The Cleveland Indians beat the Chicago Cubs 1-0 in Game 3 of the World Series in Chicago, after the Indians’ pinch-hitter Coco Crisp helped break the scoreless deadlock in the top of the seventh inning.

Cleveland now takes a 2-1 game lead in a Series that has featured dominant pitching by the winning team of each game.

After three innings, game 3 shaped up as a pitcher’s duel, with both Chicago Cubs starter Kyle Hendricks and Cleveland Indians starter Josh Tomlin allowing no runs.

Since there’s no designated hitter in a National League park, the Indians’ DH (and lead-off hitter) Carlos Santana played left field.

One of the key storylines to note is the absence of Cubs designated hitter Kyle Schwarber from the starting lineup. The young slugger spent the season rehabbing a torn-up knee, and was just activated for the Series. His hitting was a key reason why the Cubs won Game 2. But Schwarber hasn’t been cleared to play in the field, and since Game 3 is in Chicago, a National League city, there is no DH.

Indians starter Josh Tomlin was in command through four-plus innings, while Cleveland’s three relievers kept the Cubs hitters off balance the rest of the game.

The fifth inning had seen the departure of both starting pitchers.

Indians manager Terry Francona took Josh Tomlin out after he gave up one hit — just the second Cubs hit of the night — and got the next batter to ground out. Indians reliever Andrew Miller was brought in to get the final out of the frame.

The Cleveland Indians mounted their most serious threat in Game 3 thus far, in the top of the fifth inning by knocking Cubs starter Kyle Hendricks out of the game after loading the bases with a hit, a walk, and a hit batsman. But Cubs reliever Justin Grimm induced Francisco Lindor to hit into a double play.

In the sixth, Cubs reliever Carl Edwards retired the side without incident. Indians reliever Andrew Miller struck out the three Cubs batters he faced in the bottom of the inning.

The Indians broke the scoreless deadlock in the top of the seventh inning when pinch-hitter Coco Crisp singled to score pinch-runner Michael Martinez from third base. Martinez was running for Roberto Perez who opened the frame with a single. Martinez went to second on a sacrifice bunt and third on a wild pitch by Cubs reliever Carl Edwards.

The Cubs threatened to score in the bottom of the ninth, putting runners on second and third, but they couldn’t score.

Game 4 of the Series will be played Saturday. The scheduled pitchers are John Lackey for the Cubs and Corey Kluber for the Indians. Kluber was the winner of Game 1 in Cleveland.

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A jury awarded former Penn State assistant football coach Mike McQueary $7.3 million in damages on Thursday. McQueary was a key witness in the sexual molestation case against another former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky. Jurors found that McQueary was defamed by the university after it became public that he had reported seeing Sandusky abusing a boy in a team shower.

A decade before the Sandusky scandal broke in 2011, McQueary testified that he reported to then-head coach Joe Paterno that he saw Sandusky engaged in a “clear” sex act with a young boy.

McQueary, who was a graduate student at the time, claims because of that testimony he lost his assistant coaching job and was made a scapegoat in the case. He came under scathing criticism for failing to stop the abuse he witnessed.

McQueary said that since his testimony was made public he’s been unable to find work, his marriage broke up and he lives with his parents.

NPR’s Jeff Brady reports that the university argued in court that McQueary’s contract was not renewed in a routine shake-up after Paterno was fired. University lawyers also said that McQueary could have reported the crime to the police himself.

A judge has yet to rule on McQueary’s whistleblower claim in the case.

Sandusky was convicted of sexually abusing 10 boys in 2012 and is serving a 30- to 60-year prison sentence.

A Penn State spokeswoman declined comment until the case is completed.

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Updated at 11:30 p.m. ET

The Chicago Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians 5-1 in Game 2 of the World Series. The best-of-seven Series is tied one game apiece as the action moves to Chicago for Game 3 on Friday.

Cubs starting pitcher Jake Arrieta disarmed the Indians’ batters, holding them hitless until the sixth inning, when they scored their only run. The Indians stranded two runners in the seventh inning, a runner in the eighth inning and another in the ninth. But they never mounted a real challenge to Cubs relievers Mike Montgomery or Aroldis Chapman.

The Scoring

In the first inning, Indians starting pitcher Trevor Bauer gave up one run on a single by Cubs third baseman Kris Bryant, who then came home on a double by Anthony Rizzo.

The Cubs scored their second run in the third inning on a base hit by Kyle Schwarber, driving in Rizzo from second base.

The Cubs scored three runs in the top of the fifth inning after Cubs reliever Zach McAllister walked Rizzo and then gave up a triple by Ben Zobrist. Reliever Bryan Shaw was brought in to face Schwarber who followed with a single, scoring Zobrist. The Cubs scored their third run of the frame when Shaw walked Addison Russell with the bases full, scoring Schwarber.

The Indians finally got on the board scoring a run in the bottom of the sixth when Cubs starter, 2015 Cy Young award winner Arrieta, threw a wild pitch scoring Jason Kipnis, who had the Indians first hit of the night. Arrieta was replaced by reliever Montgomery.

Schwarber’s story is one Cubs fans (and TV commentators) love. After hitting 16 homers as a rookie last year, he tore up his knee in early April and hadn’t played since then until last night. He’s been in the lineup as the designated hitter. If anyone on the field was “just-happy-to-be-here,” it’s Kyle Schwarber.

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Updated at 11:55 p.m. ET with final score

The Cleveland Indians beat the Chicago Cubs 6-0 in Game 1 of the 2016 World Series on the strength of a commanding performance by their starter Corey Kluber who struck out nine batters over six innings.

Kluber was so dominant that he struck out eight of the first nine Cubs batters he faced. He had the help of back-up catcher Roberto Perez who clobbered two home runs.

Cubs starter Jon Lester gave up three runs over 5 2/3 innings. The Indians got to Lester early in the game. He gave up a hit and walked two batters in the top of the first inning before giving up an infield hit and hitting a batter. By the end of the first, the Indians were ahead 2-0 and their fans smelled blood.

The Indians added another run when Perez hit a home run to left field off Lester in the fourth inning. He struck again in the bottom of the eighth inning hitting a three-run homer, again to left field, off reliever Hector Rondon.

The Cubs twice threatened to get back in the game. In the seventh inning, they loaded the bases with no outs, but Indians reliever Andrew Miller shut them down. In the eighth inning, the Indians put two runners on base, but again failed to score.

Our original post:

Game 1 of the 2016 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians is underway.

The home-team Indians jumped out to 2-0 lead in the bottom of the first inning after Cubs starter Jon Lester walked the bases full and then gave up an infield hit and hit a batter.

Both teams have waited decades to call themselves champions. As the Two-Way reported earlier, it’s been 68 years since the Indians last won the Series and 108 years since the Cubs were baseball’s champions.

(The last time the Indians played in the World Series was 1997 and they lost in a seven-game series to the then-Florida Marlins.)

Typically, a World Series generates its own excitement. Still, with all due respect to baseball’s Chicago Cubs, Major League Baseball’s best regular-season team with 103 victories this year, tonight is a special night in Cleveland.

Before the first pitch, Indians fans streaming into Progressive Field were bouncing off the vibes from the arena right next door.

That is Quicken Loans Arena, where the National Basketball Association’s current kings, the Cleveland Cavaliers, are kicking off their 2016-17 season. Tonight they raised a championship banner from their historic 2015-16 season when they became the first NBA team to overcome a 3-1 game deficit and win the series against the Golden State Warriors.

But enough of basketball — my colleague Tom Goldman is on the scene at Progressive Field, and he summed up the mood inside the ballpark this way: “You can see it in the eyes of every fan here in Cleveland. The Cavs! The Indians! It’s beyond festive. It’s a dream come true in Cleveland!”

The temperature at game time was 50 degrees. Ski hats and parkas are in full force, says Tom, and of course, the coats and headgear are mostly in the Indians’ red, white and blue colors.

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Next month, there’s a world chess championship match in New York City, and the two competitors, the assembled grandmasters, the budding chess prodigies, the older chess fans — everyone paying attention — will know this indisputable fact: A computer could win the match hands down.

They’ve known as much for almost 20 years — ever since May 11, 1997. On that day, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated the great Garry Kasparov who, after an early blunder, resigned in defeat.

“I am ashamed by what I did at the end of this match. But so be it,” Kasparov said. “I feel confident that machine hasn’t proved anything yet.”

Kasparov’s confidence proved unjustified. In the years since, computers have built on Deep Blue’s 1997 breakthrough to the point where the battle between humans and machines is not even close. Even chess grandmasters like author and columnist Andrew Soltis know this to be true.

“Right now, there’s just no competition,” Soltis says. “The computers are just much too good.”

And as it turns out, some players prefer to stay away from computers as opponents, he says.

“The world champion Magnus Carlsen won’t even play his computer,” Soltis says. “He uses it to train, to recommend moves for future competition. But he won’t play it, because he just loses all the time and there’s nothing more depressing than losing without even being in the game.”

Magnus Carlsen, who’s Norwegian, defends his title against Sergey Karjakin of Russia, in November. Carlsen is 25. Karjakin, 26.

They have both arrived at the highest ranks of the game in an era when a $100 chess computer can easily dispose of them both.

That superiority had been pursued and imagined for decades.

There was a chess match in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL, the computer, versus Frank, the astronaut.

But here’s the question. Do HAL’s real-life progeny — computers that can see 30 moves into the future — play the game differently? Do they have a style? Have they taught humans new strategies?

Murray Campbell of IBM was part of the Deep Blue project. As he says, chess computers do play differently. They make moves that sometimes make no sense to their human opponents.

“Computers don’t have any sense of aesthetics or patterns that are standard the way people learn how to play chess,” Campbell says. “They play what they think is the objectively best move in any position, even if it looks absurd, and they can play any move no matter how ugly it is.”

Human chess players bring preconceptions to the board; computers are unbound by habit.

And, unlike people, computers love to retreat, Soltis says.

“And if you see a game in which one of the players is doing a lot of retreating mysteriously and so on, and the game goes on forever and ever, that’s a computer,” he says.

Susan Polgar is a grandmaster and a six-time national collegiate champion chess coach. Computers do all that retreating, she says, because they’re not slaves to human nature. Humans, she says, don’t like to admit a mistake unless they really have to.

“And in those borderline cases when it’s not obvious that you have to retreat, chess players tend to not like to retreat,” Polgar says. “Let’s say you move a knight forward towards your opponent’s king, attacking. Unless you absolutely have to retreat, you rather try to follow up that attack by bringing more pieces to attack your opponent’s king.”

Computers display no such stubbornness. “A computer, if it calculates that the best move is to retreat, it has absolutely no psychological boundaries holding it back from retreating,” Polgar says.

One of the human players in November’s match, Magnus Carlsen, the world champion, was described as playing a very un-computer like game of chess. Polgar says this means Carlsen can win with different kinds of strategy, and he might choose his strategy based on what he knows about his opponent.

“Against one opponent that loves having queens on the board — the most dangerous attacking piece — he would make sure, you know, try to get rid of the queens as soon as possible and put his opponent in a more uncomfortable setting on the chessboard,” Polgar says.

To the great human chess champion, understanding the foibles of his foe can be a key to victory. To a computer, all opponents look the same.

Polgar says computers are great training aids for her chess teams. And she says, computers have solved several age-old chess problems — questions of how to win when there are very few pieces on the board.

Soltis is less charitable to the machines that humans programmed to play chess, and that now beat their former masters routinely. They may have nerves of silicon. They may be indefatigable and immune to psychological distraction. But Soltis says they haven’t imparted much wisdom about the game.

“We sort of had a social contract, we thought, with the computers many years ago,” Soltis says. “We would teach them how to play chess. They would teach us more about chess. They haven’t lived up to their side of the bargain.”

The real payoff from teaching computers to play chess may not have anything to do with the game. Campbell, from IBM, says it’s a lesson taken from that experience that has propelled artificial intelligence research in the years since.

“Humans have certain strengths and weaknesses. Computers have certain strengths and weaknesses,” Campbell says. “Computers plus humans do better than either one alone.”

Computers have the advantage of brute force. They can mine huge amounts of information. But humans, Campbell says, still excel at evaluating that information and coming up with a plan that will work.

He says that’s especially true as researchers use computers to take on messy, real-world problems full of unknowns, like combating climate change or curing cancer.

“I think many of the common board games don’t have the unknown element in it,” Campbell says. “They may have chance elements. A game like backgammon, for example, there’s roll of the dice, but you can calculate the probabilities quite accurately. When there’s unknowns, there’s things … just are hidden from you, and even the alternatives, the things you can do, can’t be set down and enumerated. There’s maybe too many possible actions you can take. That’s the challenge for modern artificial intelligence research.”

Meanwhile, back at the chessboard, two of the best human players in the world — Carlsen and Karjakin — play their championship in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, starting Nov. 11.

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Cursed by a Billy Goat, bedeviled by Bartman and crushed by decades of disappointment, the Chicago Cubs are at long last headed back to the World Series.

Kyle Hendricks outpitched Clayton Kershaw, Anthony Rizzo and Willson Contreras homered early and the Cubs won their first pennant since 1945, beating the Los Angeles Dodgers 5-0 Saturday night in Game 6 of the NL Championship Series.

The drought ended when closer Aroldis Chapman got Yasiel Puig to ground into a double play, setting off a wild celebration at Wrigley Field.

Seeking their first title since 1908, the Cubs open the World Series at Cleveland on Tuesday night. The Indians haven’t won since 1948.

“This city deserves it so much,” Rizzo said. “We got four more big ones to go, but we’re going to enjoy this. We’re going to the World Series. I can’t even believe that.”

Manager Joe Maddon’s team, deemed World Series favorites since spring training, topped the majors with 103 wins, then beat the Giants and Dodgers in the playoffs.

The Cubs took their 17th pennant. They had not earned a World Series trip since winning a doubleheader opener 4-3 at Pittsburgh on Sept. 29, 1945, to clinch the pennant on the next-to-last day of the season.

The eternal “wait till next year” is over. No more dwelling on a past history of failure — the future is now.

“We’re too young. We don’t care about it,” star slugger Kris Bryant said. “We don’t look into it. This is a new team. This is a completely different time of our lives. We’re enjoying it and our work’s just getting started.”

Hendricks pitched two-hit ball for 7 1/3 innings. Chapman got the final five outs, then threw both arms in the air and got mobbed by teammates and coaches.

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It will be a night of tension and hope for baseball fans in Chicago when the Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers play Game 6 of the National League Championship Series on Saturday.

If the Cubs win, they will move on to the World Series to face the American League champion Cleveland Indians. It will be a step closer to fulfilling a wish of a faithful fan, 101-year-old Virginia Wood.

Wearing a Cubs T-shirt and surrounded by family, Wood was ready for baseball Thursday night when the Cubs and Dodgers took to the field. Her wheelchair not far from the television, the former physical education teacher knew what she wanted to see from her team.

“I just want to be sure they get the first run,” Wood says. “I really do. I think it makes a difference.”

And the Chicago Cubs did not disappoint — scoring in the first inning.

Wood attended her first Cubs game at Chicago’s Wrigley Field in 1924. She was 10 years old. As an adult, she would go as often as she could, especially with friends after work on “Ladies Day” when they could attend free.

“When people didn’t stay for the whole game, we’d all move ourselves down a little closer to the front as far as we could go,” Wood says.

Wood saw lots of games but no championships. The Cubs last won a World Series in 1908, but Wood dismisses the idea of a curse holding the Cubs back. She says she knew a championship would come eventually, and she is convinced this is the year.

“Oh, I’m counting on them going all the way, absolutely,” she says.

Wood says in the past, the Cubs didn’t have all the parts they needed — good pitching and hitting at the same time. This year, they have Joe Maddon. Wood says Maddon is an excellent manager directing a very talented team.

“They’ve got all young kids now,” Wood says. “It’s wonderful. They’re enthusiastic. They hustle a lot. They go after everything, and I think that’s what the difference is.”

Wood’s son, Gary, says his mother hopes the Cubs grant her a favorite wish — a World Series title.

“She’ll be 102 next month,” he says. “That’s what she wants for her birthday.”

“Oh yeah, sure, I’d like to have that,” Wood says. “Good birthday present. Oh yeah, that’s the best.”

But first, there’s a game or two left before that can happen, and Wood says she’ll be watching and cheering on her team.

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A federal jury in Los Angeles found New York Knicks guard Derrick Rose not liable Wednesday in a civil suit that accused him and two friends of rape. Ryan Allen and Randall Hampton, the two friends, were also cleared.

The suit accused Rose, Allen and Hampton of breaking into the home of a Los Angeles woman. The alleged victim, a former girlfriend of Rose, had sued for $21 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. Rose, a former NBA MVP and Rookie of the year, testified during the trial as reported in the Times.

“Contradicting the woman’s claim that she became severely intoxicated and ‘blacked out’ while drinking with the three men the evening before the alleged rape, Rose said the woman appeared lucid at the Beverly Hills house he was renting. He described how the woman, whom he had dated casually for two years, made repeated sexual advances toward him and eventually initiated sex with Hampton and him.

“Several hours later, when the woman had gone home, Rose claimed she agreed to have the three men come to her apartment, let them in and willingly had sex with each of them in turn.

“The woman testified that she believes the men slipped an unnamed drug into one of her drinks and that she has only ‘flashes’ of memory of what occurred at Rose’s house and in her apartment. She told jurors that she passed out in her bed and awoke to find the men in her room having sex with her.”

Neither side denied Rose, Allen and Hampton had sex with the woman. At issue was whether she was too intoxicated to consent.

The three men have been friends since childhood in Chicago. Both Allen and Hampton work for Rose.

Criminal charges have not been filed but a Los Angeles Police investigation is still pending. In a strange twist, LA police detective Nadine Hernandez, one of the officers investigating the potential criminal case against Rose, Allen, and Hampton, was killed last week, as reported by member station KPCC.

Rose, once a top draft pick, was traded by his hometown Chicago Bulls earlier this year to the New York Knicks. Rose has been plagued my knee problems for years, though last year he was free of injuries. In 2016-2017 season, Rose is expected to make $21 million.

“I am thankful that the jury understood and agreed with me.” Rose said in a statement to the Associated Press, “This experience and my sensitivity to it was deep. I am ready to put this behind me and focus on my family and career.”

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