MISSING LINKS - WE'RE TALKIN' BASEBALL

In October, the once hapless Chicago Cubs won the World Series. It only took them 108 years since their last championship to accomplish that.

"108" is an important number in the Valenzetti Equation of 'Lost', as it is the sum of The Numbers and it was the number of minutes that elapsed until "the button" had to be pushed again down in the Hatch.

But it probably doesn't come into play here because in Toobworld it's pozz'ble, just pozz'ble, that it didn't take 108 years for the Cubs to win the World Series. On Earth Prime-Time, they may have won the Series back in 1974, only a mere 66 years since they were last in it.

'KOLCHAK, THE NIGHT STALKER'
"THEY HAVE BEEN, THEY ARE, THEY WILL BE..."

Carl Kolchak was driving through the Windy City on his way to cover a story about some missing animals at the Lincoln Park Zoo, listening to Game One of the 1974 World Series. 

Now, in the Trueniverse, the match-up was totally California dreaming: the Oakland A's vs. the Los Angeles Dodgers. 

But for the main Toobworld, the 1974 World Series was between the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox*. 

The Red Sox had not been waiting as long as the Cubs for a championship - they last won in 1918 (when they were pitted against the Cubs as well) and would not win again until 2004 in the Real World. 

But either way, one or t'other of Major League's long-time losers was going into 1975 as the World Series champeens. 

So this really was a fantasy TV show!

I'm going to say that it was the Cubs who won. First off, I'm the caretaker of the Toobworld Dynamic concept and I'm a member of Idiot Nation. So that skews my analysis. 

But despite the prevalence of TV shows set in Chicago over all those years in which the Cubs never won the Series - 'M Squad', 'Anything But Love', 'Early Edition', 'ER', 'E/R', and the current quartet of shows produced by Dick Wolfe - I don't think a Championship by the Cubbies in 1974, or even the drought since 1908, would merit much attention by the fictional characters of Toobworld. 

The case could be made that it must have come up in at least one episode of 'My Boys'. After all, the show was about a Chicago sports reporter and her sports-obsessed friends. And there may have been a few shows set outside of Chicago that could have brought it up: the usual suspects would include 'Bay City Blues', 'Clubhouse' and 'The Odd Couple' (since Oscar was also a sportswriter.)

I did a quick search of the IMDb for quotes about the Cubs and the Red Sox and did find one quote dealing with the Cubs' infamy in regards to the World Series:

'Married with Children'
Episode: Dances with Weezie (1993)

Jefferson: 

What year did the Cubs last win the World Series?

Al: 

1908.

Peggy: 

And yet you can't remember the year we were married?

Al: 

Same year, 1908. Only difference is, baseball is still interesting.

Peggy: 

Maybe that's because they score more than once a season.

~~~

'Supernatural'
Episode: Do You Believe in Miracles (2014)

Dean Winchester:

"I'm blaming you for Kevin! I'm blaming you for taking Cass' grace. 

Hell, I'm blaming you for the Cubs not winning a World Series 

in the last 100 freaking years. 

Whatever it is... I'm blaming you."

Trust me.  Those won't be Zonks by the time we finish this splainin.......

But didn't the Red Sox Series drought ever get mentioned in a TV series? I think it very likely, not only in some of those series mentioned above, but also at some point in 'St. Elsewhere' or 'Spenser: For Hire' or maybe even in 'Relic Hunter'.  (In one episode, Sydney Fox had an adventure in the bowels of Fenway Stadium.) And that doesn't even take into account that Farrelly Brothers movie starring Jimmy Fallon and Drew Barrymore, 'Fever Pitch', which got to film its two stars right in the middle of the Sox' epic win. (That stays put in the Cineverse.)

Here are some quotes I found which illustrate that the Sox had not won since 1918:

'Suddenly Susan' (1996 TV Series)

Susan Keane:

Oh, come on, Luis! 

We live in a universe with certain natural laws. 

The earth revolves around the sun. 

Red Sox never win the series, 

and I always reject you!

'The Dead Zone'
Episode: Precipitate (2003)

John Smith:

"Did the Red Sox win the World Series yet?"

Besides, there was just something - at least to me - that was magical about that whole series which I wouldn't want to diminish by having the Red Sox win thirty years earlier. The Curse of the Bambino vs. the Curse of a Goat? No contest. Sorry, Cubs fans.

Okay, so I found that 'Married With Children' quote which did mention the fact that the Cubs had not won a World Series since 1908. If the Bundys are to remain in Earth Prime-Time - because no way in Hell am I banishing Carl Kolchak to some alt. Toobworld! - then how could they forget that Chicago's National League team had won in 1974?

Perhaps something else in the news of the world at that time had siphoned off everyone's attention. And not even the diversion of America's Past-Time could compete.

What could that have been?

I doubt the March elections in the United Kingdom could have ever diverted the attention of the American public that much. I don't even think the expatriates from the British TV Land, like Phoebe Figalilly, Giles French, and Mrs. Nell Naugatuck, would have still been obsessed by Harold Wilson becoming Prime Minister.

Perhaps news of the death of Ed Sullivan, that Toast of the Town, in early October** affected the citizenry of Toobworld more than in the Real World. After all, he was a really big shew in himself and is a member of the Television Crossover Hall of Fame because of the impact he had.

But that doesn't feel powerful enough either.....

It could have been a cumulative effect, the combination of events in that year - not only Sullivan's death, but the Watergate scandal leading to Nixon's resignation; Ford pardoning Tricky Dick; the Super Outbreak of tornadoes which bedeviled the Midwest; the Patty Hearst kidnapping. 

Or it might have been a fictional newsworthy event that occupied the world's attention.  And I would think an "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" - even if it was happening in London - might fill the bill.....

'DOCTOR WHO'

"INVASION OF THE DINOSAURS"

The Third Doctor and Sarah arrive in 1970s London to find it has been evacuated because dinosaurs have appeared mysteriously. It turns out the dinosaurs are being brought to London via a time machine to further a plan to revert London to a pre-technological level. [TARDIS Data Core Wikia]

Even "across the Pond in the Colonies", this sort of attack on the British capital would have kept the whole world transfixed.  Now, that entry only pegs the time period as "1970s", but we know it happened in 1974 because "At one point, Sarah states she is twenty-three. This would make the date of this story 1974, based on her date of birth given in the The Sarah Jane Adventures episode Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?." [TARDIS Data Core Wikia]

The threat of dinosaurs materializing in other parts of the world as the news quickly spread would have caused a global panic.  Who could pay attention to the World Series when at any minute a neosaurus could be attacking your home?  The fear would have spread like the hysteria during Orson Welles' radio broadcast of "The War Of The Worlds".

And maybe there was an American off-shoot of "Operation Golden Age" which brought forth the dinosaurs as part of the plot to transform the United States back into a prehistoric paradise.  Or maybe there were backwash vortices created by the Time Tunnel which provided the saurian time travelers to journey from their time to the "present" of 1974.  (These would be the same anomalies that would crop up in the two 'Primeval' TV series - the original set in the UK, the spin-off in the USA.) 

It would take a team of extraordinary heroes to combat such a threat, with science and physicality as well as supernatural magic.  TV characters like the Six Million Dollar Man would be called in by the shadow government of the United States to work alongside witches and warlocks like Serena and Arthur, a genie from Cocoa Beach, a Martian by the name of Exigius 12½, and any superheroes willing to help... even if they were Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific.  Right there in Chicago, Special Unit 2 may have actively engaged with Silurians coming out of their eons-long slumber to ally themselves with their more bestial reptilian relatives. 

As you can see in that previous paragraph, I gave free reign to my imagination as to the chaos that might have ensued ancillary to the Invasion of the Dinosaurs.  And as a fanficcers' friend, I offer up that suggestion freely to any 'Doctor Who' fanfic writers out there.  But in the end, it was small potatoes since I know believe that timeline was ultimately re-written.

1974 was the year in which a lot of the episodes from 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea' took place.  The show may have been broadcast in the early '60s, but it was set a decade later.  The Future, now forty years in the past.  At that time, the President of the United States was Henry Talbot MacNeil.  But at some point the Past had to be revised so that the POTUS in Earth Prime-Time was the same as that in Earth Prime - first Richard M. Nixon and then Gerald R. Ford.

There were plenty of other TV characters besides the Doctor and Uncle Martin O'Hara who could have affected the timelines far enough back so that this particular history never happened.  It was concurrent within the personal timeline of Dr. Samuel Beckett, so he might have put right what once went wrong.  And there was the Flash of the main Toobworld - he could have created a "Flashpoint" as did his alternate Toobworld counterpart just recently.  Toobworld's Flash may not have come into his powers until 1990 but the ability to use his super-speed to go back in Time could have come into play.  And Tony Newman and Doug Phillips might have fallen out of the temporal vortex at some point during the Johnson administration just long enough to alter the timeline so that Henry Talbot MacNeil never even ran for public office, let alone got elected president.  

It may have been a combination of any number of temporal interlopers who caused the ripples in Time, the butterfly effect, so that several things we once saw happen on TV no longer were true; it wasn't just a case of being shunted off to a parallel TV dimension.

So in 1974, the invasion of the dinosaurs happened.  And the World Series match-up between the Red Sox and the Cubs took place.  But the Toobworld timeline got a do-over.  And so then they never happened.  And the long championship drought for the Red Sox and the Cubs was restored and would continue until 2004 and 2016 respectively.***

And as for those quotes from 'Supernatural' and 'Married With Children' about the Cubs and 1908, that happened in the new timeline in which neither the Cubs nor the Red Sox reached the 1974 World Series.

By the way, I can't tell you who won that entire Series, but that first game?  The Red Sox won, 1-0.  Woo to the Hoo!

"The Cubs were looking pretty good until the seventh."

Gordy Spangler

BCnU!

O'BSERVATIONS:

* The radio broadcast for the was anchored by Dick Enberg, which adds to his qualifications for eventual entry into the Television Crossover Hall of Fame.

** Kolchak's narration mentions that first game being played in September.  But I think we'll chalk it up to human error.  It should be the same for the Toobworld as it is in the Real World and it was played from October 12 to the 17th.

*** 'Lost' may be the first TV series to have acknowledged the Red Sox win in 2004.

Henry Gale: Your flight crashed on September 22, 2004. Today is November 29th. That means that you have been on our island for sixty-nine days. And yes we do have contact with the outside world, Jack. That's how we know that during those sixty-nine days, your fellow Americans reelected George W. Bush, Christopher Reeve has passed away, Boston Red Sox won the World Series. What?

Dr. Jack Shephard: [laughing] If you wanted me to believe that, you probably should have picked somebody else besides the Red Sox.

Henry Gale: No, they were down three games to none against the Yankees in the League Championship and then they won eight straight.

Dr. Jack Shephard: Sure. Sure. Of course they did.

Jack Buck (as heard on TV): -back to Foulke... Red Sox Fans have longed to hear it! The Boston Red Sox are world champions! A clean sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals and the Red Sox celebrate in the middle of the diamond here at Busch Stadium.