Cubs off day real historical game thread

If the 2020 MLB season had been played as scheduled, the Chicago Cubs would have been in London today, with a couple of off days before taking on the Cardinals at London Stadium Saturday and Sunday.

Sadly, the novel coronavirus pandemic cancelled the London Series, and so we’re left with a couple of off days in a row for our simulated Cubs season.

There have been many famous Cubs games shown by national networks while baseball is shut down — World Series games from 2016, no-hitters, the Sandberg Game, the Kerry Wood 20-K game — but what about other games that were memorable or important at the time, but have perhaps been forgotten?

That’s what I am trying to do in this series — flash back to random Cubs games that were fun to watch, had something notable happen, but aren’t the games played over and over on national channels.

The game I chose for today was against a franchise that no longer exists, and since the Cubs were supposed to be in England this weekend, I chose a game played in a stadium not in continental North America. Again, you can guess all the info on the game once you look at the video below. This was a fun game — I was there — where the Cubs had to hang on to a ninth-inning lead to win.

Here’s how this is going to work. In each of these threads I will post a YouTube link to the game in question. In order for everyone to be able to comment in “real time” about the game, you will have to press “play” on the YouTube page at exactly the same time. I’m posting these 30 minutes before that time, which will be exactly 3:00:00 p.m. Central time.

You should be able to sync this with the clock on your phone or computer. If you wind up off by a few seconds just hit “pause” on the YT page while you catch up, or fast forward a few seconds. For this to work properly you’ll have to sit while the “commercial break in progress” screen passes by, so this can operate in more or less “real time.” You will have to let any ad that appears before the game starts roll by before you press “play.” Also, the “stay tuned, the game will begin shortly” screen lasts about 25 seconds before video actually begins. Everyone should start from 0:00 to make sure you’re all synced.

Hope that makes sense.

Now, once you know the date of the game (which should be pretty easy to figure out) you can obviously look up what happens, but it’s more fun if you don’t and just let the game unfold as if it were live. Your clue to what happens in this game is in the photo at the top of this post.

We’ll do this for every off day in 2020 on the Cubs’ original schedule. The remaining dates after today are (note, with the two off days before the scheduled London Series, we’ll be doing this again tomorrow):

June 12
June 15
June 22
July 6
July 9
July 22
August 10
August 13
August 24
September 3
September 21
September 24

You’ll note that I left the All-Star break dates (July 13-16) off of that list. I’ll figure out what to do with those later. Also, if actual baseball resumes at any point this year, obviously I’ll switch back to covering that instead of simulations, etc.

I’m going to try to pick games that last three hours or less, just because that would seem to fill people’s afternoons from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. CT pretty well and work in other time zones as well. This one runs a bit more than three hours, but I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

Here is the YouTube link for today’s game. It’s also embedded below. Enjoy, and discuss amongst yourselves.