100 Things Cubs Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (23 page)

69. Milt Pappas vs. Bruce Froemming

All that stood between Milt Pappas and a perfect game was one strike. And the way he sees it now, one umpire.

One of the most controversial calls in Cubs history has turned into a bitter 40-year feud between Pappas and Bruce Froemming, the umpire who was calling balls and strikes on September 2, 1972. It was on that day, before a sparse crowd of 12,979 at Wrigley Field, that Pappas retired the first 26 San Diego Padres he faced.

The 27
th
, a pinch-hitter named Larry Stahl, fell behind in the count 1–2. The next three pitches, according to every eyewitness account, were close. According to Froemming, they were all balls.

TV replays, which haven’t helped settle the dispute, show an enraged Pappas immediately move toward home plate and scream a few choice words toward Froemming, who had just turned Pappas into the only pitcher in major league history to lose a perfect game by walking the 27
th
man he faced.

Pappas, a 33-year-old right-hander in his third season with the Cubs, wrapped up the no-hitter one batter later and showed no ill-will toward Froemming afterward, telling the
Chicago Tribune
, “The pitches were balls. They were borderline but balls. Froemming called a real good game.

“I was just hoping Froemming might sympathize since it was a perfect game. But he couldn’t be expected to do that.”

Oh, couldn’t he be? Since that magnanimous postgame interview, Pappas has changed his tune and will gladly tell anyone within earshot that Froemming should have given him the benefit of the doubt. One of his biggest arguments is that in 1956 when Don Larsen threw a perfect game in the World Series, the home plate umpire appeared to give Larsen a favorable call on the final pitch.

“It’s a home game in Wrigley Field,” Pappas told ESPN in 2007. “I’m pitching for the Chicago Cubs. The score is 8–0 in favor of the Cubs. What does he have to lose by not calling the last pitch a strike to call a perfect game?”

Pitcher Milt Pappas in a 1971 photo. (AP Photo)

In 2010, when Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga lost a perfect game on a blown call by first-base umpire Jim Joyce, the similarities between the two games led to media contacting Froemming and Pappas to rehash the memory of a game played nearly 40 years earlier. The biggest difference is that Joyce acknowledged the blown call as soon as he saw a replay, while Froemming made it clear he felt he had nothing to apologize for.

“The pitch was outside. I didn’t miss the pitch; Pappas missed the pitch,” Froemming told
The New York Times
. “You can look at the tape. Pappas, the next day, said, ‘I know the pitch was outside, but you could have given it to me.’ That pitch has gotten better over the years. That pitch is right down the middle now.”

Pappas retired after getting cut by the Cubs at the end of spring training in 1974 while Froemming, who was in his second season as a big-league umpire in 1972, worked as an umpire for another 35 seasons before retiring in 2007.

The two have run into each other a couple of times over the years, and although they were cordial to each other, Pappas will never forgive and never forget.

“Of course he’s never going to change his mind, and I’m never going to change my mind,” Pappas said. “’Til the day I die, it’s always going to be the fact that he blew it.”

70. Fiasco: The Milton Bradley Signing

In theory, it all kind of made sense.

See, the Cubs needed a left-handed bat for their lineup, and there was this really good hitter with a whole lot of fire in his belly—a fellow by the name of Milton Bradley—who could not only hit lefty but could draw a whole bunch of walks and pound some homers and boy, if the Cubs could just get him to take their $30 million then they’d be all set.

That was the theory, anyway. In practice, it turned out horribly. The signing of Milton Bradley
—coupled with the trade of uber-popular Mark DeRosa to Cleveland—became arguably the worst personnel decision by the Cubs since they thought they needed Broglio more than Brock.

The mystery about the Bradley signing is that he wasn’t a mystery when Cubs General Manager Jim Hendry signed him to a three-year, $30 million deal after the 2008 season. Before coming to the Cubs, Bradley had been with six different franchises in nine seasons and often burned bridges.

Cleveland traded him to the Los Angeles Dodgers after he had feuded with Indians manager Eric Wedge, and the Dodgers dealt him two seasons later after he said teammate Jeff Kent, also a prickly sort, “doesn’t know how to deal with African American people.”

Bradley was with the Padres in 2007 when he got into a run-in with an umpire late in the season and during the argument blew out his knee when one of his own coaches tackled him. A year later he was with Texas and during one game had to be stopped from going into the broadcast booth after hearing a perceived slight.

Still, he hit .321 with 22 homers and drew 80 walks for the Rangers, and he did it as a switch-hitter, which trumped any warning signs that trouble was lurking. On January 9, 2009, Milton Bradley officially became a Cub.

And it might have all worked out if Bradley hadn’t forgotten how to hit the ball. Cubs fans have turned on quite a few high-salaried busts over the years—Todd Hundley and Jacque Jones are among the most notorious—but it wasn’t because of money, it was because they played poorly.

Bradley started out 3-for
-31 and that was pretty much it, he’d lost most of the fans. It didn’t help that he was ejected during his Wrigley Field debut for arguing a third-strike call and received a two-game suspension—eventually cut to one game—for making contact with an umpire.

“He’s going to swing the bat well, his teammates love him, and we’re glad to have him,” general manager Jim Hendry said after Bradley’s inauspicious Wrigley debut, his head firmly buried in the sand. “He has the respect of the people he has played with in the past and the respect of his opponents, so I would think that says it all.”

It was near the end of August when Bradley started to turn on Cubs fans and his meltdown began. On August 25, he told reporters he faced “hatred” on a daily basis in the right-field bleachers, the implication being he was the victim of racist remarks. “All I’m saying is I just pray the game is nine innings, so I can be out there the least amount of time as possible and go home,” he said.

Bradley never provided specific examples, and the incident was fading away when on September 17 he told the
Daily Herald
, “You understand why they haven’t won in 100 years here.... It’s just not a positive environment. I need a stable, healthy, enjoyable environment.…
It’s just negativity.”

In other words, his troubles were everyone else’s fault but his own. At this point, Hendry threw up his hands and realized Bradley was a lost cause. He suspended him for the remainder of the season. “The last few days became too much for me to tolerate,” Hendry said.

Bradley’s teammates, who had defended him during the season, were also fed up. “Sometimes you’ve just got to look in the mirror and realize that maybe the biggest part of the problem is yourself,” Ryan Dempster said.

“In a way, I feel sorry for him,” Reed Johnson said. “He can’t enjoy the same things the rest of us enjoy.”

Even Andre Dawson chimed in, telling
the
Tribune
, “You want to give the uniform back, hopefully, on your terms, and not find yourself in the position where you are out of the game or unemployed because of selfish behavior or behavior that is not conducive to what you are trying to accomplish out there on the playing field.”

Bradley, who finished the season hitting .257 with 12 homers and 40 RBIs, was pawned off to Seattle in the off-season for Carlos Silva, ending his troubled tenure in Chicago. Meanwhile, the calm, collected, right-handed DeRosa, who hit .250 but clubbed 23 homers, was traded to St. Louis in June where he helped the Cardinals win the National League Central.

The Cubs wanted fire, and that’s exactly what they got. They just didn’t expect to get burned.

71. The Last World Series Game

Cubs fans started gathering outside Wrigley Field on the morning of October 10, 1945, hoping to get one of the bleacher seats that would soon go on sale for Game 7 of the World Series against the Detroit Tigers.

This was the Cubs’ fifth World Series appearance since 1929, so while it was not an annual affair, there was certainly no reason to believe this day would mark the beginning of the end.

Later that afternoon, around 4:00
pm
, Cubs second baseman Don Johnson stepped to the plate with Roy Hughes on first. Facing Tigers starter Hal Newhouser, Johnson rapped a ground ball to shortstop Skeeter Webb, whose flip to second forced Hughes to give Detroit a 9–3 victory.

And that was it. The Cubs participation in baseball’s Fall Classic was ended for what has not been, but surely seems like, an eternity.

There wasn’t a generation of built-up angst to contend with leading up to the game, and Sam Sianis and his goat had only been ejected from Wrigley Field days earlier before Game 5, so there wasn’t any talk of curses, either. This was merely a humbling loss due to the prevailing view that the Tigers were one of the worst American League pennant winners in recent years, though not the devastating kind of loss the Cubs would suffer during the 1984 and 2003 playoffs.

Game 7 got underway with Hank Borowy, 1945’s version of Rick Sutcliffe, on the mound. The New York Yankees had sold Borowy to the Cubs for $97,000 on July 27 after somehow passing through waivers. While Sutcliffe’s blistering second half came as something of a shock, Borowy’s was more of the same. He joined the Cubs with a 10–5 record and went 11
–2 the rest of the way. But by the time Game 7 rolled around, Borowy was spent. He gave up three singles on a mere nine pitches before getting yanked, and the Tigers raced to a 5–0 lead.

Manager Charlie Grimm’s decision to start Borowy on a single day’s rest—he had thrown four innings of shutout relief in the Cubs’ 8–7 Game 6 win in 12 innings—is open to a healthy dose of second-guessing. But aside from Hy Vandenberg, a spot starter during the season who threw 3⅓ innings of shutout relief in Game 7, Grimm didn’t have any good options.

Claude Passeau, Grimm’s only other reliable starter who had thrown a one-hitter in Game 3, had tossed 6⅔ innings in
Game 6 when the Cubs blew a 7
–3 lead in the 8
th
inning. If they had been able to put away the Tigers without going to extras, Borowy might have been a different pitcher in Game 7. Tigers manager Steve O’Neill also turned to a worn-down pitcher, though you would never have known Hal Newhouser was throwing on two days’ rest. He gave up 10 hits, including three singles to Phil Cavarretta, but he was never in serious trouble while striking out 10.

The Cubs’ final hours playing in the World Series were watched by 41,590 fans as well as Warren Brown, a Hall of Fame sportswriter whose 1946 book,
The Chicago Cubs
, recounted the first 70 years of their history. Brown’s look back didn’t foresee what was to come. In the last paragraph of his chapter on the 1945 Series, which was dubbed “World’s Worst Series”, Brown writes about postseasons yet to come.

“They’ll be back for more, however. They always have come back. They always will, for, as was set forth ’way back yonder, if National League baseball can’t always get along with the Cubs, neither can it get along for long without them.”

72. A Starlin is Born

If it weren’t for hope, Cubs fans wouldn’t be Cubs fans and a turnstile of failed phenoms over the years wouldn’t have devastated them.

The list of prospects who came to Wrigley Field making hearts flutter but who were eventually run off by a chasing mob includes the likes of Kevin Orie, Felix Pie, Corey Patterson, and the immortal Gary Scott. It was Scott who joined the Cubs in 1991 at the age of 22 saying he’d “like to be the next Ron Santo” and left at 23 with his tail—and a .160 lifetime batting average—between his legs.

So if you weren’t expecting a whole lot from Starlin Castro when he joined the Cubs on May 7, 2010, in Cincinnati for his major league
debut, who could blame you? A heart can only get broken so many times.

Shortstop Starlin Castro throws the ball to first base for the out on the Houston Astros Chris Johnson in the ninth inning on Saturday, October 2, 2010, in Houston. The Cubs won 8–3. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)

Born and raised in the Dominican Republic, Castro signed with the Cubs at 17 and distinguished himself in two seasons of rookie ball with averages of .299 and .311 before moving on to Single-A Daytona to start the 2009 season.

He headed to Double-A Tennessee after hitting .302 at Daytona and kept it up with a .288 average and the knowledge that he was not only competing but dominating. By then, Castro was considered an untouchable by the Cubs brass, and there was talk of joining the Cubs in 2010, even though he would only turn 20 on March 24.

The Cubs gave him a shot in training camp, but by the end of March Castro had been cut despite a robust .423 batting average in the Cactus League. The only question left was when, not if, Castro would join the Cubs in 2010.

With a .376 average in his first month at Tennessee, Castro was summoned to become the youngest shortstop in Cubs history, bumping Ryan Theriot over to second base in the process.

On the mound for the Reds was right-hander Homer Bailey, himself a one-time phenom. Cubs manager Lou Piniella hit Castro eighth to take a little pressure off him, so his first at-bat didn’t come until the second inning with two runners on base.

Of the first four pitches he saw, two were called strikes and on the fifth pitch, Bailey tried to send the bushy-haired rookie back to the bench with a curveball. Castro did head back to the bench after that pitch but not before rocketing it—on the first swing of his major league career—over the right-field fence for an opposite-field three-run homer. Castro had hit only nine home runs in 995 minor-league at-bats, so this was not a matter of a slugger doing what comes naturally.

Three innings later, after lining out, Castro came up with the bases loaded and cleared them with a triple to the gap in left-center, giving him six RBIs in his first three at-bats in the big leagues.

The six RBIs were the most ever by a player in his major league debut, breaking the mark of five held by four other players. Castro also became the sixth Cubs player to homer in his first big-league at-bat.

“I don’t believe it,” Castro marveled after the game.

The next few weeks indicated Castro was no longer a phenom but a bona fide big leaguer. He hit .310 during the month of May and ended the season at an even .300, finishing with three homers and 41 RBIs. In 2011, Castro got off to a roaring start and hit .307 with 10 homers, 66 RBIs, and 22 stolen bases as the youngest player in baseball much of the season.

And a child shall lead them? On a magical Friday night in May, Cubs fans could only hope.