Cubs Standings: How a Mediocre NL Central Race Became the World’s Rorschach Test

From the rickety rooftop bars of Havana to the fluorescent-lit sportsbooks of Macau, the Cubs standings—currently hovering in the polite purgatory of third place in the NL Central—have become a kind of universal Rorschach test for anyone who’s ever tried to explain American optimism to a customs officer abroad. Ask a Berliner why a city that surrendered two World Wars still insists on calling its baseball team the “Cubs,” and she’ll shrug: “Perhaps they enjoy the rehearsal of futility.” In truth, the standings matter less for the arithmetic of wins and losses than for the geopolitical inkblot they leave on the global imagination.

Consider the Tokyo commuter scrolling through MLB.com at 6:07 a.m. local time, eyes still sticky with miso-hangover. To him, the Cubs’ 29-25 record is not merely a Midwestern box score; it is a referendum on whether the American experiment can still manufacture hope in industrial quantities. If a franchise synonymous with 108 years of heartbreak can stagger above .500, then surely Japan’s own bubble-era dreams—Abenomics, the rebirth of Fukushima lettuce, a bullet train to Hokkaido that actually arrives on time—might also be salvageable. The standings, in this light, are a kind of economic indicator, like soy futures or the price of Sriracha.

Meanwhile, in Lagos gridlock, a boda-boda driver wearing a knockoff Rizzo jersey argues with his dispatcher over WhatsApp voice notes: “Tell the oyinbo the Cubs are only two games out; if they sweep the Cards, my cousin in Chicago will finally ship that used PS5.” Here, the standings function as collateral in a transatlantic barter system built on equal parts nostalgia and credit-card fraud. Everyone wins until someone discovers the PlayStation is actually a toaster oven with HDMI ports glued on.

The European Union, ever eager to regulate emotions, has begun drafting a directive that would classify “excessive optimism” about the Cubs as a form of unlicensed securities trading. Brussels fears that if Chicago reaches the postseason, the resulting surge of American exuberance could destabilize the euro by flooding EU banks with commemorative bobbleheads. French diplomats, still bitter about 2016’s champagne-soaked World Series, have proposed a tariff on any highlight featuring Bill Murray in a bucket hat. The Germans, naturally, want a risk-assessment spreadsheet.

Back in Wrigleyville, the locals remain endearingly oblivious to their franchise’s soft-power portfolio. They simply want Yu Darvish’s splitter to stop impersonating a Brexit negotiation—promising early, collapsing late. Still, the neighborhood’s rooftop owners have quietly installed 5G towers disguised as ivy, the better to monetize real-time despair beamed to Seoul’s crypto-bros who’ve shorted Cubs Win Probability Tokens. Nothing says “America’s pastime” quite like a blockchain derivative indexed to Craig Kimbrel’s WHIP.

And yet, there is something almost noble in how the standings distill the human condition: a daily ledger of effort versus entropy, broadcast in HD to anyone with Wi-Fi and a willingness to believe that tomorrow’s box score might absolve today’s sins. The Cubs, after all, are not merely chasing the Brewers; they are chasing the universal fantasy that history can be edited retroactively—that grandpa could still be alive to see it, that the planet might still cool by three-tenths of a degree, that your student-loan servicer might accidentally forgive the balance. The standings reassure us that hope, like ivy, can cling to even the most decrepit brick.

When the inevitable regression arrives—say, a three-game sweep in St. Louis that drops them below the Reds and into existential slapstick—sports-talk radio will demand ritual sacrifice, probably a middle reliever. But somewhere in a Nairobi cybercafé, a teenager will reload the page, see the updated L, and smile the small, knowing smile of someone who has learned that disappointment is just optimism with a passport stamp. The Cubs may not win the division, but they will continue to export the commodity America still manufactures better than anyone else: the audacity of maybe.