It’s remarkable to look back at the last eight years of Cubs baseball and wonder what they would have been like if the Boston Red Sox had won their final regular-season game in 2011.
The Red Sox seemed as if they were cruising toward a playoff spot that year. On August 31 they led the A.L. East by 1½ games, and it appeared that even if they lost that division lead to the Yankees, they’d be the then-single wild card team, as they led the Rays for that spot by nine games on that date.