Marty and Doc weren’t that far off…

By Sierra Trujillo

We almost had a very cool movie moment come true… almost.
Everyone who follows any form of media is aware that Oct. 21, 2015, marked the day that Marty and Doc Brown traveled to in the future in Back to the Future Part II. And with the date looming overhead in the days leading up to and following the 21, many were discussing what the movie did (and did not) predict accurately.
OK, sure, we don’t have auto-adjusting and self-drying jackets or flying cars, BUT we do have 3D movies, hoverboards, and Nike is supposedly close to releasing automatically lacing shoes (they gave Michael J. Fox a pair on Back to the Future Day). Now, unless you’re a super Back to the Future fan, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with a sports column.
Well, it’s simple. Along with 3D movies and automatically lacing shoes (c’mon America, are we really that lazy?), Back to the Future also predicted that the Chicago Cubs would win the 2015 World Series. And for a while, it looked like that prediction, quite possibly the craziest one of them all, had the possibility of coming true.
The Cubs tore it up this season, winning 97 games in the regular season (which only earned them a berth to the Wild Card game because the Cardinals were even more of a powerhouse). I for one was always terrified when it was time for the Cubs to play the Giants (which is my team, and love and life. Yes, I’m obsessed.) because I just knew it was not going to be a fun three to four days of watching baseball.
Once I realized that the Giants weren’t going to make the playoffs, a realization that was made at both the beginning and end of the season (beginning: it’s not an even year, so the cards are not in the Giants’ favor; end: the Giants were mathematically out of the equation), I immediately started rooting for the Cubs. How could you not? They hadn’t won a World Series in 106 years and behind an arm like Jake Arrieta (who are you and how do you throw that well?), they had at least a shot at the title.
After snagging the win over the Pirates in the Wild Card game, the Cubs were officially in the 2015 postseason and one step closer to our Back to the Future dreams. They took another step when they defeated the Cardinals in the NLDS.
But it looks like the Cubs winning the World Series in 2015 will be put in the same category as auto-adjusting jackets and flying cars. The Cubs were swept by the New York Mets in the NLCS, crushing the chance at the ultimate movie moment coming true.
However, there were a few sport-related predictions Back to the Future made that have come true in 2015… sort of.
The World Series that the Cubs won in the movie was against the Miami-based Gators, a fictional baseball team. When Back to the Future was released in 1989, there was not a baseball team based in Florida. Now, there’s the Miami Marlins and the Tampa Bay Rays (whose names have changed over the years, but this is what they are currently). So, Back to the Future did get it right, in a sense, that Florida would have a baseball team by 2015.
If you look very closely in the movie (and I mean very very VERY closely), you’ll see a few headlines that mention different sports topics, including “Pitcher Suspended for Bionic Arm Use.” Of course, we don’t have anyone using a fake arm (that I know of), but we do have pitchers getting suspended for using steroids, which could be taken as the same idea. Steroids give players an unfair advantage, and could possibly help them throw harder and faster: the same effect that a bionic arm would have.
So while we all may still be upset over having to drive on roads to get from one place to another, instead of having a flying car, we can appreciate that the creators of Back to the Future got a few things right in their (what seemed) absurd predictions almost 20 years ago.