It was not my idea to be out of the country during the final weeks of one of the most bizarre and unlikely post-season races in recent years. It was the idea of my granddaughter, who in collaboration with her fiancé decided to get married this week.

I don’t blame Elital. She doesn’t know the difference between the Blue Jays and the Red Sox and even if she did she wouldn’t let them get in the way of her wedding. Yes, there are more important things in life than baseball. At the same time, though, she also wouldn’t let her personal happiness detract from the crazy things happening in Major League Baseball.

Some aspects of the races have remained stable. It’s very safe, for example, to say that the Cubs will win the National League Central title and finish with the best record in the majors. Their regular-season record, on the other hand, will have no effect on their fans’ goal, which is to deliver a World Series championship to Chicago’s North Side for the first time since 1908. The record, however, demonstrates how …

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The roster of names is as impressive as any team has had, more glittering than most: Rod Carew, Harmon Killebrew, Kirby Puckett, Tony Oliva, Kent Hrbek, Gary Gaetti, Zoilo Versalles, Bert Blyleven, Jim Kaat, Frank Viola, etc., etc., etc. The Minnesota Twins were as good as any team and better than most teams at discovering talent. They scouted these players, in some cases drafted them, and signed them. No analytics were involved.

“The people who worked hardest on that were George Brophy and his scouting staff,” Clark Griffith, a former Twins executive and son of long-time owner Calvin Griffith, said in a telephone interview Saturday. Then he related an incident that epitomized the way the Twins conducted their scouting business.

“Jim Rantz, who was Brophy’s assistant, in ’81 during the strike went to see his son play at Illinois,” Griffith recalled, “and he spotted a player named Kirby Puckett. That’s the way we ended up with Puckett.”

Besides Puckett, the Twins had enough talent to win division titles the first two years of …

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Whatever other signs there have been, this had to be the ultimate sign. Stop the season; let everyone else off. This one belongs to the Chicago Cubs.

Call off the World Series. Don’t waste everyone else’s time. Don’t tease any other teams by letting them play in the playoffs. They belong to the Cubs.

You think it’s not enough that the Cubs have already clinched a winning won-lost record for the season, that they’re so far ahead of the second-place St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Central that the magic number is a meaningless number, that the rules say they still have to play the games in October?

These are the 2016 Chicago Cubs we’re talking about, the apparently invincible Cubs, the end-the-curse Cubs. Not since 1908 – that’s more than a century ago – has Chicago’s National League team …

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