The Mouth That Roared (23 page)

Dickie sat in the parking lot and smiled. He didn’t want to leave Philadelphia but was ecstatic about joining me in Chicago, knowing what we could accomplish together.

That trade worked out pretty well for us.

But it was my next trade with the Phillies that resonates in Philadelphia and Chicago to this day.

*

I knew from stories in Philadelphia-area papers sent to me by my best friend, Clyde Louth, that veteran shortstop Larry Bowa and owner Bill Giles were in a heated dispute over Bowa’s contract. Bowa wanted a three-year extension that Giles and Pope didn’t think he was worth. After 16 years in the organization, it was clear Bowa’s days as a Phillie were over.

This put the Phillies in a jam. They had designs on competing for a second championship in three years, but they needed a proven shortstop to have a realistic shot at that. It just so happened I had a guy who fit the bill: Ivan DeJesus. Even though he had a dreadful year at the plate in 1981, he was a career .257 hitter to that point and just two seasons removed from stealing 44 bases.

Bowa and I didn’t always get along in Philadelphia, but his opinion of me improved a lot after he got a World Series ring in 1980. His dedication to the game was second only to Pete Rose among players I knew. Though he had lost a step on the base paths and some range at shortstop, he still knew how to play championship baseball.

Gordie and I were willing to trade for Bowa, but we agreed the Phillies were going to have to throw in at least one other player to make a deal worth our while. We needed inventory. And the fact that DeJesus was seven years younger than Bowa gave us leverage to ask for an additional player.

In January 1982, Bowa went on a Philadelphia radio station and said his agent told him the Phillies had agreed to trade him, infielder Luis Aguayo, and outfielder Dick Davis to the Cubs for DeJesus and pitcher Bill Caudill.

His agent was wrong.

Gordie and I wanted a young player who could be a building block for the Cubs’ future. We agreed that 22-year-old Ryne Sandberg had that potential. Gordie had scouted him in high school, and I had picked him in the 20
^th
round of the 1978 draft. Sandberg only had six major league at-bats to his name, but we were confident he had all the skills to thrive in the big leagues. He was a tremendous all-around athlete, with great speed and hands. He had mostly played shortstop in the minor leagues, but we felt he could adapt to any infield position.

Pope and the Phillies liked Sandberg, too. But as negotiations continued, we hung tough.

It helped us that the Phillies had middle infielder Julio Franco in their minor league system. Pope went on the record saying he thought Franco, and not Sandberg, was the team’s shortstop of the future. That left one fewer infield position Sandberg could play for the Phillies, who were likely going to send him back to Triple-A for another year.

The talks went on for weeks. There were other talented players in the Phillies system, including Len Matuszek, a slugging first baseman who had hit for power and average. But first base was one of the few positions where we didn’t need help.

We held out until Pope agreed to give us Sandberg.

All the newspaper stories about the trade mentioned Sandberg in passing. He was a prospect, a throwin, a deal-sweetener.

Ryno jumped right into our starting lineup as a third baseman in 1982. His eventual development into a perennial All-Star and Hall of Famer at second base now makes that deal look like one of the most lopsided in baseball history. But in the short term, the trade benefited the Phillies. DeJesus helped them get to the 1983 World Series. They got what they wanted, and so did we.

The trade for Sandberg was a sound baseball decision. Every now and then, such decisions make general managers look like geniuses.

*

With all the Philadelphia transplants in Chicago, it didn’t take long for the Cubs to be nicknamed “Phillies West” and the “Cubillies.” I threw fuel on the fire by never missing a chance to tell Chicago fans how much the Cubs could learn from the Phillies’ way of doing business. They resented the hell out of me for that.

It would be a couple more years before some strategic trades and Ryno’s emergence as a superstar helped the Cubs shed their losing ways. For the time being, we had to try to drum up interest in the team based on a belief that better days lay ahead, even if they might take a while to arrive.

I tried to make it clear that I didn’t think there was anything lovable about losing.

With that in mind, Bing Hampton came up with a hell of a slogan for the Cubs: “Building a New Tradition.” It was a way for us to hedge. The new tradition of winning wouldn’t take hold overnight. A blind man could see that. But it was being built…or so we hoped.

Not everybody embraced the idea of the Cubs as winners. Some so-called fans actually liked the decades of losing. Studs Terkel, the legendary Chicago writer, summed up that mind-set best when he said, “I think they’re more endearing in defeat than in victory. I like their loser-like quality.”

That’s what we were up against.

*

I had no delusions of grandeur when I got to Chicago. But as someone who liked a good challenge, I relished the chance to try and rebuild an organization. Teams win games, but organizations establish the framework for success. And while the Cubs may have been a venerable organization, they certainly weren’t a successful one.

It was hardly a coincidence that the Cubs’ record for single-season attendance to that point had come in 1969, the year the team played inspired baseball until they blew a nine-game lead and lost the division to the Mets in the final weeks of the season.

It’s simple: when you win, you put people in seats. And because the Cubs didn’t win a lot in the 1970s and early 1980s, they didn’t draw well. Fewer people watched games at Wrigley Field in 1980 than at the outset of the Great Depression in 1930. Among the reasons for that was the team’s difficulty selling season tickets.

I leveled with Cubs fans about their misplaced love of failure, a phenomenon further perpetuated by the 1969 team. I did a call-in radio show in Chicago that gave me a chance to interact with fans. And by that I mean it gave me a chance to set fans straight on some things.

“The ’69 team that you loved so much
lost
,” I told them. “They were losers. Why did they lose? Because Wrigley Field didn’t have lights. The team got tired from coming off the road late at night and then reporting to the ballpark early for day games. That sapped their stamina.”

The 1969 team and day baseball were both sacred to Cubs fans. But there I was on the airwaves disparaging both. That led to a lot of pissing contests with callers to the show, especially after we got off to another losing start in 1982.

I’ve always had a loud mouth and yakked too much, but I didn’t do the show just to make people angry at me. I felt it was a way to reach a section of the fan base that knew the game and could give me feedback on how we were doing. I guess it all made for good radio. A lot of the callers were your typical talk show types who just wanted to harangue me. Well, I’m not harangue-able. My advocacy for lights at Wrigley Field, which started slow and built over the next few years, was evidence of my willingness to mix it up with the locals.

The new general manager and the stubborn old fans agreed on one point: Wrigley Field was a wonderful place to watch a game. So many Chicagoans had childhood memories of taking the train to Wrigley with their parents or grandparents. Now, they were parents or grandparents themselves who were passing on the same tradition.

A love of the Friendly Confines and the game itself is a perfectly good reason to come out to the ballpark. But I felt we had to move beyond that by bringing back pride to the organization.

The Cubs weren’t cursed. They just had come to accept losing.

On a visit to our spring training facilities in Mesa, Arizona, shortly after we joined the Cubs, Lee Elia and I saw firsthand the Cubs organization’s lack of pride.

Before the trip, we informed our minor league coordinators that we were coming to check out our prospects in the Fall Instructional League. That’s what general managers and managers do to acquaint themselves with their organization. To us, that was a given. But in the Cubs’ world, it apparently was a revolutionary concept.

When Lee and I landed at the Phoenix airport, no one came to meet us. We took a taxi to the team hotel, but there weren’t any signs identifying it as such. In Clearwater, Florida, where the Phillies train, we hit fans over the head with reminders of our presence. It helped locals establish a connection to the team.

Lee and I threw our bags in our rooms and went out to HoHoKam Park to get a glimpse of our Instructional League team. Again, no signs identified the park as the spring training and Instructional League home of the Chicago Cubs. Not only that, but there wasn’t anybody at the park.

We reasoned that Instructional Leagues don’t wake up as early as some of us and waited for some activity to commence. After a while, I turned to Lee and said, “You think we’re in the right goddamn stadium? Shit, shouldn’t someone be out there throwing the ball or checking out the field?”

We sat there for two hours before anybody showed up. And when our staff finally arrived, no one came up to introduce themselves to the new manager and general manager. I had come from a Phillies organization that cared about its people and tried to make every new employee feel welcome. I interpreted the silent treatment we got that day as my staff saying, “So you’re the new guy, big fucking deal! We’re the old Chicago Cubs.”

Well, that attitude had to change.

*

I had started to overhaul the front office and the team. Next up was the broadcast booth.

Harry Caray, who had worked White Sox games for the past decade, was on the outs with management for his support of broadcast partner Jimmy Piersall, who had been suspended by the organization for calling the wives of White Sox players “horny broads.” Harry said he’d quit if Jimmy got fired for his comment.

White Sox manager Tony La Russa and his coaches hated Piersall, but they didn’t think much of Harry, either. They were sick and tired of Harry ripping the team at every turn. When the White Sox announced they were moving their games to a pay-TV service, Harry declared himself a free agent.

Our own legendary play-by-play man, Jack Brickhouse, was retiring, and the brass wanted a big name to fill Jack’s shoes. Jim Dowdle, the Tribune Company’s executive vice president for media, asked me what I thought about Harry coming aboard as the Cubs’ play-by-play man on Tribune-owned WGN.

I said I didn’t like Harry’s tendency to get personal on the air. “I know he’s a great announcer and brings a lot to the table with his personality,” I told Dowdle, “but the White Sox want to run him out of town. What’s he going to do when he comes over here?”

The Cubs weren’t good enough to win, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to give Harry a platform to skewer the team. Still, I agreed to meet with Harry and Dowdle at some clandestine Chicago club to hash out the situation.

Over drinks, I looked Harry in the eye and told him I respected him as a broadcaster. “But I know your reputation for telling it like it is, and I can’t have you burying my guys like you did the White Sox,” I said. “We’re a few years away from making any noise. If you beat up our guys, no one is going to want to come and play here.”

I invoked an incident with Garry Maddox as an example. “Harry, if a guy loses a ball in the sun because he’s not wearing sunglasses, I don’t have a problem with you ripping him. Hell, I’ll do it myself. But I can’t have you ripping families or the way a guy goes about his business off the field. That’s not acceptable to me.”

Harry gave me the assurances I wanted to hear, so I gave his hiring my blessing.

My only other concern was how Harry’s presence would impact Cubs broadcaster Milo Hamilton, who had been groomed to replace Brickhouse. With Harry in the booth, he’d be playing second fiddle again. On top of that, Harry and Milo had worked together in St. Louis in the 1950s and didn’t particularly like each other. They ended up coexisting in Chicago for two years before old grudges from their St. Louis days spilled over into on-air squabbles. Milo was fired after the 1984 season. With my blessings and support, he joined the broadcast team in Houston, where he remained until retiring after the 2012 season. Milo, like Harry and Jack, is in the Hall of Fame.

We made the right decision with Harry. He brought a lot of life to the broadcast booth and became an inseparable part of the Cubs brand in the 1980s.

Sylvia and I got to know Harry and his wife, Dutchie, pretty well. On our first dinner out with them, Harry plopped down next to Sylvia at the restaurant bar and got morose about having to pay alimony to two ex-wives. This turned into a general rant against women. We had yet to be seated for dinner, and Harry was already on his fifth or sixth drink.

Harry turned to Sylvia and asked with great scorn, “What did
you
ever do?”

I’m not sure if the question was directed at Sylvia or all females. But Sylvia didn’t back down. “What the fuck did
you
ever do?” she responded.

I could be wrong, but I think the rebuttal sobered Harry up pretty quickly. A few days later, Harry was on his way to the broadcast booth at Wrigley Field when he saw Sylvia. He walked over to her, held up her arm, and said, “The winner!”