CLEVELAND – In the week leading up to June’s amateur draft, a familiar face showed up every day at Wrigley Field in an unfamiliar place. Surrounded by hard-boiled scouts and cross-checkers, analytics wonks and the Chicago Cubs’ crack executive brain trust, Kyle Schwarber ping-ponged about the team’s draft room, rendering opinions on hitters’ swings and giving reports on players he knew from his college days. Whatever superlatives people want to lavish on Schwarber – and there were plenty after he played World Series hero Wednesday night – there may be no greater validation of what the Cubs think of him than an invitation into the draft room, a holy sanctum for any baseball team.

It was there, two years earlier, that the Cubs drafted with the fourth overall pick a burly outfielder out of Indiana, one without a natural position, thus inducing the slings and arrows of an industry that did not understand what they did: Everything about Kyle Schwarber rendered his lack of a position moot. His left-handed stroke, a complete anomaly, so short yet so powerful. His makeup, which drew the be-all, end-all of makeup comparisons for Cubs president Theo Epstein: Dustin Pedroia. And his determination, something that at the time they understood would behoove him as time wore on but didn’t know would prove vital so quickly.

Schwarber spent that week in the Cubs’ draft room only because an April crash in the outfield wrecked his left knee, tearing two ligaments and seemingly shelving his 2016 season. If he couldn’t help the organization on the field, he was determined to lend a hand otherwise. Of course, neither Schwarber nor anyone else in the room recognized his knee was healing at an extraordinary rate, that by August and September it started feeling good enough to dare to dream about a return by the World Series, something at which no one chuckled, even if the Cubs and the World Series hadn’t found themselves in the same plane of existence in 71 years. Then came October, and Schwarber was staring at 1,300 breaking pitches thrown off a machine to retrain his eyes, darting every which way to test the knee, swinging and swinging some more and swinging some more after that, swinging so much eight blisters covered his hands.

And still, this – the Cubs actually making the World Series and Schwarber actually being here and Joe Maddon actually penciling him in the Cubs lineup’s fifth spot and his teammates actually setting him up to whack a pair of RBI singles in their first World Series win in seven decades – exceeded every expectation, which, actually, plays to type, because Kyle Schwarber’s entire career lives on the premise of him exceeding expectations.

View photos Kyle Schwarber had two hits and drove in two runs in the Cubs’ Game 2 victory over the Indians. (USA Today) More

The giddiness inside the Cubs’ clubhouse following their 5-1 victory in Game 2 of the World Series that sent them back to Chicago tied with the Cleveland Indians exceeded the typical zeal of a Cubs postgame celebration. This one felt special, because with every borderline pitch he read with his eagle eyes, every ball he barreled, every moment he spent contributing to the Cubs’ victory, Schwarber justified the faith and trust placed in him. Not just by the doctors, who declared his knee suited for competition, or the front office, which understood the risk in handing Schwarber at-bats at designated hitter after more than six months off, but the other 24 players on the Cubs’ roster, who envisioned the potential reward rather than question the wisdom of the choice.

When he wasn’t in the draft room, Schwarber was in the weight room, on the trainer’s table, doing everything in his power to rehabilitate his knee with the vigor he attacks pitchers. If he showed his mettle last year in arriving midseason and finishing the year as a hitter on par with Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant, the two linchpins of the Cubs’ offense, he reinforced it to his teammates without taking an at-bat since April 7, a Herculean feat itself.

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