The Mouth That Roared (24 page)

As a broadcaster, he didn’t let me down. He didn’t hurl personal insults at players. In fact, he established himself as the Cubs’ biggest fan. To this day, people associate Harry Caray with his joyful on-air call, “Cubs win! Cubs win!” And his performances of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field inspired a much-loved tradition.

*

In 1982, Lee Elia and I convinced most of the team to report early for spring training. Lack of talent was going to be an issue all season. I didn’t want lack of preparation to compound our problems.

Our retooled lineup featured Ryne Sandberg, Larry Bowa, and Keith Moreland. It remained to be seen if the addition of those players would translate into wins.

No matter how long you’ve been associated with the game, the excitement of Opening Day never gets old. In most years, it announces the arrival of spring. But in my first season in Chicago, it signified the continuation of winter.

The night before our home opener against the Mets, several inches of snow fell in Chicago. As the snow accumulated, I called in some outside workers to help our grounds crew get the park ready for the next day’s game. God bless those guys! They worked their tails off, shoveling every single aisle and cleaning off all the seats. By morning, the sun was out, but the temperature was below freezing. The crews continued working right up until game time.

It wasn’t the best weather for baseball, but nearly 27,000 fans showed up to watch us beat the Mets 5–0 behind a strong outing by 39-year-old Ferguson Jenkins. After the game, I brought the grounds crew workers a couple of cases of beer to thank them for their hard work. In contrast to my disheartening experience at the Instructional League, our home opener showed we might yet develop the kind of can-do spirit that makes organizations successful.

It was time to celebrate.

Yosh Kawano, our clubhouse manager, was a Cubs institution, a cantankerous old devil but a man who was very effective at his job. Somewhere in the sales contract between the Wrigley family and the Tribune Company was fine print stipulating that Yosh had a lifetime contract with the team. It had long been tradition for Yosh to take the manager and general manager to dinner on Opening Day. John Vukovich and my secretary, Arlene, who was also Yosh’s girlfriend, came along.

We had a wonderful meal in a semi-private room at an Italian restaurant. After we finished eating, we started drinking pretty good—Black Russians for me and wine for the rest of the table.

Yosh, Arlene, and I were yakking it up when we heard a commotion coming from the bar area. When I went to check it out, I saw a guy pushed up against the wall with two other guys about to beat the hell out of him.

The two other guys were Elia and Vukovich! Apparently the guy pinned to the wall had made some negative comments about the Phillies
and
the Cubs.

Lee was an emotional guy, but he never flew off the handle just for the hell of it. The restaurant fight happened because somebody took a shot at his former and current employers. Lee, like me, oozed passion for his work and took insults about his team personally. Vuke was the same way.

Here’s how Lee reflects on that particular incident and the bonds between him, Vuke, and me: “None of us were going into the Hall of Fame as players. We got to where we got in the business because we worked and competed and cared about what we were doing. Our teams became like families. And it wasn’t tolerated if someone said anything about our family. There we were at Yosh’s party, having a good time, not looking for trouble, but somebody opened his mouth, and that created a little bit of a situation.”

*

The win over the Mets in the home opener brought our season record to 2–1. It was the only time all year we had a winning mark. By the end of July, we were 25 games under .500, and if not for a strong finish, we might have suffered the ignominy of a 100-loss season in 1982.

Not surprisingly, we again finished near the bottom of the league in attendance.

Our best pitcher in 1982 was Jenkins, who led the team with 14 wins and a 3.15 ERA. A bright spot offensively was Sandberg, who came to the plate 687 times in his first full season in the major leagues. He hit .271, stole 32 bases, and played a capable third base. His rookie year confirmed what we already knew: Ryno was going to be a major contributor to the team for many years.

Our on-the-field product was a work in progress. But the behind-the-scenes culture at Wrigley Field remained a problem.

I’ve always felt that employees make a baseball organization what it is. They should feel like they are part of a family. I experienced that in Philadelphia and wanted to duplicate that atmosphere in Chicago. That wasn’t an easy sell. During my first season with the Cubs, I learned something about day baseball. It turns employees into 9-to-5 people, as opposed to 24-hour people. Here’s what I mean by that: when a team plays only day games, employees arrive at the ballpark around 9:00
AM
, do a little work, take a break to watch the game, and then go home.

There were plenty of days I wanted to have meetings after games, but I’d walk through the hallways and see empty office after empty office. Even when our staff was present, I observed lot of people running around but not doing anything in particular.

I wanted hard-working and dedicated employees. Anyone simply going through the motions was better off someplace else.

After the 1982 season, I cleaned house.

In what became known as “Bloody Monday” at Wrigley Field, I fired our promotions director, ticket director, traveling secretary, director of publications, public relations secretary, clubhouse attendant, group sales manager, head of security, and several office assistants. I also got rid of a guy who liked to tell people his job was organizing staff birthday parties.

A
Chicago Tribune
columnist named John Husar called it the “biggest front office purge in Chicago sports history.”

It was a bloodbath, and it wasn’t fun. But I had to send a message that the 9-to-5 way of doing business was a relic of the past. In his column, Husar compared me to a caveman: “Early man made room at the table by shoving out the weak and the old. Those who couldn’t hunt were left to be hunted. Well, some of these (people fired by the Cubs) were fair hunters but poor office politicians.”

That was nonsense. My message was clear: the Wrigley family wasn’t around anymore to take care of everyone. You had to work to earn your keep.

After the purge, we eventually doubled the size of the front office. The increase in quantity and quality made us a better organization.

*

I even had to give Cubs legend Ernie Banks his walking papers in 1982.

This was sensitive stuff, because Ernie is so revered in Chicago, and rightfully so. I loved Ernie as a player and as a person. Heck, I thought so highly of him that I made sure we retired his number soon after I got to Chicago. He is Mr. Cub, after all.

Ernie is the nicest guy you’ll ever meet. But his niceness caused me some headaches.

Ernie represented the Cubs as a goodwill ambassador, appearing at various events in the community, where he’d say a few words and pose for pictures. Everywhere Ernie went, people approached him to request his attendance at an event.

“Hey, Ernie, great to see you. We’re having such and such a function at 1:00
PM
on Saturday. Can you make it?”

Ernie would reply, “Oh yeah, sure, I’ll be there.”

Later that same day, someone would say, “Hey, Ernie, we’re having a Little League thing on Friday. Can you come and throw out the first pitch?”

And Ernie would respond, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be there.”

The problem was he said yes to everybody, but he hardly showed up for anything. Then my office dealt with the fallout. We’d get calls from people cursing us out for promising Ernie Banks and not delivering him. Of course, it had been Ernie doing the promising, not us.

I scheduled a meeting with Ernie’s agent to address the situation. I told him we very much wanted Ernie to represent the organization, but we couldn’t have him agreeing to appear at events and then not showing up.

“We’ll get a gal to handle all his stuff for him,” I told Ernie’s agent. “She’ll keep his calendar and call him to make sure he’s available to attend an event. And on the day of the event, she’ll make sure he gets there.”

That idea worked fine for a while. We paid Ernie a few dollars as an official employee and made sure he followed through on his commitments. But another problem arose. For every event his assistant booked for him, he committed to three or four others without our knowledge. We continued to catch hell from jilted members of the community when Ernie was a no-show.

I met with his agent again.

“Look,” I said, “we’re going to do this one more time, and one more time only. You have to tell Ernie to pass along any information he gets about appearances to his gal, and she’ll take care of it.”

It still didn’t work.

At that point, I decided we wouldn’t accept any more phone calls requesting Ernie’s presence at events. And we wouldn’t take responsibility for any arrangements he made on his own. I made sure Ernie knew he was welcome at the ballpark any time he wanted. Like I said, Ernie is one of the nicest people you’ll ever run across. But, goddamn, he just couldn’t say no.

I don’t think Ernie held that whole episode against me, which is good, because I have the utmost respect for his baseball career. I also had enough thorns in my side as it was.

Bill Buckner was an accomplished baseball player, but his selfish attitude never sat well with me. Lee Elia didn’t like him, either, which is probably why he and Buckner got into a scuffle during a game at San Diego in 1982. On paper, Bill had a fine season in 1982, hitting .306 and exceeding previous career highs with 15 home runs and 105 RBIs. But he wasn’t my kind of ballplayer.

Buck bitched about everything. If we let the grass at Wrigley Field grow because we wanted to give our infielders an edge out in the field, Buckner complained that the tall grass cost him hits. When we expanded the bleacher area in center field so we could sell a few more tickets, Buckner whined that the people in the seats obstructed his view of pitches. Everything we did, Buckner cried about.

He also constantly expressed his wish to be traded.

Buck was happy to put his numbers up, but he was never truly content. And he most definitely never embraced the idea of baseball as a team sport.

Maybe it was all the losing he had experienced as the longest-tenured position player on the Cubs. When you lose that much, it becomes ingrained in your thought process. I also think it creates a player who is more interested in his own statistics than his team’s won-lost record.

Moving forward, that wasn’t the kind of guy I wanted on my team.

I fully intended to trade Buckner after the 1982 season. And I knew I wouldn’t have a problem finding a taker, because other general managers didn’t know the Buckner I did.

As I shopped him around, I looked to the free agent market for a player to replace him at first base.

It didn’t take long to zero in on Steve Garvey, an eight-time All-Star with the Dodgers, who hit the free agent market after Los Angeles declined to give him a five-year contract. Garvey had already made it known the Cubs were one of five teams he wanted to play for. The others were the Giants, the Padres, the Astros, and the Yankees. I felt I could make a compelling case that we were the best fit for him.

At the 1982 winter meetings in Honolulu, I delivered my pitch to Garvey and his agent, Jerry Kapstein. The Cubs were headed in the right direction, I told them, and Garvey could play a major role in bringing playoff baseball to the north side of Chicago. I also touted the city itself, arguing it was an ideal place for Garvey and his magnetic personality.

Gordon Goldsberry, our director of scouting and player development, helped me woo Garvey. During breaks in negotiations, Gordie and I huddled in my suite at the Sheraton Waikiki and took notes on a blackboard. We penciled in what we hoped would be our new infield: Ryne Sandberg at third, Larry Bowa at shortstop, and Garvey at first.

A five-year deal for Garvey was going to cost us about $7 million, not much by today’s standards, but a lot at the time. The cost was secondary, however. I knew Garvey would help improve our club. That’s all that mattered. The Tribune Company had given me carte blanche to make all baseball decisions, and I was going to exercise that power.

*

A few days into the winter meetings, news broke that Garvey had narrowed his list to two teams: the Cubs and the Padres. I knew we had an excellent shot at landing him, because Garvey seemed to like the spotlight that came with playing in a large market.

Kapstein, Garvey, and I talked again, and this time we agreed in principle to a deal. I then turned around and made a handshake agreement with Paul Owens of the Phillies on a trade involving Buckner. Maybe Pope would have better luck with Buck than I did.

Late that evening, Gordie and I met with Tribune liaison Andy McKenna, who had come with us to Hawaii. We showed Andy the blackboard with all our notes. Andy studied the board, which included players’ names, dollar figures, and assorted scribblings.