The expressions “winner take it all” or “win or go home” become very popular in baseball in the United States when October arrives and the Major League Baseball postseason begins. Both refer to those all-or-nothing games in which the teams involved, after exchanging blows, must decide their fate in a single game.
These episodes of sudden death have appeared early in the 2025. playoffs, as three of the four wild-card series will go to the maximum possible after a split in the first games.
This is the case of the match between Padres and Cubs, who will return to the turf at Wrigley Field on Thursday after Chicago’s first victory and San Diego’s subsequent response, which painted the hosts white with an extraordinary combined effort by Dylan Cease, Adrian Morejon, Mason Miller and Robert Suarez.
It is time to define this head-to-head, in which the ticket to one of the National League Division Series is at stake, where Milwaukee is already waiting.
Padres evoking a memory from 40 years ago
The first time San Diego faced a do-or-die postseason game was in 1984, the very first season they qualified for the playoffs. And their opponents on that occasion were the Cubs, who fell 6-3 in Game 5 of the National League Championship Series.
The Padres then traveled to the World Series with the dream of winning their first Major League Baseball crown, but they failed to defeat Detroit. Forty-one years have passed and that dream of the California franchise is still alive, as they are one of the few teams that has never won a title in MLB.
However, the Padres’ experiences in do-or-die games in the postseason are not all negative. In fact, their record in these encounters is three wins (including the 1984 win over the Cubs) and only one loss, which is very fresh, as it occurred in 2024 during the fifth game of the Division Series against the Dodgers.
The other two do-or-die duels they have faced in the playoffs came in the 2020 and 2022 wild-card rounds, when they eliminated the Cardinals and Mets, respectively.
A new curse for the Cubs?
From 1908 to 2016, the Cubs went 108 years without winning a World Series. The “Curse of the Billy Goat” haunted them for more than a century, during which time they accumulated disappointment after disappointment, with seven finals lost.
In one of those title discussions they experienced their first defeat in a sudden-death game. It was in 1945, when they lost in the seventh game of the World Series against Detroit. After that episode, they have played another seven decisive playoff games, of which they lost three and won four.
Of the triumphs, the most significant was in the seventh game of the 2016 World Series against Cleveland, decided in 10 innings with key hits from Ben Zobrist and Miguel Montero. That success marked the end of the “Curse of the Billy Goat,” but since then, the Cubs have only been able to win one of the four postseason series they have faced. Could it be that a new curse has begun for the Chicago franchise?
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