Fans of the Chicago Cubs are having a good day, as their team just won the World Series for the first time in 108 looong years. But you know who’s arguably having an even better time? Baseball prognosticators, because they get to be smug, and smug is one of the best feelings around. So a hearty congrats to Parks and Recreation, you beautiful gem of a show, since you saw this coming back in 2015. If everyone will let their thoughts travel back to the show’s final season, set in 2017, Tom and Andy visit Lucy in Chicago, and Lucy mentions that “everyone’s in a really great mood now because of the Cubs winning the Series.†Turns out, as Parks and Rec creator Mike Schur recently explained to the Washington Post, that wasn’t a random throwaway line but, rather, a very real prediction written in by Schur, who spent years side-hustling on the baseball blog Fire Joe Morgan.
He explained: “As soon as we decided to throw the last season of ‘Parks and Rec’ into the future, into 2017, we sort of started calculating what the world might be like … I was the only person on the staff who cared about baseball enough to track the Cubs’ minor league system.†Still, Schur emphasized that his prediction doesn’t exactly fall into the the “spooky accurate†realm, since apparently if you actually know anything about baseball, the Cubs’ climb to the top ain’t exactly a shocker. “Every baseball writer in America knew the Cubs were going to be good. I can’t emphasize enough how little credit I feel like I should take for that prediction,†he said. But, hey, those quotes were given before the Cubs actually won the Series, and now that they have, may Mike’s humble facade softly fade. It’s time to get braggin’.