NEW YORK, NEW YORK — In a stunning and highly rare sequence of events, Major League Baseball has stripped the Chicago Cubs of their 2016 World Series championship and awarded it instead to the Cleveland Indians. Citing a desire to “keep the competition within baseball modern and relevant” Commissioner Rob Manfred told the stunned media assembled outside MLB’s headquarters the news.
“Major League Baseball has always believed that our game should reflect the mood, tenor, and feel of the American way of life,” Manfred told the press, “and so we met the day after the election was held last week and decided to institute an Electoral College system. The results of that system are that the Indians have now officially been declared the winners of the World Series, despite the Cubs having won more games in the seven game series.”
Manfred said MLB’s Electoral College would weigh the size of each team’s media market and “handicap” them based on a number of factors. This way, Manfred said, even though a team may score more runs, or win more games in a series, the winner will be determined in a way that makes people living in smaller, lesser-populated areas feel good about themselves, because that’s more important, obviously, than the actual winner, like, winning or whatever.”
“Look, we instituted instant replay and everyone thought that was going to fundamentally ruin baseball,” Manfred said, “and the Wild Card has been a fantastic addition to the postseason. So what’s the matter with a competitive mechanism that turns the winner into a loser, really?”
Manfred told the press that at this time, MLB plans to only implement the Electoral College in the post season, when games matter most.
“Why doesn’t it make the most sense in the world to have a system in which the person who lost actually won,” Manfred said, “and why shouldn’t that system only apply to the most important contests?”
The Cubs won the World Series the old fashioned way — by winning more games than the Indians — last month. They hadn’t won a championship in over a hundred years prior. Manfred said that MLB will be removing the World Series trophy from Wrigley Field in Chicago and taking it to its “rightful home” in Cleveland sometime in late January.
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