The Mouth That Roared (27 page)

When I arrived in Chicago, I promised the beginning of a new—and winning—tradition. Back then, I was the new general manager looking to trade veterans for prospects. Now, with a playoff run looking plausible, I felt comfortable gambling on a player who might help us get over the top.

A paperwork glitch almost scuttled the deal, but once we got that straightened out, Sut was ours. He came to the Cubs along with reliever George Frazier and catcher Ron Hassey. In addition to Hall and Carter, we sent pitchers Don Schulze and Darryl Banks to Cleveland.

It was a steep price to pay for a pitcher not considered among the game’s elite, but again, I had a feeling Sut would emerge as the ace we needed.

I told reporters at the time, “We don’t like giving up promising players, especially a player such as Mel Hall. But we need a first-class pitcher, and if we are going to win, our players, not just management, have to grab the brass ring.”

As it turned out, Carter, not Hall, became the superstar. Carter was a 30-30 guy with Cleveland and later helped lead the Toronto Blue Jays to two straight championships. Hall had some pretty decent years with the Indians and the Yankees but is now serving a long prison sentence for rape.

In addition to bringing us Sut, the trade helped defuse Keith Moreland’s anger at Frey for platooning him with Hall. In our pursuit of a top-flight pitcher, Keith thought for sure he would be dangled as trade bait. I couldn’t easily tell Jimmy how to fill out his lineup card, but I could decide who to offer to other teams. I thought highly of Keith and believed we’d be more likely to make a pennant run with him on the team. When Hall got traded, Keith was poised to reclaim right field for himself. I told him, “Okay, big boy, you got the job. Now stop bitching and moaning and go out and play.”

Like a lot of guys that year, he stepped up to the challenge.

*

Shortly after that trade, the Phillies rolled us in a four-game series at Wrigley Field. The sweep dropped us to third place and vaulted Philadelphia into first. As the Phillies left town, manager Paul Owens assured the baseball world that his team had every intention of repeating as division champions. Pope’s proclamation hinted at something many were surely thinking after Philadelphia handed our tails to us: Like clockwork, another June swoon awaited the Cubs.

I was as concerned as anybody about the Cubs’ tendency over the years to fall into a rut in the middle of the season. While with the Phillies, I saw it firsthand in 1977 when the Cubs held onto first place through July but suddenly ran out of steam, allowing us to catch and pass them.

I agreed with the conventional wisdom that all the day games took a toll on the team.

Knowing Wrigley Field wouldn’t have lights any time in the near future, I came up with the idea of 3:05
PM
start times for games taking place on days after the team returned from a road trip.

I thought an extra couple hours of rest between night and day games would help our players. And in my opinion, it did. But the later start times also presented challenges. As these games entered the later innings, shadows crept across home plate, making it difficult for batters to pick up incoming pitches. It was a tough go at times, but I never questioned the choice. Day baseball is a wonderful thing—until fatigue starts costing you games.

I didn’t hear too much grumbling from my own players about the 3:05 games (Buckner was gone, after all), but a former player of mine, Mike Schmidt, ripped me for making his job a little harder.

“I guess it’s Dallas Green’s decision, but there’s no concern for players and players’ performance,” Schmidt told the
Chicago Tribune
. “When a team plays a 3:05 game, they’re pretty sure that if the sun’s out, by the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, or ninth inning, they’re not going to be able to see the ball when it gets to home plate.”

Quite honestly, I never really worried about anything Schmitty said. He had long been his own worst enemy. And I could have cared less about other teams’ bitching about the 3:05 start times. I did it to help the Cubs, not them.

I guess I couldn’t blame Schmitty too much for not wanting to hit in the late innings at Wrigley Field if the Cubs had a lead. That meant hitters likely had to face our closer, Lee Smith. I hate the word
dominant
, because I think it’s overused. It ranks up there with
small ball
on my list of least preferred terms. But Lee was as close to dominant as you can get a lot of the time. In 1983, his first year as a full-time closer, he led the league with 29 saves and gave up just 19 earned runs in more than a hundred innings.

The shadows definitely worked to Lee’s advantage. His 95 mile-per-hour fastball was difficult to hit at any time of the day, but in the fading late-afternoon sunlight, it was next to impossible. Lee would rear back and throw that lively fastball or a tricky slider. Halfway to the plate, it would momentarily disappear before emerging from the shadows. Hitters had precious little time to decide whether to swing or not.

My only criticism of Lee was that he didn’t throw inside. I’d say, “Lee, do me a favor and bust them in every once in a while just to let them know you’re there. Pitch them in, jam them, make their fingers hurt.” He had a hell of a time with that. He liked to pitch away.

Lee didn’t have a stellar year, by his standards, in 1984, but his presence at the back end of our bullpen meant a lot to us. Like Tug McGraw in 1980, he had the head, heart, and belly to close games.

*

What can I say about Ryne Sandberg? Well, for starters, I can say I’m glad he didn’t listen to his mother and accept the college football scholarship he was offered out of high school. If he had, my time in Chicago likely would have been drastically different.

The letter of intent Ryno signed with Washington State turned him from a hot baseball prospect into an afterthought in the 1978 major league draft. No team wanted to squander a pick on a player it couldn’t sign. As Phillies farm director, I knew how much our scouts loved Ryno. But why waste a pick?

“What the hell,” I said when I saw him still on the draft board at the start of the 20
^th
round. “Let’s take a chance and hope the kid changes his mind about college.”

A few days later, Bill Harper, our scout for the Northwest region, and his supervisor, Moose Johnson, visited with Ryno and his parents in Spokane, Washington. Bill, whose grandson, Bryce, became a pretty good player himself with the Washington Nationals, must have given the Sandberg family one hell of a sales pitch. He and Moose walked out of the house with a signed contract.

Over the next couple of years, I watched Ryno’s rapid development in the minor leagues. As GM of the Cubs, I insisted the Phillies include Ryno in the 1982 Larry Bowa trade. That ended up being the single best decision I ever made as a general manager.

Ryno’s first two seasons in Chicago confirmed he had a bright future in the majors. He adjusted quickly to major league pitching and put up respectable offensive numbers.

But I don’t think any of us were prepared for what happened in 1984.

Recognizing Ryno had some pop in his bat, Jimmy Frey talked to him in spring training about how to utilize his power. “Especially when you’re ahead in the count, look for a ball in the middle of the plate and try to drive it, even if it means hitting foul balls down the third-base line,” Jimmy told him.

It was simple advice, but Ryno hadn’t heard it before. Back then, a slick-fielding infielder who stole 30-plus bases and hit .270 was a pretty damn good player. That was Ryno before 1984. The talk with Jimmy helped him add a new dimension to his game.

From that time on, whenever he fell behind in the count, he tried to make solid contact. But when he got ahead, he showed off a nice power stroke. In 1984, he hit 19 home runs, more than he hit in the previous two seasons combined. He also hit a league-leading 19 triples. By adding power to his game, he became the rare five-tool second baseman.

*

A nationally televised game on June 23, 1984, against the Cardinals marked Ryno’s emergence as a superstar and ours as a contender for the division crown.

The game showed no signs of being remarkable early on.

St. Louis jumped all over Steve Trout, scoring six runs in the second inning to take a 7–1 lead. In years past, the Cubs would have folded tent. And despite the home team’s ineptitude, the fans at Wrigley Field would have enjoyed a nice summer afternoon anyway.

On that day, however, the team fought back, and the fans learned just how enjoyable winning baseball can be.

A two-run single by Sandberg in the bottom of the sixth capped a five-run inning that cut the Cardinals’ lead to 9–8. An inning later, Whitey Herzog brought in Bruce Sutter to try and quell our comeback.

Remember what I said about Lee Smith being dominant at times? Well, Sutter, a former Cub, also could be described that way. He had led the league in saves in 1984, the fifth time in six years he captured the NL saves title. And up to that point in the ’84 season, his split-finger fastball had been almost unhittable. Despite routinely pitching multiple innings in relief, his ERA was just a shade over 1.00.

Sutter got the final out of the seventh and breezed through the eighth. Strong relief work by our Tim Stoddard and George Frazier kept it a one-run game going into the bottom of the ninth.

Ryno stepped to the plate to lead off the inning against Sutter, against whom he was 2-for-11 in his career to that point. That’s a stat that confuses me. Did it mean Sutter owned him? Or did it mean Ryno was due for a hit? It turned out to be the latter. Ryno followed Jimmy’s advice and put a compact swing on a Sutter split-finger fastball. The ball jumped off his bat and into the air, eventually landing in the left-field bleachers for a game-tying home run. The crowd went bananas. And so did the Cubs front office, watching the game from our ballpark suite.

The thrill was short-lived, however. Lee Smith coughed up a couple of runs in the top of the 10
^th
to put us back in a hole. Willie McGee finished off his cycle with a double that gave the Cardinals the lead.

Sutter retook the mound in the bottom of the 10
^th
. One comeback against him was improbable, but two in the same game? That seemed next to impossible.

We started the inning with two ground outs. Down two runs with two outs and nobody on base, it looked as bleak as it gets. From my seat near the press box, I could hear NBC broadcasters Bob Costas and Tony Kubek preparing to sign off by thanking their crew and announcing that night’s prime-time lineup.

Sutter ran the count full to Bobby Dernier, taking us down to our last strike. Bobby hung tough and drew a walk.

With a runner on first, Ryno came to the plate again.

The rest is history, I guess.

He smacked another homer to left to tie the game at 11–11. The hit completed his 5-for-6 day at the plate. After the home run, I ran over within earshot of Costas and Kubek and shouted, “You guys better take all those thank-yous back! We’re still playing!”

We won the game in the 11
^th
on an RBI single by Dave Owen.

After the game, Herzog said Sandberg was the best baseball player he’d ever seen.

It was just unbelievable storybook stuff. That game defined Sandberg going forward. And it defined the Cubs in 1984 as anything but pushovers.

We avoided a swoon in June and every other month. In fact, we had a winning record every month of the ’84 season.

After Ryne Sandberg’s career-making game at Wrigley Field against St. Louis, we really got on a roll. We moved into first place in the National League East for good on August 1 and ended up winning the division by 6½ games. Over the last three months of the season, we went 54–31.

Rick Sutcliffe was as good a pitcher in the second half of the 1984 season as you’ll ever see. He won 16 games and lost only one after we traded for him. Seven of those victories came in games following a Cubs loss. On September 7 at Shea Stadium, the second-place Mets trounced us 10–0 on a one-hitter by Dwight Gooden, who struck out 11. It was the kind of win that can propel a team to a late-season run. But Sut took the mound the next day and kept the Mets from inching any closer. He threw a four-hit, complete-game shutout, striking out 12 while walking none.

Dennis Eckersley and Steve Trout also chipped in with double-digit win totals.

The Dernier-Sandberg combination at the top of the lineup lived up to my expectations. A
Chicago Tribune
article pointed out we were 25–6 in 1984 when those two players combined for three or more hits in a game. In addition, both won Gold Gloves.

Bobby and Ryno got on base, and the guys hitting behind them made sure they crossed the plate. In the process of scoring the most runs in the National League, we had six guys with 80 or more RBIs. Three of the six were ex-Phillies, but no one was complaining anymore about the Phillies-heavy influence in our lineup. As Bobby said later in the season, “The important thing is not where guys come from, but whether or not they’re good players. All the guys that came over here from other clubs qualify.”