The outer concourse of the upper deck at Wrigley Field provided a perfect view Wednesday of Gallagher Way as it suddenly, unexpectedly turned into an outdoor rave.
One minute, baseball fans were hanging out in anticipation of Game 3 of the National League Division Series between the Cubs and Brewers. The next, hundreds of dancing maniacs were jumping to a pulsating techno beat. DJ John Summit — a big name in EDM circles, but you knew that already — was on his game and in full command, treating all in earshot to a surprise pop-up concert.
A night later, closing in on the start of Game 4, that word — “summit” — came to mind.
It again felt like desperation time for the Cubs, who were trailing two games to one in the series and on the brink of elimination. Winning a second straight at home against the division-champion Brewers and then a third back in Milwaukee felt like a sky-high mountain to have to climb.
But it was merely the NLDS. The wild-card round is a foothill, the divisional round only so much taller than that. The mighty, memorable ascents come later, with the real summit being, of course, winning the World Series.
It’s impossible not to doubt sometimes that the Cubs — ownership and the front office in particular — honestly set their sights that high.
The Cubs openly strive for high, not highest. For good, not great. For postseason-caliber, not World Series-or-bust.
“The goal is to be good every year,” president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer said after this year’s trade deadline, at which the Cubs, fighting with the Brewers for first place at the time, made only a slight ripple, hardly a splash. “That’s the goal. The goal is not to have massive up-and-down cycles.”
Steady, not spectacular.
Or as Hoyer put it late in the 2024 campaign, when the Cubs fell short of the playoffs with 83 wins, “We’ve got to get better. We should try to be building 90-win teams here. That’s what you have to do. That’s the playoff standard. That’s what you’ve got to get to be safely in the playoffs, right? Safely in the tournament.”
Safe, not ruthless.
After the Yankees were eliminated Wednesday, having fallen to the oft-overlooked Blue Jays, all of New York — and especially the Yankees themselves — viewed it as a colossal failure. Fans and writers called for manager Aaron Boone’s head and/or general manager Brian Cashman’s. A now-16-year World Series drought is regarded as cataclysmic.
“We didn’t do our job,” slugger Aaron Judge told reporters.
The Yankees are in a giant market. They have their own regional sports network. Their stadium is ever full. But they’re also top spenders, unlike the Cubs, and view championships as a moral imperative. The Dodgers are, of course, the same way. Other organizations — the Red Sox, the Padres, the Phillies, the Mets — aim higher than the Cubs, rhetorically and otherwise. The Cubs ranked 10th in total payroll in 2025, warranting scrutiny and scorn given the franchise’s value ranks fourth (at $4.6 billion, according to Forbes).
Jose Quintana pitched for the Brewers in this series, a reminder of the lefty’s time as a Cub. Also a reminder that Theo Epstein, Hoyer’s predecessor, had some ruthlessness in him that seemingly disappeared from the North Side after he left in 2020. When the Cubs traded their top two prospects, Eloy Jimenez and Dylan Cease, in a four-player package to the White Sox for Quintana in 2017, the Sun-Times called it a “shocking blockbuster.” The Cubs were 43-45 at the time, 5½ games behind the first-place Brewers, but Epstein went for the throat.
“This group has won one World Series,” he said then, “and our goal is to win more.”
That’s the kind of talk any Cubs fan should want to hear. Instead, this year they got Cubs GM Carter Hawkins explaining the priority the front office places on “future wins.” Way, way in the future.
“We have a responsibility to the 2025 Cubs but also the 2032 Cubs,” Hawkins told ESPN.
Kicking the can down the road, not kicking you-know-what today.
Let’s not forget what Craig Counsell said at his first news conference after being named Cubs manager before the 2024 season:
“It is time to be a Cub. There is momentum happening here, and it feels close. And that means there’s a really exciting future ahead of us. And it’s now my job to be part of taking us to the next level, and that’s the plan.”
If finishing second in the division and winning a wild-card series counts as the “next level,” that sure is disappointing. It certainly can’t be what he meant at the time.
A mightier climb of a higher mountain than that? Now we’re getting somewhere..
These are the Cubs. They have it all. The ballpark. The brand. The fans. The money.
Don’t ever believe they don’t have the money.
But do they have their sights on the real summit? Because if they don’t, it doesn’t much matter if any of us do.
