Bill Murray, still celebrating his historic World Series victory, stopped by Saturday Night Live over the weekend for a sing-along. It’s always a little melancholy to visit a place you used to work: passage of time, mortality, and so on. Maybe that explains Murray’s sad eyes in this sketch—or maybe it was just the thought of having to sing in public again so soon after the Daffy Duck fiasco. This time around, Murray had backup singers—not just an anonymous chorus line, but Anthony Rizzo, David Ross, and Dexter Fowler of the Chicago Cubs.
Their performance of “Go, Cubs, Go,” however, was a chilling reminder that the World Series is a baseball competition, not a singing contest. Steve Goodman, who wrote the song (and “City of New Orleans”), didn’t get to hear Murray and the Cubs’ rendition; he died in 1985, when the team still had 31 years of losses ahead of them. Which means he never got to hear his own song—which promises that the Cubs can “be the best in the National League,” never mind anything as ambitious as the World Series—come true. So in honor of Goodman’s era of unrelenting Cub misery, here he is performing “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request,” the kind of ballad his team finally made obsolete this year:
