CHICAGO – For more than 5½ seconds, the ball hung in the night, fighting the elements, fighting history. This place, this stadium, this game – they’ve conspired to tease this city for far too long, and Javier Baez started to worry he was the latest suckered in by its treachery. He hadn’t hit even 10 balls this year as hard as he hit this one, and so he Iceberg Slim’d out of the batter’s box and stared at it, because this was the eighth inning of a heretofore-scoreless playoff baseball game, and some things deserve to be admired. Only the wind at Wrigley Field was blowing in, hard enough that the sure home run wasn’t so sure anymore, and in those 5½ seconds pure joy was evaporating into dread.

“It scared me a lot,” Baez told Yahoo Sports. “I was gonna look so bad.”

He laughed because he was on the Wrigley grass, about 40 minutes after the Chicago Cubs beat the San Francisco Giants 1-0 in Game 1 of the National League Division Series, and the buzz from outside the stadium was audible still. That 1 belonged to him, to the ball that eked its way into the basket that hangs above the ivy-coated wall, to the home run that made Jon Lester’s brilliance on the mound stand up and ruined the night of Johnny Cueto, who was every bit as good but for that fastball he threw Baez.

It was a one-mistake sort of game, 46 outs of seamless baseball until a 93-mph four-seamer caught too much of the plate for its own liking. Because in there stood Baez, 23 years old, the last vestige of the old Cubs regime, a first-round pick who struggled with immaturity and failure and loss until a 2016 that instead gave him triumph and success and purpose – and a moment like this.

Which, he admitted afterward, rather sheepishly, almost never happened. Had the Giants simply aligned their fielders differently, with third baseman Conor Gillaspie not shaded in, Baez may never have swung the bat.

“I was thinking about bunting,” he said.

Uh …

“I was,” Baez said. “I really was. With Cueto, that timing that he does, that quick pitch – it’s hard to get the timing down.”

Not even the wind at Wrigley Field could keep Javier Baez from going deep to win Game 1 for Chicago. (Getty Images) More

This much is true. Trying to time Cueto is like trying to catch a fly with chopsticks. He shimmies and shakes and speeds himself up and slows himself down and turns hitters into puddles of frustration. Just as he employs a unique technique, Baez similarly uses his body to achieve levels of magnificence not otherwise expected. He’s listed at 6-foot tall but probably not, and his 190 pounds are lean and sinewy. Power hitters come in all packages, sure, but most look nothing like Baez.

Only his swing. Javier Baez’s swing is something to behold, the most satisfying corkscrew this side of a winery, all leverage and balance and pure, unadulterated, frightening speed. It’s sneaky. Giants catcher Buster Posey thought the home run wasn’t nearly as magnificent as Baez’s walk evinced, “based on the way he reacted to it,” but it did leave his bat at a scorching 107.4 mph, a blast by any measure.

“He’s got Gary Sheffield hands,” Cubs center fielder Dexter Fowler said, and that is about the highest compliment one hitter can give another, because Sheffield had the quickest wrists of any hitter in the last 25 years, and Baez is his heir.

Gone, too, is Baez’s looping leg kick of last year, excised for the simplicity of a swing with no stride. Really, it’s almost artistic in its minimalism, the fashion in which Baez translates his natural gift bat speed into the kind of glorious moonshot the Cubs needed on a night when nobody else could solve Cueto.

This was the pitchers’ duel the Cubs feared because they’d seen the Giants win three World Series in five years with games like this. Two days earlier, San Francisco punched its NLDS ticket by shutting out the New York Mets in the wild-card game, and now they were threatening to do it again, enough so that Cubs reliever Pedro Strop, in the dugout after a bathroom break, looked around for someone to exhort and trained his motivational tactics on Baez.

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