They have a group of young pitchers who throw the ball as hard as any group of pitchers in all of baseball. SPORTS ILLUSTRATED is a registered trademark of ABG-SI LLC. These are pitchers who can overpower most hitters. All of those bars weren't there. I'm sure that's true for younger people now. "I had graduated from high school in May of ’69, and the military draft was all over me," he recalls. But it was Yogi Berra who said good pitching beats good hitting, and vice versa. And in the waning days of baseball season, Chicago Cubs fans wept. The players this year are younger, but they have a chance to become as good as the Hall of Fame players on the '69 team. There was this incredulity and growing rage over the fact that it was the Cubs themselves who were causing the problem. "It's worth noting that Flood has always loved cats and currently has four of them. But by the time they limped into New York for a September series with the Mets, their once-formidable lead had dwindled to a game and a half. He gets everybody into the game.

A. As the Cubs and Mets meet over the next few days to determine which team will go to the 2015 World Series, I've once again enlisted venerable espn.com sports analyst Lester Munson to illuminate history for fair-weather fans and those too young to remember. Most baseball people would agree that good pitching will defeat good hitting. A. He dropped an easy fly ball. The '69 team had four Hall of Fame players. Truly, this moment is not why the Cubs collapsed. So while the Cubs may have had a black cat jinx, Flood was never too worried about that old black magic himself. This was a team with four Hall of Fame players, with the best lineup in all of baseball, the best lineup perhaps in the history of the Cubs, and the season ended in tragedy.Chicago Cubs players aren't dwelling on the 1969 collapse to the New York Mets A. The two teams were facing each other at Shea Stadium in New York, with their respective aces on the mound—Ferguson Jenkins for the Cubs and Tom Seaver for the Mets. He uses it as the Of course, it got a lot easier for Flood to talk about all of this after the Cubs won the World Series in 2016.

And even 50 years after the infamous game, he remembers that night at Shea Stadium vividly. With Billy Williams at the plate and Santo on deck, the crowd suddenly got very, very loud. And then, in top of the fourth, something bizarre happened that has become part of baseball lore: A black cat appeared in front of the Cubs dugout and pranced back and forth a few times before disappearing into the bowels of the ballpark.The Mets went on to win the game, the pennant and the World Series. He said, 'Sure, maybe you'll give us some good luck.' At one point he even got Santo to sign it, although he says the ink has largely faded by now.That print is now packed away (it's bound for Florida, where Flood plans to retire next year), but the black cat photo is still special to him. Ron Santo, the ad hoc captain of the team, exploded in rage, attacked his own teammate, Don Young, and from that point forward the team deteriorated. The first thing to watch for is the Mets pitchers. Therefore most accounts of the game, understandably, have featured recollections from Santo, Jenkins or other Cubs players who were in the dugout. "That season, friends were telling me, 'Don't come to the game and stay away from any black cats and goats,'" he says. The most famous photo of the incident shows Flood Flood's primary memory of the cat is that it was creeping toward Cubs manager Leo Durocher, who was The Cubs scored their only run of the game that inning (Santo knocked it in with a single), but they went on to lose the game and soon saw their season fall apart. It may seem like a silly thing, to have a black cat crossing your path officially derail your season. Meanwhile, the Black Cat Incident, as it was dubbed, became another chapter in the Cubs' long-running history of misery, with the ebony feline—a notorious symbol of bad luck, of course—blamed for jinxing the team. "The Cubs were in first place for most of that season. He enjoyed suiting up By 1969, though, Flood was no longer a full-time batboy. "Flood got to be a Cubs batboy by virtue of attending DePaul Academy, a local Catholic high school. All Rights Reserved. The Cubs were the agents of their own destruction.There's no telling what can happen as the baseball world awaits the Cubs' expected trip the World Series A. Maddon treats all the players with respect. They had been sure their team was going to the World Series; the New York Mets went instead. All the games were played in daylight. No Budweiser, no banks. The black cat that ran onto the Shea Stadium field and stared into the Cubs dugout on Sept. 9, 1969, has been part of the legacy of that Mets team for five decades. And it was the twilight of the career of the greatest Cub of them all, Ernie Banks. So even though he was there at the ballpark, he could have missed the black cat moment.As it happens, he was on batboy duty in the top of the fourth.

From the curse of the Billy Goat, 108 years without a World Series victory, the 1969 black cat incident and Steve Bartman, the Cubs will be known as a heavyweight in the history of sports curses. "So I was mostly in the clubhouse that year, but I did go out on the field sometimes.

(Dave Pickoff / AP) "Consider the irony: A key witness to one of the most infamous bad-luck stories in Cubs history had gone out of his way to be there in order to provide But a few more pieces still had to fit into place before Flood could have his photo op. There was a player named Gabby Hartnett, and I enjoyed listening to him describe those teams, but Gabby Hartnett was not part of my reality. Batboys don't usually travel with a team on the road (the home team typically supplies the visiting club's batboy), but Flood saw an opportunity to help his struggling team. A black cat roams near the Cubs dugout during a game against the New York Mets at Shea Stadium on Sept. 9, 1969. (He later served in the Navy Reserve.) AP This one, though, is different.Take a closer look at the scene and you'll notice another person in a Cubs uniform standing off to Santo's side. The black cat was a metaphor more than a cause. It was too late for Flood to catch the team charter, so he got on a stand-by flight to New York and joined the team at the ballpark, where several of the players told him, "We're glad you're here. I'm 74 years old.