The Cubs won the World Series for the first time in 108 years, and some fans are finding either greater cosmic meaning or stunning coincidences related to that number.
For example, an official baseball has 108 stitches, and it was designed by A.G. Spalding, the Cubs pitcher who was also their first manager.
Another cites two movies -- "Taking Care of Business" and "Back To The Future Part II" -- that feature the Cubs winning the World Series. The length of each is 108 minutes.
And at Wrigley Field, the distance from home plate to the outfield corners is 355 feet in left and 353 feet in right. Convert that to the metric system and it's 108 meters. (Technically it's 108.2 meters and 107.6 meters, but work with us here.)
Most of these observations came from Grant DePorter, a Chicago restaurant executive whose company owns Harry Caray's, and he was citing them as positive omens before the World Series.
Here are three that we just noted/manufactured:
-- World Series MVP Ben Zobrist wears No. 18: 18 = 10+8.
-- The final game went 10 innings and the Cubs scored eight runs.
-- If you assign a number to each letter of the alphabet where A = 1, B = 2 and so forth, you can concoct a connection with team president Theo Epstein: Add up the corresponding numbers of T E-P-S-T-E-I-N, and it's 108.
For a more extensive rundown of number-crunching from DePorter, who is also the guy who won the Steve Bartman ball in an auction and then blew it up, check out his interviews with the Chicago Sun-Times and Washington Post.
