A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (12 page)

So, in 1962 … they did it again. Craft, no fool he, decamped to Houston to manage the Houston Colt .45s, an expansion team that, notwithstanding the fact that it was assembled from scraps discarded by other teams, finished six games ahead of the Cubs, who finished ninth—the first year that was possible—and lost 103 games. They were spared the ignominy of being the first National League team to finish tenth because the historically awful New York Mets, another freshly minted expansion team, lost 120 games. Seven years later, however, the Mets would have the consolation of winning the World Series.

It is altogether fitting that on July 20 in 1962, the final year of this nadir of baseball foolishness, the Cubs passed a dismal milestone. Playing the Dodgers in Wrigley Field, they lost 8–2. With that loss, the Cubs’ record since taking up residence in Wrigley Field in 1916—they had defeated the Reds 7–6 in the first game there—fell below .500. It has been there ever since.

In 1963, the Cubs gave up on Wrigley’s experiment but tried to save face by continuing to call the actual manager, Bob Kennedy, “head coach.” He served two years, then was replaced by head coach Lou Klein.

The College of Coaches may deserve a portion of the blame for the worst trade in Cubs history. Lou Brock was a struggling twenty-five-year-old outfielder for the Cubs when, on June 15, 1964, they lost patience and sent him
to the Cardinals in exchange for a pitcher, twenty-eight-year-old Ernie Broglio. Broglio, whose career would end with the Cubs after the 1966 season, had a 7–19 record with them. The Cardinals won the 1964 World Series with Brock batting .348 in a Cardinal uniform, and they won another with him in 1967. He finished with 3,023 hits and 938 stolen bases (at the time, a major league record). These numbers are on his plaque in Cooperstown. He says he might have found his talent in Wrigley Field if he had received steady attention from coaches who were not distracted by episodic managerial duties.

One—
the
one—good result of the College of Coaches is that the Cubs became the first team to have an African American coach. Buck O’Neil of the Kansas City Monarchs was thirty-seven when Jackie Robinson broke the color line, in 1947. He was too old to play in the major leagues, but he scouted for the Cubs, who made him a coach during the college era.

After the collapse of the College of Coaches, P. K. Wrigley said, in effect: No more Mr. Nice Guy.
For the 1966 season, he hired Leo Durocher, who when introduced to the Chicago media said, “If no announcement has been made about what my title is, I’m making it here and now. I’m the manager. I’m not a head coach. I’m the manager.” And
he was a prophet, of sorts. He promptly proclaimed that the Cubs, who had finished eighth in 1965–25 games behind, with a 72–90 record—were “not an eighth-place ball club.” He was right. In 1966, they finished tenth, 36 games out of first place, with a 59–103 record.

With the hiring of Durocher, climate change came to Wrigley Field.
His salty memoir, published in 1975, when he was sixty-nine, is titled
Nice Guys Finish Last
. No one was more temperamentally opposed to Wrigley Field’s golly-the-ivy-is-so-green-and-the-sun-is-so-warm-and-the-beer-is-so-cold-and-the-ambience-is-so-gosh-darned-
friendly
-who-cares-what-the-score-is ethos.

“Nice guys finish last” is one of the most famous statements in baseball history. But Durocher did not say quite that. One day in the 1940s, when he was managing the Dodgers, his team was taking batting practice before a game with the Giants at their Polo Grounds. There he said of the Giants, “All nice guys. They’ll finish last. Nice guys. Finish last.” Journalists “improved” what he’d said.
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
has the correct version.

“Give me,” Durocher liked to say, “some scratching, diving, hungry ballplayers who come to kill you.” And: “If I were playing third base and my mother were rounding third with the run that was going to beat us, I’d trip her.” He said he believed in rules, because “if there weren’t any rules, how could you break them?” He illustrated that philosophy by telling how in the 1930s, when he was a shortstop with the St. Louis Cardinal Gas House Gang team, he would “file his belt buckle to a sharp edge,” and when
a Cardinal pitcher was in a jam, he would visit the mound and scuff the ball.

Durocher, the distilled essence of everything the Wrigley Field ethos is not, disliked the man who embodied this ethos. In fact, Durocher detested Ernie Banks, one of the best players ever to wear a Cubs uniform, and unquestionably the most beloved player in the team’s history. Banks liked to be loved. Durocher reveled in his role as a human cactus, which may have been the main reason P. K. Wrigley hired him.

Another reason was that the turnstiles at Wrigley Field were turning more and more slowly. In 1965, attendance had sunk to 641,361, an average of 7,727 per game, and the club had lost $1.3 million, which was real money in a year when the average player salary was $14,341 and the average team payroll was $573,640. Wrigley’s business model—serve cold beer in a pretty place and the score will not matter—was not working. And it was becoming expensive.

Durocher adored P. K. Wrigley: “Simply the finest man to work for in the world. The most decent man, probably, I have ever met.” Wrigley probably reciprocated Durocher’s affection because in Durocher’s second year, 1967, the Cubs were making money and finished third with a winning record (87–74), the first time they had finished in what was then called “the first division”—the top half of a league—since 1946. In 1968, the Cubs again finished third (84–78) but drew more than a million customers (1,043,409) for the first time since 1952. In 1969, they drew 1,674,993, breaking a franchise record that had existed
since 1929. They also set a Chicago record, topping the one set by Bill Veeck’s White Sox of 1960. This at a time when Wrigley Field’s capacity was just 36,667 and all games were played in the afternoon; lights were still nineteen years away. The 1969 attendance record would survive until 1984, when the Cubs played in their first postseason since 1945. Yet 1969, like 1984, would not end happily.

The Cubs started the season by winning eleven of their first twelve games and on August 7 were in first place, with a nine-game lead. But August is when the first four months of the season have taken their toll in injuries and drained energy, and before the challenge of September can revive the adrenaline of a pennant contender. Durocher, then sixty-four, was more impatient than ever to win, and he would not rest his key players, who wore down just at the moment when the “Miracle Mets”—a franchise just seven seasons old—were becoming white hot.

By September 8, the Cubs’ lead was down to two and a half games as they entered Shea Stadium for their final two away games against the Mets. They lost both, their slide accelerated, and they finished the season in second place, eight games behind the Mets, who went on to defeat Baltimore’s heavily favored Orioles 4–1 in the World Series.

The remainder of Durocher’s stay in Chicago was an exercise in disappointment, a fact that he blamed on Banks and perhaps the second-most-popular Cub of all time, third baseman Ron Santo. “Right in the middle of the lineup,” Durocher complained, “I had two men who couldn’t run.” Durocher says he tried to trade Santo but
could get no takers. What he says about Banks is scalding. He concedes that Banks was a great player in his time but adds, “Unfortunately, his time wasn’t my time.” Durocher knew how to nurse a grudge, and when he published his memoir, just three years after leaving the Friendly Confines, he offered an unfriendly assessment of Banks:

He couldn’t run, he couldn’t field; toward the end, he couldn’t even hit. There are some players who instinctively do the right thing on the base paths. Ernie had an unfailing instinct for doing the wrong thing. But I had to play him. Had to play the man or there would have been a revolution in the street.… Ernie Banks owns Chicago.… How does he do it? You could say about Ernie that he never remembered a sign or forgot a newspaperman’s name.

Durocher was just warming to his theme:

With every other player, we had the usual signs, an indicator followed by a combination. With Ernie we had to have flash signs. One sign. Like the Little League. Ernie, you’re always hitting unless we flash something at you. If I tip my hat, now you’re taking. Pull up my belt, it’s a hit-and-run. In my first year, when he could still run a little, I’d sometimes want him moving on a 3–1 count [when he was the runner on first] with Santo at
bat to break up the possible double play. From the bench, you could see his whole body just rear back and he’d look at the coach as if he were saying, “You got to be kidding.” Your little boy knows that it’s percentage baseball to get a runner moving on a 3–1 count under those conditions. But not Mister Cub.

Both of Banks’s knees were shot by the end of his career, which came after the 1971 season. Durocher says, “He’d come up with men on the bases and if he hit a ground ball they could walk through the double play.” In the field, “if the ball wasn’t hit right at him, forget it. He’d wave at it. Two feet away from him—whoops—right under his glove.”

That is the brief for the prosecution. Now for the defense.

Not that Ernie Banks needs any defense in the environs of Wrigley Field, where a statue of him stands on Clark Street, near the home plate entrance. He is the face of the Cubs franchise, as much as Stan Musial, Bob Feller, Ted Williams, Robin Yount, Tony Gwynn, and Cal Ripken are the iconic players of the Cardinals, Indians, Red Sox, Brewers, Padres, and Orioles, respectively. Just as Wrigley Field is, for better or worse, a summation of the Cubs’ experience,
Banks embodies the post-1945 franchise, for two reasons. First, his disposition, win or lose—and it was mostly lose—was as sunny as the ballpark in which he never performed at night. Second, his play demonstrated that even in a team game, a player can achieve greatness with precious little support from his teammates.

It is odd that in the 1950s, a decade in which the Cubs’ record was 672 wins and 866 losses (.437), two Cubs players won a total of three National League Most Valuable Player awards. In 1952, left fielder Hank Sauer led the league with 37 home runs and 121 runs batted in. This was four years before the Cy Young Award was created for pitchers, so pitchers were as eligible as position players to be named MVPs. Indeed, Bobby Shantz of the Philadelphia Athletics was the 1952 American League MVP, with a record of 24–7 and a 2.48 ERA. The 1952 National League award should have gone to another pitcher from that city, Robin Roberts, who had a phenomenal 28–7 record and a 2.59 ERA for a mediocre fourth-place team with a 87–67 record. Sauer won the award even though Roberts was responsible for 32 percent of his team’s wins.

In 1958 and 1959, Ernie Banks won the MVP award even though in those two seasons the Cubs had a cumulative record sixteen games under .500 (72–82 and 74–80). The next player—and, as of this writing, the last NL player—to win the MVP award while playing on a team with a losing record was another Cub, right fielder Andre Dawson, who had 49 home runs and 137 RBIs with the
1987 Cubs, who finished sixth, which was last place in what was then the National League’s East Division.

Banks could have been a Cardinal. In the spring of 1953, one of that team’s scouts saw him playing shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League and sent a favorable report to St. Louis.
The Cardinals sent out another scout for a second opinion, which was: “I don’t think he is a major league prospect. He can’t hit, he can’t run, he has a pretty good arm but it’s a scatter arm. I don’t like him.” In the annals of misjudgments, that ranks with the report on the screen test of a young Fred Astaire:
“Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.”

On July 28, 1953, Hugh Wise, a scout for the Cubs, submitted the report reproduced here on
this page
. On the nineteenth line down, on the right, the question is how many years it will be before Banks can play in the major leagues. Wise said: “Can play now.” Forty-two days later, Banks came to the Cubs. Golenbock says that when Banks got to Wrigley Field he did not own a glove, so teammate Eddie Miksis lent him one.