A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (14 page)

A Phillies broadcaster that day, and for several decades more, was Richie Ashburn. He had a Hall of Fame career as the Phillies’ center fielder for twelve seasons, and toward the end of his fifteen-year career he played two seasons with the Cubs, who had a tradition of acquiring future Hall of Fame players after they had expended most of their greatness elsewhere (see, for example, Dizzy Dean, Ralph Kiner, Robin Roberts).
In Ashburn’s final big league season, when he was voted the most valuable player on the 1962 Mets, an expansion team that lost 120 games, he said, “MVP on the worst team ever? I wonder what exactly they meant by that?” So Ashburn was familiar with bizarre baseball, and with Wrigley Field when the wind was gusting out. It was doing so at eighteen miles per hour on May 17, 1979. During the first inning Ashburn said, “I have a feeling this might wind up about 19–12.” He was off by fourteen runs.

By the time the Phillies finished circling the bases in
the fifth inning, they led 21–9, and Ashburn’s scorecard was, he said, “uncipherable.” It was a day that demanded such a neologism. The Cubs scored seven in the bottom half of the fifth inning, turning the game into a 21–16 squeaker. By the end of nine, the score was 22–22. The Phillies drove in their twenty-third and winning run in the top of the tenth. The losing pitcher, the Cubs’ sixth pitcher of the game, was a future Hall of Famer, Bruce Sutter, who would win the Cy Young Award that year and who, true to another Cub tradition, had begun his career with the Cubs but entered the Hall of Fame wearing another team’s cap (see Lou Brock of the Cardinals). The last out of the game was made when future Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt, who hit two home runs that day, fielded a grounder and threw to the first baseman, Pete Rose, who, were it not for his unfortunate habit of betting on baseball, would be in the Hall of Fame.
It is somehow fitting that the Phillies’ manager in 1979 was Danny Ozark, who was given to mind-bending thoughts such as, “Even Napoleon had his Watergate” and “Contrary to popular belief, I have always had a wonderful repertoire with my players.” He was not talking about the 23–22 game, but he could have been when he said, “It is beyond my apprehension.” He once remarked of baseball, “Half this game is 90 percent mental.” Less than half on May 17, 1979.

On that day, Krukow remembers, “I was charting.” As was standard practice, the previous day’s pitcher charted both teams’ pitches, of which there were about five hundred as the two teams piled up fifty hits (Phillies 24, Cubs 26),
the fourth most in baseball since 1900. Exaggerating somewhat, Krukow now says, “I wore out three pens and had to go on the DL with a broken wrist.” As was something of a Wrigley Field tradition, the baseball that day made up in entertainment value what it lacked in artistry.

April is—a
poet born and raised in the Midwest said so—the cruelest month. In 1983, it was especially not nice on the North Side. The Cubs staggered out of the starting gate, and there was noisy disapproval from the few fans who were drawn to the Friendly Confines in the often unfriendly weather of a Chicago spring. On April 29, 9,391 fans filed out of Wrigley Field after the Cubs lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers, 4–3. Cub manager Lee Elia was in his office after the game, with the media present, their pens and voice recorders in hand. They would not be disappointed by his colorful meditation on Cub fans.

Then forty-five, Elia was a baseball journeyman whose most memorable contribution to the game’s lore was about to occur. It became an instant classic of a particular genre of expression, the Postgame Rant. It is available, and probably will be through eternity, in the digital ether.
Because it is the most famous rhetorical moment in Wrigley Field history, it is here reprinted, with excisions made to protect the delicate sensibilities of readers:

“I’ll tell you one f**kin’ thing, I hope we get f**kin’ hotter than s**t, just to stuff it up them three thousand f**kin’ people that show up every f**kin’ day because if they’re the real Chicago f**kin’ fans, they can kiss my f**kin’ ass right downtown—and print it! They’re really, really behind you around here—my f**kin’ ass. What the f**k am I supposed to do, go out there and let my f**kin’ players get destroyed every day and be quiet about it? For the f**kin’ nickel-dime people that show up? The motherf**kers don’t even work. That’s why they’re out at the f**kin’ game. They ought to go out and get a f**kin’ job and find out what it’s like to go out and earn a f**kin’ living. Eighty-five percent of the f**kin’ world is working. The other fifteen come out here. A f**kin’ playground for the c*********s. Rip them motherf**kers. Rip them f**kin’ c******kers like the f**kin’ players. We got guys bustin’ their f**kin’ ass, and them f**kin’ people boo. And that’s the Cubs? My f**kin’ ass. They talk about the great f**kin’ support that the players get around here. I haven’t seen it this f**kin’ year.… The name of the game is hit the ball, catch the ball and get the f**kin’ job done. Right now we have more losses than we have wins. So f**kin’ changes that have happened in the Cubs organization are multifold.

All right, they don’t show because we’re five and fourteen—and unfortunately that’s the criteria
of them dumb fifteen motherf**kin’ percent that come out to day baseball. The other eighty-five percent are earning a living. It’ll take more than a five-and-thirteener, five and fourteen to destroy the makeup of this club. I guarantee you that. There’s some f**kin’ pros out there that wanna f**kin’ play this game. But you’re stuck in a f**kin’ stigma of the f**kin’ Dodgers and the Phillies and the Cardinals and all that cheap s**t. All these motherf**kin’ editorials about [inaudible] and f**kin’, uh, the Phillie-itis and all that s**t. It’s sickening. It’s unbelievable. It really is. It’s a disheartening f**kin’ situation that we’re in right now. Five and fourteen doesn’t negate all that work. We got a hundred and forty-three f**kin’ games left. What I’m trying to say is don’t rip them f**kin’ guys out there. Rip me. If you wanna rip somebody, rip my f**kin’ ass. But don’t rip them f**kin’ guys ’cause they’re givin’ everything they can give.… But once we hit that f**kin’ groove … it will flow. And it will flow—the talent’s there. I don’t know how to make it any clearer to you. I’m frustrated. I’ll guarantee you I’m frustrated. It would be different if I walked into this room every day at eight-thirty and saw a bunch of guys that didn’t give a s**t. They give a s**t and it’s a tough National League East. It’s a tough National League period.”

Elia’s rant is familiar to Wrigley Field regulars.
What is not well known is what preceded it and probably triggered it.

In those days, when the Cubs left the playing field at the end of the game, they could not reach their clubhouse, as they now do, through their first-base dugout. Instead, they had to go under the grandstand through an entrance farther down the left-field line. The Cubs’ right fielder that day was Keith Moreland, “a redheaded snapdragon”—his description—from Texas, where he had played defensive end for the University of Texas Longhorns football team. Defensive ends are not shrinking violets. In 2013, when he was the color analyst on Cubs radio broadcasts, he recalled that as he walked down the left-field line that day thirty years earlier, a fan—or at least a spectator—offered what might be considered negative feedback on the team’s performance. The person, who had probably partaken too liberally of Heileman’s Old Style lager, threw a cup of that beverage in Moreland’s face, drenching him. Moreland had a football player’s zest for combat and the sort of temper commonly ascribed to redheads. He headed into the stands after the beer thrower, but two strong hands grabbed the back of his belt to restrain him. One hand belonged to relief pitcher Lee Smith, a mountain of a man then in his fourth season with the Cubs, the first of eight teams he played for in eighteen seasons, during which he recorded 478 saves, the third most in baseball history. Smith stood six feet five and weighed at least 220 pounds. The other
hand belonged to Elia, who kept up a steady flow of expletives as he and Smith propelled Moreland into the clubhouse. Moreland assumed the profanity was directed at him for charging into the stands and braced himself for a tongue lashing and perhaps a fine. It turned out, however, that Elia was just tuning up his voice and vocabulary for his philippic against Cub fans, who he thought lowered the tone of the Friendly Confines.

The “f**kin’ groove,” the “flow” that Elia anticipated, never quite arrived in 1983. The Cubs did, however, improve somewhat, finishing fifth, with a 71–91 record. Wrigley Field’s lights were still five years away, so the customers who were the subject of Elia’s disapproval, the 15 percent of the people in the world who had the time to come to day baseball, included all of the Cubs’ customers. Elia was fired.

In 1984, one of the happier summers Wrigley Field has seen, Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim were not there. They were, in their own words, “a pair of sports-crazed twelve-year-olds from Indiana,” and both were members of Bunk 7 at Camp Young Judaea in Ortonville, Michigan. Their resemblance to baseball Hall of Famers Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax began and ended with their being Jewish. But even at their young age, they
brought to the camp’s softball games an analytic intensity that might have had something to do with the fact that they were Cub fans. If you are (as they were) intelligent, observant, and curious, the experience of being a Cub fan leads to an itch to explain the seemingly inexplicable—the astonishing consistency of the Cubs’ futility.

In 1984, the Cubs were thirty-nine years from their last World Series appearance, seventy-six years from their last World Series victory, and well into what has become the longest run without a championship of all North American professional sports franchises. In 2011, the two former campers collaborated in trying to explain this in their book
Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won
. Their last chapter is titled “Are the Chicago Cubs Cursed?” Its subtitle is: “If Not, Then Why Are the Cubs So Futile?” By now, you will not be surprised to learn that Moskowitz and Wertheim think that one reason is Wrigley Field.

They begin by rejecting a rival explanation: bad luck. No one, they say, thinks that it is by luck that the Yankees have won twenty-seven World Series. Or that the Cubs’ principal rival, the Cardinals, have won the second-most World Series, eleven. Luck implies randomness, an outcome not commensurate with ability. Hence luck is, they rightly note, “inherently immeasurable.”

If the Cubs were just unlucky in consistently not winning their division, they should at least have frequently finished second to the Cardinals in it. But Moskowitz and Wertheim note that the Cubs have finished second even
fewer
times than they have finished first. They have finished third more times than either first or second, they have finished fourth more times than third, and have finished last seventeen times. This, Moskowitz and Wertheim say with nice understatement, “is not consistent with luck.” Neither is the obverse: The Yankees have finished first (much) more often than second; they have finished second more often than third; they have finished third more often than fourth; and they have finished last only three times.

If luck falls short as an explanation for either the success or the failure of teams on the field, you would think that the opposite of luck—talent—would provide the answer. And you would be correct, say Moskowitz and Wertheim:

Historically, for the average MLB team, its on-the-field statistics would predict its winning percentage year to year with 93 percent accuracy. That is, if you were to look only at a team’s on-the-field numbers each season and rank it based on those numbers, 93 percent of the time you would get the same ranking as you would if you ranked it based on wins and losses.… Based on this measure, how unlucky are the Cubs? Did the Cubs lose more games than they should have based on their performance at the plate, on the mound, and in the field? Unfortunately (for us Cub fans), no.… The Cubs’ ritual underperformance in terms of wins is perfectly understandable when you examine their performance on the field. To
put it more precisely, if we were to predict year to year the Cubs’ winning percentage based on all available statistics, we would be able to explain 94 percent of it, which is slightly higher than the league average.