100 Things Cubs Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (12 page)

32. The Sandberg Game

The most famous game in the historic Cubs-Cardinals rivalry was played on June 23, 1984, at Wrigley Field. And it belongs to Ryne Sandberg, as you can see from the title of this particular entry.

But Sandberg has always shared it with every Cubs fan in attendance and the millions watching and listening at home. This was a game that became an event, the kind you never forget where you were and what you were doing when it happened.

The Sandberg Game, as it came to be known almost immediately, was NBC’s Game of the Week and introduced the nation to the Cubs’ 24-year-old second baseman, a smooth fielder who was only just emerging as an offensive force. Going into the game he was hitting .321 with seven homers, above what he’d produced during his first two full seasons with the Cubs but not enough to cause anyone to think a Hall of Famer was waiting to bust out.

The Cardinals jumped out to leads of 7–1
and 9–3, knocking out Cubs’ left-hander Steve Trout before the end of the second inning and silencing most of the 38,079 fans, but not the thousands of Cardinals fans who still routinely venture to Wrigley Field. The Cubs scored five runs in the sixth to make it 9–8, but they couldn’t complete the comeback and with two outs in the seventh Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog turned to his closer, Bruce Sutter.

Bringing in a closer in the seventh is unheard of today but it was run of the mill for Sutter, who had outings of two innings or more in 41 of his 71 appearances in 1984. Sutter was still a master of the split-finger fastball, which he had learned while in the Cubs’ minor league system and perfected during his five years with the Cubs from 1976–80. As usual with the Wrigley-owned Cubs, money became an issue and Sutter was traded to the Cardinals for Leon Durham, Ken Reitz, and Ty Waller. Just as with Lou Brock almost 20 years earlier, the Cardinals rode their recently acquired former Cub to a World Series title in 1982.

So the sting of losing Sutter was still very fresh in 1984, and it didn’t help that Sutter was nearly untouchable after a subpar 1983 season. Going into the game, Sutter had a 1.19 ERA and had given up three home runs all season. This wasn’t going to be easy, and Sutter retired the first four Cubs he faced on grounders. The split-finger was working splendidly.

Sandberg, who was 1-for
-10 lifetime against Sutter, surprised just about everyone by knocking out his eighth home run of the season while leading off the ninth inning to tie the score 9–9. There was tremendous excitement, sure, but little did anyone know this was just the warm-up act.

In the top of the 10
th
, skinny center-fielder Willie McGee rapped an RBI double off Lee Smith that not only put the Cardinals ahead but allowed McGee to hit for the cycle. They tacked on another run and went to the bottom of the inning secure that Sutter, who was still in the game, wouldn’t blow it again.

Sure enough, Sutter got two quick ground outs before narrowly walking Bobby Dernier on a 3–2 pitch that was just a touch low and easily could have gone the other way. But there Dernier stood at first, and there Sandberg once again stood at the plate.

If you watch closely, there’s very little different about Sandberg’s ninth-inning homer and the one he sent soaring into the left-field bleachers in the tenth that tied the game, leading NBC’s Bob Costas to scream, “Do you believe it!” and sending Wrigley Field up for grabs.

What gets lost in the hysteria is that Sandberg, who finished 5-for-6
with seven RBIs, didn’t even figure into the final inning of the game, in which the Cubs got three straight walks—two of them intentional—and then won it on Dave Owen’s RBI single.

After the game no amount of hyperbole was good enough for Herzog, who declared, “Sandberg is the best player I have ever seen.” Sandberg, as shy and reserved a superstar as baseball ever had, was in shock afterward. “I don’t even know what day it is,” he said.

It was the day that changed Sandberg’s life and the memories of Cubs fans forever.

33. The Hawk

In 1987, I thought about giving up the game or maybe going to Japan. But I knew there had to be a place where the game could be fun again. I found that place. It’s called Wrigley Field. It reminded me that if you love this game, the game will love you back.

—Andre Dawson, Hall of Fame induction,
Cooperstown, New York
, 2010

It’s remarkable to think about what Andre Dawson had to go through in order to become a Cub, and it’s even more remarkable to think about what he did once he became one.

There weren’t many options for a free agent in 1987; collusion among major league owners had made player movement very difficult. But Dawson simply had to leave Montreal’s Olympic Stadium and its rock-hard artificial turf. His knees wouldn’t have it any other way. Dawson knew where he wanted to be, and that was playing day baseball on the Wrigley Field grass. Going into 1987, he had hit about 100 points higher during the day and was a lifetime .346 hitter at Wrigley. It was a perfect fit.

Only the Cubs didn’t see it that way, or rather collusion didn’t allow them to see it that way. Instead of embracing Dawson, they treated him like a poor relation who kept showing up on their doorstep asking for a handout. In fact, Dawson did show up on the Cubs’ doorstep. After trying to secure a two-year, $2 million contract over the winter, negotiations broke down in January. When training camp began, Dawson and his agent, Richard Moss, went to Mesa anyway and held a press conference to announce Dawson had signed a contract and the Cubs could fill it in with whatever dollar figure they wanted.

Cubs president and general manager Dallas Green, whose club had finished 70–90 in 1986, was ticked off by this because he was doing everything he could to not sign Dawson. “In my heart I don’t feel that we need Andre Dawson,” Green had told the
Tribune
. “We need every one of those guys in that locker room. They are signed, they’re Chicago Cubs. And some of them have not performed too well in the past. If they perform up to their past capabilities, and what we feel are their present capabilities, I’m not sure we need Andre Dawson.”

It took several days for the Cubs to agree to this radical proposal that was so incredibly tilted in their favor. They eventually gave in to Dawson’s “demand” and paid him $500,000 plus incentives. Finally, with three weeks left in camp, the Hawk was a Cub. That’s when the fun really began.

Hall of Famer Andre Dawson thanks the Chicago fans as he is honored by the Chicago Cubs before a game against the Pittsburgh Pirates on Monday, August 30, 2010, at Wrigley Field in Chicago. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

Dawson put the negotiations behind him and turned in a season for the ages that initiated a love affair with Cubs fans and in all likelihood elevated him to Hall of Fame status. Secure in his new home, Dawson hit .287 with 49 homers and 137 RBIs and became the first player to ever win the Most Valuable Player Award for a last-place team. The Cubs were actually decent that year and despite a 76–85 record, Dawson and Rick Sutcliffe, who went 18–10, kept the Cubs above .500 through early September.

Wrigley Field was the haven Dawson imagined it would be. In 74 home games, he hit .332 with 27 homers and 71 RBIs compared to .246 with 22 homers and 66 RBIs on the road. Nothing could stop him, not even a beanball from San Diego’s Eric Show on July 7 at Wrigley Field that left Dawson’s face bruised, bloodied, and with 22 stitches.

The beaning, which came two innings after Dawson’s 24
th
homer, resulted in a bench-clearing brawl led by Sutcliffe, who tore after Show from the dugout while Dawson still lay on the ground writhing in pain. When he finally regained his faculties, Dawson ripped himself away from those attending to him and made his own attempt to get to Show, who was whisked away to the Padres’ dugout. Incredibly, Dawson was ejected from the game while Show, though replaced by a reliever, was not.

Dawson missed just two games and
after slowing down for a few weeks went on to have a monster August, slamming 15 homers. He then put the final touches on his magical season by homering in his final home at-bat of the season.

Dawson spent five more seasons with the Cubs and averaged 25 homers and 90 RBIs, good numbers but nothing approaching the 1987 season. When the Cubs went to the playoffs in 1989, a year when Dawson only played 118 games due to knee problems, he went 2-for-19 and didn’t hit a home run.

After the 1992 season, when he was 38, Dawson left for Boston and criticized Cubs’ management. “I’m just excited that an organization, for once, has shown me the decency and respect that I think I didn’t get when I was in Chicago,” Dawson told the
Chicago Tribune
.

There would be one more bittersweet moment involving the Cubs, and that was on the day the Baseball Hall of Fame announced Dawson would be immortalized with a Montreal Expos hat on his plaque. That wasn’t what he wanted. But he made his true feelings known in a moving speech that singled out Cubs fans who embraced him in 1987 when it appeared nobody else in baseball wanted him.

“And from my heart, from my heart, thank you, Cub fans,” Hawk said. “You were a true blessing in my life. I never knew what it felt like to be loved by a city until I arrived in Chicago. And though it wasn’t my way to show it, I can’t express to you enough how I appreciate what you did.

“You gave me new life in baseball when I arrived in Chicago, and you are the reason I continued playing the game. I can’t thank you enough for how good you were to my family and me. You were the wind beneath the Hawk’s wings.”

34. 95 Years Later, the Cubs Win a Playoff Series

Futility can take many forms, and aside from not making the playoffs for decades, the Cubs also didn’t know how to handle themselves when they got there.

After beating Detroit in five games to win the 1908 World Series, they lost 10 straight postseason series, including seven Fall Classics. A 39-year playoff drought ended in 1984
, but a heartbreaking loss to San Diego that season was followed by rather mundane postseason defeats by San Francisco in 1989 and Atlanta in 1998.

There wasn’t much reason to think 2003 would be any different. The Cubs won the National League Central with a mere 88 victories and didn’t clinch until the next-to-last day of the regular season.

Meanwhile, the powerful Atlanta Braves won 101 games, tying the New York Yankees for the most wins in the majors, and had six players with 20 home runs and four with 100 RBIs during the regular season. The Cubs did have one distinct advantage. Their top two starters—Kerry Wood and Mark Prior—were the most dominant starters on either team, an invaluable commodity in a short series.

The other thing giving the Cubs hope was they were not the same team they had been 2½ months earlier. On July 23, Cubs general manager Jim Hendry sent Jose Hernandez, minor leaguer Matt Bruback, and a player to be named later (it wound up being Bobby Hill) to Pittsburgh for power-hitting third baseman Aramis Ramirez and aging center fielder Kenny Lofton.

The Cubs were 50–49 when the trade was made and desperately needed help at both positions. They had first tried Mark Bellhorn at third, but he wasn’t hitting and on June 20
he was sent to Colorado for Hernandez. Five weeks, 26 strikeouts, and a .188 batting average later, he was sent packing and replaced by Ramirez, who proved to be the answer. He hit 15 homers after joining the Cubs.

Corey Patterson, 23 years old on Opening Day, was fulfilling his promise as the Cubs’ center fielder of the future by hitting .298 with 13 homers, 55 RBIs, and 16 stolen bases as the All-Star break approached. But on July 6 he blew out his knee against St. Louis and was lost for the season. Lofton was at a point in his career where he was becoming a wanted man by playoff teams at the trade deadline. The previous year he had helped Cubs manager Dusty Baker lead the San Francisco Giants to the World Series. In 56 regular season games after joining the Cubs, he hit .327 and stole 12 bases. It was a masterful trade, easily Hendry’s best, and set up the Cubs perfectly for the playoffs.

In order to win the series the Cubs would have to win at least one road game, which also meant snapping an eight-game road losing streak in the playoffs. Their last win away from Wrigley in the postseason had come in Game 3 of the 1945 World Series when Claude Passeau one-hit the Detroit Tigers. Wood didn’t throw a one-hitter in Game 1 at Turner Field, but he came pretty close. In six powerful innings, Wood allowed just two hits and struck out 11 in 7⅓ innings. He also went 2-for-4 with a team-high two RBIs in the Cubs’ 4–2
victory.

Baker decided to go with 22-year-old Carlos Zambrano in Game 2, and even though he pitched well, the Braves got a pair of eighth-inning runs to snap a tie and deliver a 5–3 victory. The series went back to Wrigley Field all tied up.

A loss in Game 3 would have probably forced Baker to use Wood on three days’ rest, but Prior didn’t allow that to happen. In a 133-pitch, two-hit performance, he won a 3–1 decision over the Braves’ Greg Maddux to bring the Cubs to the brink of a series win. There was hope that in Game 4 the Cubs could break another streak. The only two postseason series they had ever won had both come on the road in Detroit during the 1907 and 1908 World Series. It wasn’t to be as the Cubs’ Matt Clement fell behind 4–1 after five innings and the Braves held on for a 6–4 win.

Sammy Sosa, who wound up 3-for-16 in the series without an RBI, nearly produced the most thrilling Cubs playoff moment in several generations when he came to the plate with two outs and Damian Miller on second base in the bottom of the ninth. His drive on a 3–2 pitch couldn’t escape Wrigley Field and the teams headed back to Turner Field to decide the series.

The previous time the Cubs had played a winner-take-all playoff Game 5 was in the 1984 NLCS in which they led San Diego 3
–0 in the sixth inning with their best pitcher on the mound before falling apart. There was even a mishap involving a glove just like there was in 1984 when a bucket of Gatorade was spilled on Leon Durham’s glove before he committed a fateful error that led to a bucketful of runs. Wood’s glove didn’t make the trip to Atlanta; he had forgotten it in his North Side apartment while rushing to pack for the flight. He had been so confident the Cubs wouldn’t need a Game 5 that he hadn’t packed for a road trip.

You can debate whether Wood or Prior was the Cubs’ best pitcher in 2003, but as in 1984 this Game 5 followed a similar pattern as the Cubs built a 4–1 lead. Moises Alou, who went 10-for-20 in the series, had an RBI single in the first, and Alex Gonzalez hit a solo homer an inning later.

Ramirez, who had a lone RBI in the first four games, put the Cubs up 4–0 in the top of the sixth inning with a two-run blast off Mike Hampton. A controversial call in the bottom of the inning led to the Braves’ only run of the game, but it could have been worse for the Cubs. With nobody out and Marcus Giles on first base and Rafael Furcal on second, Gary Sheffield hit a liner to center that Lofton appeared to have caught. Furcal thought the ball had dropped and kept running while Giles hesitated. If the umpires’ call had come right away he could have made it to second, but there was no immediate call on the field.

Finally, right-field umpire Gary Cederstrom signaled that Lofton had trapped the ball, but Giles wasn’t able to get to second in time to avoid a force out. Even though Furcal scored on the hit, which replays showed Lofton had actually caught, the damage was mitigated.

The Braves only managed two more hits over the final three innings and never brought the tying run to the plate before closer Joe Borowski pitched a 1
–2–3 ninth to win the game and close out the series. The Cubs had at long last won a playoff series, defying tradition and putting their demons to rest.

For a little while anyway.