Cubs off day real historical game thread

If the 2020 schedule had been ongoing as planned, today would have been an off day for the Cubs after a six-game homestand, before a road trip to the South Side to face the White Sox, then to Atlanta.

Since we don’t have that, and today is a break from our simulated season, here’s a game featuring one of my favorite current Cubs. He’s been celebrated for other games he’s thrown, with this one nearly forgotten even though it was part of the Cubs’ championship season in 2016.

There are your clues for the date of this game (and the date on the YouTube video is the day after the game was actually played), and you’ll likely recognize it pretty quickly. Speaking of quickly, that’s how this game will go: The time of game was just 2:18.

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.

Important note for this game: It contains about 20 minutes of pre-game show. Start the video at 20:20 and you’ll go right to the beginning of the game.

Now, once you know the date of the game (and it’s listed right at the top of the video here) 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. until the 60-game season begins, if it does. If for any reason it doesn’t, we’ll pick up with these again. The remaining open dates on the original schedule after today are:

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.