Cubs will leave Schwarber’s home run ball on top of scoreboard

In a scene reminiscent of "The Natural," Chicago Cubs rookie Kyle Schwarber crushed a mammoth home run Tuesday night to help seal Chicago's National League Division Series-clinching win over the rival St. Louis Cardinals.

The ball landed on top of the right-field scoreboard at historic Wrigley Field and the Cubs announced Wednesday that they're going to leave it there.

According to the Chicago Tribune, a Cubs' employee was sent to retrieve the ball on Wednesday morning and a source said the team verified it was the actual Schwarber ball through an MLB postseason watermark on it.

The Cubs then returned it to its original location on top of the board and will leave it there until their postseason run has concluded.

The source said the Cubs will decide what to do with the ball after the season, but wanted to leave it there for now as a memento of the Game 4 win. The Cubs will put a plexiglass case around it for now to preserve it from the elements.

A security guard will escort anyone going up to the top of the video board to service it so it won't be stolen. There will be no 24-hour security.

The TBS cameras didn't have any close-ups of the seventh-inning blast, which gave the Cubs a 6-4 lead, and everyone in Chicago's clubhouse assumed the ball went out of the park. But Tom Comings, a Tribune Publishing employee, confirmed the ball landed under the "i" in the Budweiser sign through before and after photos of the scoreboard.

"We were watching and looking," Comings said. "Nobody actually saw where it went at first and then instantly I said 'There it is, on top of the scoreboard.' I put the picture on Twitter, and pictures from the seventh-inning stretch that clearly shows there was no ball up there then... It had to ricochet perfectly to land there."

Check out video of the "Schwarbomb" above.