Of course, some political leaders and pundits have expressed nervousness about Donald Trump's access to nuclear codes, should he win the presidential election next week. While Trump has rained down furious attacks on one-time Cub fan Hillary Clinton, he's been mum about her manning our nuclear arsenal.

In the final debate Hillary said, "This is not someone who should ever have the nuclear codes. It's not hard to imagine Donald Trump leading us into a war just because somebody got under his very thin skin."

Kinsella definitely predicted what our future leaders would be like when he wrote:

"It is my observation that almost without exception, incompetent people are in positions of power. Society survives because of luck."

On the other hand, Kinsella's tale was based on the irony that Cubs' fans would finally win the pennant and not get to enjoy the World Series. And they are truly enjoying their World Series, as exhibited by the madness of the first World Series game at Wrigley since 1945 and the fact that the loveable losers are only two games from winning their first World Series since 1908.

Peter Kravitz is a former Philadelphia reporter and current New York journalism teacher. cassady495@yahoo.com