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Cubs: Five things to know
MESA, Ariz. -- Maybe you learned in school that the Hundred Years' War was a long battle between two houses for the French throne.
Maybe you grew up in Chicago, or came of age a Cubs' fan, and if so, you know that's a crock.
The Chicago Cubs have been fighting their own Hundred Years' War for, well, look! It's going on 100 years now. Yes, you've handled the horrors, watched the meltdowns, drank the beer, smelled the goat and worshiped at the altar of Wrigley Field.
And now, formally, welcome to 2008, the 100th anniversary since the Cubs last won a World Series.
Did you bring a card?
• • •
"Do they still play the blues in Chicago
When baseball season rolls around
When the snow melts away,
Do the Cubbies still play
In their ivy-covered burial ground
When I was a boy they were my pride and joy
But now they only bring fatigue
To the home of the brave
The land of the free
And the doormat of the National League ..."
-- Steve Goodman, A Dying Cubs Fan's Last Request
• • •
The Arizona sun is bright. Manager Lou Piniella has mostly settled on a lineup and is ready to head north. The Cubs are coming off of a division title and are even stronger and more cohesive this season. Japanese free agent Kosuke Fukudome's talent for getting on base will be a welcome boost, slugger Alfonso Soriano is through the adjustment period, ace Carlos Zambrano is ready to rock, former ace Kerry Wood will be the closer and if he's injured, Carlos Marmol's stuff is wicked enough to pitch the ninth.
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| Grin and bear it: Lou Piniella's team shoulders a lot of history. (AP) |
"Let this team stand on its own merit," Piniella says. "I told the players, don't think about the past, don't think about 100 years -- think about this year here. That's all you can do. You can't do any more than that. The more relaxed guys are and the more confident they are, the better."
That the skipper would even acknowledge the 100-year anniversary to the players themselves is both telling and sweet, a sort of unofficial confirmation that everybody realizes they're battling unseen forces far bigger than anyone can even imagine.
"Enough of all the, you know, the curse this, the curse that, the goat this, the black cat, the 100 years, whatever it is," pitcher Ryan Dempster, who is converting back into the rotation this season after converting 28 of 31 save opportunities as a closer in 2007, told reporters earlier this spring. "We're a better team than we were last year, I truly believe. And last year we made it to the playoffs."
It's not fair, of course, to pile these 100 years onto the backs of the boys who will be Cubs in 2008. Asking them to explain and take responsibility for the last 100 years is like blaming your kids for World War II, or the Great Depression. How the hell were they supposed to do anything about it? They weren't there.
"I think the 100 years matters to the people who are Cubs fans," Dempster says. "But what matters to me is that we haven't won a World Series in the past five years that I've been here. I'm concerned with that.
"No disrespect to the '03, '99 or '84 teams and the other teams that came before us. But the guys who are putting on the Cubs uniform this year, we're concerned with ourselves, with our team."
• • •
"... But the last time the Cubs won a National League pennant
Was the year we dropped the bomb on Japan
The Cubs made me a criminal
Sent me down a wayward path
They stole my youth from me
That's the truth
I'd forsake my teachers
To go sit in the bleachers
In flagrant truancy
Year after year after year
After year, after year, after year, after year, after year
'Til those hopes are just so much popcorn
For the pigeons beneath the El tracks to eat ..."
-- Goodman
• • •
People have written odes, dirges, poems and songs over the years to the Cubs and about the Cubs, such as the heartfelt tune penned in 1983 by Goodman, who is best known for authoring the lyrics to the Arlo Guthrie pop classic City of New Orleans.
Type the phrase "hapless Cubs" into Google, and roughly 61,000 links pop up. Which isn't nearly as many as when you search the terms "Cubs cursed" (147,000) and "Cubs losers" (147,000), but it is more than you get when you punch in "Cubs billy goat" (43,800).
For the record, the Cubs won their last World Series in 1908. It was a five-game dusting of the Detroit Tigers behind the timeless double-play combination of Tinker to Evers to Chance, remembered through the ages in Franklin Pierce Adams' immortal poem Baseball's Sad Lexicon, written in 1910 from the sad perspective of a New York Giants' fan who had watched one too many baserunners gobbled up by the then-powerhouse Cubs.
The Republican National Convention was held in Chicago in 1908, and William Howard Taft was elected president that fall. Our heaviest president at 332 pounds, Taft would get stuck in the White House bathtub and need to summon help to get out.
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| It ain't easy being a Cubs fan. (Getty Images) |
A first-class postage stamp cost two cents in 1908, and don't ask about the price of gas. Henry Ford had just developed the Model T -- 1908 was the year it went into production, and it sold for $850 dollars. The Grand Canyon was designated as a national monument in '08, and there was a grassroots movement to institute this thing called Mother's Day as a national holiday. Congress would make it official in 1914.
"You hear about the 100 years and you get a little laugh from it because many years ago, Jack Brickhouse, our old (Hall of Fame) broadcaster, made the statement that every team can have a bad century," says Hall of Famer Billy Williams, a lifetime Cub who played on the 1969 club that blew a big lead to the New York Mets.
• • •
Everybody associated with this organization has been winners their whole f------ life. Everybody. And the credit is not given in that respect. All right, they don't show because we're 5 and 14. And unfortunately, that's the criteria of them dumb 15 mother f------ percent that come out to day baseball. The other 85 percent work for a living.
-- Former Cubs manager Lee Elia, postgame tirade in May, 1983
• • •
General manager Jim Hendry helped build the 1997 Florida Marlins World Series winners while working as a special assistant to then-Florida GM Dave Dombrowski in the early-to-mid 1990s before joining the Cubs in 1994. So did Gary Hughes, special assistant to Hendry with the Cubs. And one of Hendry's other assistants, Randy Bush, earned a World Series ring from his playing days with the 1987 Minnesota Twins.
Piniella owns two World Series rings from his days as a player (Yankees, 1977 and 1978) and one from managing (Cincinnati, 1990). Bench coach Alan Trammell won one as a player (Detroit, 1984). First baseman Derrek Lee was part of the Marlins' 2003 World Series-winning team. Left fielder Alfonso Soriano played on two Yankees World Series teams, though they didn't win a ring. Infielder Mark DeRosa played on seven division title teams in Atlanta -- two full seasons and parts of five others.
"I feel very strongly that this organization is going in the right direction," says radio broadcaster Ron Santo, the former Cub who is as emotionally invested in this franchise as anyone. "We're going to win. It's a matter of time. The minor leagues have been built. The club we've got is pretty young. Lou took us from last place to first place last year. We made a couple of moves that might solidify us.
"If we stay healthy, I think we can win 92 or 93 games."
Last year, the Cubs' 85-77 mark was good enough to win the NL Central. Had they won 92 or 93 games, it would have represented the best record in the NL.
"Seriously, I don't live in the past," Soriano says. "I'm in the present and in the future. We're here in 2008, and we're going to go to the World Series and win. Whatever's happened, happened."
Dempster predicted a World Series appearance the first week of spring camp, and nothing has happened since to change his mind.
"There's a lot of competition, it's a great division and it's not an easy thing," he says. "But we feel we have a team that can get to the World Series."
You can't win one unless you play in one. Not only have the Cubs failed to win a Fall Classic since 1908, they haven't even played in one since 1945, when, under the appropriately named manager Charlie Grimm, they lost to Detroit.
"It's hard for me to understand 100 years," Santo says.
"It's been quite awhile," Williams says. "Every now and then, I run across a person who's 60 or 70 years old who says that their father was there at the World Series.
• • •
Chicago Cubs fans are 90 percent scar tissue.
-- Political columnist George Will
• • •
Forget, for a moment, the New York Yankees' 26 World Series titles. What's stunning, when considering the Cubs' banana-peel history, is that even the Florida Marlins, an expansion team in 1993, have won two World Series.
That equates to one World Series title every 7½ years. Continuing at that pace, the Marlins would win 13 World Series over a 100-year span.
The Cubs? They've lost with three-fingered pitchers and with six-fingered pitchers. Hall of Famer Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown lost his other two fingers in a farming accident but, nevertheless, helped pitch the Cubs to their only two World Series titles in 1907 and 1908 before helping to kick off the 100-year streak over his next five seasons in Chicago. Reliever Antonio Alfonseca, born with six fingers on each hand, pitched in relief for the Cubs in 2002 and 2003.
They committed one of the most infamous trades in baseball history, sending Lou Brock to St. Louis in 1964. They've employed a manager who delivered one of the most infamous rants against his own team's fans anybody has ever heard while defending his players from the booing Wrigley Field denizens in '83 (Elia was fired soon thereafter). There was Babe Ruth's called shot against them in Wrigley Field while they were losing the 1932 World Series to the Yankees.
There was the famous "Billy Goat Curse" placed on them during that '45 World Series loss, when Billy Sianis, owner of the famous Billy Goat Tavern (impetus for the famous Saturday Night Live "Cheeborger, Cheeborger" sketches with John Belushi), brought his pet goat to Wrigley Field. As legend has it, then-Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley had the goat ejected when, in the rain, the odor of the wet goat became overbearing. A livid Sianis cursed the club, the Cubs lost Games 4 and 5 and haven't appeared in another World Series since.
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| 'It's hard for me to understand 100 years,' Cubs legend Ron Santo says. (Getty Images) |
Yogi Berra never played for the Cubs, but if he did, he might say that even when they've won, they've lost. And forget about reversing the curse of that foul-smelling goat: Sianis' nephew has been trotted out to Wrigley Field with a goat on numerous occasions to participate in ceremonies reversing the curse. You may have noticed that it hasn't resulted in a World Series appearance.
"I think that to break all of that kind of jinx talk, you've got to have a good pitching staff," Williams says. "You can have all the goats you want, but if you don't have a guy to drive in the runner from second base, it's not going to matter."
Besides, singer (and professed Cubs fan) Jimmy Buffett played Boston's Fenway Park in September, 2004, and little more than a month later, the Red Sox won their first World Series in 86 years.
So Buffett played Wrigley Field in 2005, and little more than a year later, just three seasons after coming within five outs of the World Series, the Cubs lost 96 games and fired manager Dusty Baker.
By then, even the cross-town Chicago White Sox had won a Fall Classic, ending an 88-year drought in 2005.
• • •
"The dying man's friends told him to cut it out
They said, 'Stop it, that's an awful shame
He whispered, 'Don't Cry, we'll meet by and by near the Heavenly Hall of Fame'
He said, 'I've got season tickets to watch the Angels now,
So it's just what I'm going to do
He said, 'But you, the living, you're stuck here with the Cubs,
So it's me that feels sorry for you!"
-- Goodman
• • •
So what happens when the Cubs actually do win?
"We've had 100 years to prepare for it, it'll probably be a big party," Williams says. "I tell you, the players, managers, coaches, whoever's there when this thing finally happens, Chicago is going to show them one great time.
"The White Sox won it, but it wouldn't be like if the Cubs won it. And it could happen. It could happen this year. We've got most of the people in place. If guys have the years they're projected to have, it will be great."
A dying Cubs fan's last request? Can you imagine how many ashes already have been secretly scattered at Wrigley Field in memory of those who couldn't wait for that next World Series title?
"No doubt about it," Santo says. "Absolutely."
Then he pauses, grins wide, and his eyes twinkle.
"I'm going to have mine scattered there," he says. "That's what I'm asking."
