Review: Cubs Titles

This piece originally ran in NINE. I thought, with all the buzz about the Cubs wining the 2008 pennant, and perhaps more, it was time to post it. Bear in mind that some new books on the team have been published since, including Glenn Stout’s The Cubs.

The Million-to-One Team: Why the Chicago Cubs Haven’t Won a Pennant Since 1945, by George Castle (Diamond Communications, 2000)
Durocher’s Cubs: The Greatest Team That Didn’t Win, by David Claerbaut Taylor Publishing, 2000)
Banks to Sandberg to Grace: Five Decades of Love and Frustration with the Chicago Cubs, by Carrie Muskat (Contemporary Books, 2001)
Take Me Out to the Cubs Game: 35 Former Ballplayers Speak of Losing at Wrigley, by John C. Skipper (McFarland & Company, 2000)
The Chicago Cubs, by Warren Brown (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001)
Baseball Between the Wars: A Pictorial Tribute to the Men Who Made the Game in Chicago from 1909 to 1947, by Bill Hageman (Contemporary Books, 2001)

One of the democratic qualities of baseball is that every team starts out even at spring training. The winter is thawing, and fans all over the world look forward to a season full of possibilities. Everyone has a chance, at least theoretically, to win the pennant. Everyone, it seems, but the Chicago Cubs. At least for the past fifty or so years.

Perhaps it’s that name, which denotes cute and cuddly. Compare this to the Windy City’s football team, the Bears, Monsters of the Midway. Which sounds more intimidating?

In the first half of the twentieth century, the Cubs could be expected to win the pennant on a fairly regular basis. The 1906 team, featuring such stalwarts as Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, Frank Chance, Harry Steinfeldt, and Johnny Kling as well as topnotch pitching from Three Finger Brown, Jack Fiester, and Ed Reulbach, compiled a 116-36 record, which is still the standard of excellence nearly 100 years later. They did lose the World Series that year, but they won back-to-back Fall Classics the following two years. They also won in 1910 and 1918 and then every third year from 1929 to 1938.

That was then…

This is now: when it comes to “championship futility,” the two teams we read about most are the Boston Red Sox and the Cubs. As well known as the “Curse of the Bambino” is, it’s nothing compared to the inability of the Cubbies to keep playing into October, let alone win the whole shooting match. The BoSox, at least, have made it to the Series as recently as 1986. The last Cubs appearance? Back in 1945. And even that one, according to George Castle, author of The Million-to-One Team, was almost a default, due in large part to the wartime absence of Stan Musial and some of his Cardinal teammates.

To put it in some perspective, the Cubs have not won the World Series since Ford invented the Model T.

Maybe it’s all for the best. In “The Last Pennant Before Armageddon,” W.P.Kinsella postulates how the end of the world will come when the Cubs next play in the World Series. In fact, they are lauded in fiction as the poster team for dreams unfulfilled.

One area in which the Cubs are among the league leaders is the amount of bookshelf space devoted to the team. Within the past two years, a seemingly disproportionate number of titles on the team from the Northside of the Windy City have appeared, several of which are included here.

The Million-to-One Team is the most analytic in its criticism of the foibles, almost all of which Castle blames on the Cubs ownership. Phil Wrigley was the antithesis of the crosstown White Sox owner Bill Veeck. “P. W.” played everything close to the vest, not wanting to take too many chances, fiscally conservative to the point of penuriousness, racially conservative to the point of passing on black players who could have improved the team.

One apt photograph in the book shows then-general manager Wid Matthews showing off an organizational depth chart to farm director Harrison Wickel, with the caption “a farm system filled with many names and little talent.” Apparently, Wrigley didn’t want to spend too much on scouting out or teaching new talent either; many Cub farm hands complained that they received no instruction in the minors, that they were told, basically, to just go out and play.

Wrigley also had an “aha experience” when he decided that the traditional way of managing a team wasn’t good enough. In the early 1960s, he came up with the infamous concept of the “college of coaches,” a scheme whereby the mentoring staff rotated as head coach. Needless to say, the plan failed as confusion and politics reigned.

Castle takes the reader step by painful step through the different regimes of Cubs leadership: the fiery Leo Durocher, who was tabbed to lead the Cubbies to the promised land but failed to do so despite the presence of such steady players such as Ron Santo, Ernie Banks, Don Kessinger, Billy Williams, Glenn Beckert, and Ferguson Jenkins. The team of the late sixties was loaded for bear, and it turned into a train wreck. “The Lip” had little trust in his bench, preferring to work his veterans to the point of exhaustion. Down the stretch, he basically ran a three-man rotation and used one reliever as his mainstay, as opposed to the Mets manager Gil Hodges, who used a five-man rotation before it was fashionable and platooned at several positions.

Castle continues his postmortem of the decades-long problems as he goes into great detail about the transition of the Cubs ownership from the Wrigley family to the Tribune Company in 1981. Finally, there was someone willing to spend some money, to make the team competitive. Heretofore, management had been unwilling to deal with the era of free agency, with its high salaries and long-term contracts; players would include the Cubs on their list of teams in the newly popular “no trade” clauses. Now it would be different.

Well, if not now, then soon. Dallas Green took over the front office, clearing out the old Wrigley loyalists, bringing in his own people. Over time, the farm system dramatically improved (but then, how could it not?). Night games, a heresy within the ivy-covered walls of Cubland, became a fact of life, trying to quash the notion that it was “too hot to win” in the blistering daytime games in the Chicago summers. (Castle offers evidence to the contrary, going so far as to include meteorological data.) A more likely culprit was flipflopping between days games at home and night games on the road, especially on the West Coast.

By 1984, the Cubs fielded a team that would garner any kind of title for the first time in almost forty years. Under the leadership of Don Zimmer, and with such players as Ryne Sandberg, Andre Dawson, and Rick Sutcliffe, the Cubs won the NL East. The fact that they lost to the San Diego Padres after winning the first two games of the league championship series, ostensibly on a grounder ball that got by first baseman Leon Durham (shades of Bill Buckner!) merely adds to the hard-luck legend.

The glory was, again, short-lived. General manager Jim Frey and his entourage helped founder the Cubs for a while longer, trading away one of the game’s most outstanding relievers in Lee Smith, giving up way too soon on a young batter named Raphael Palmiero, and missing out on the chance to draft Robin Ventura (followed by more years of poor selections). Subsequent administrations didn’t fare much better–after all, they let Greg Maddux leave town.

Castle continues his amazingly thorough insider’s job, getting the stories behind the stories, showing that it’s not only what happens on the field that determines how well a team will do. He more than adequately passes on a feeling of frustration and incredulity over the failure of a once-proud team to produce. Sadly, politics and personalities are a part of every business venture, and if the baseball fan has learned anything over the years, it is that the national pastime is business.

David Claerbaut focuses solely on the problems of the Leo Durocher era. In Durocher’s Cubs, the author reiterates several of Castle’s points to try to answer the question, how could the team come up empty with all the talent it had at the time? Did the abusive Leo wear down his troops? Was the pressure too much? Were they afraid of failure? Claerbaut offers a detailed account of the 1967-72 seasons, chronicling one of the greatest fold jobs since the 1964 Phillies. He quotes the Santoses and the Jenkinses and the Bankses (“Mr. Cub,” the eternal optimist, supposedly predicted to pitcher Bill Hands during the tense dog days of 1969 that the Cubs would not, could not, win the division) as to the reasons, but it all falls into the seemingly eternal plight of the Cubs to be losers. Did anyone ever check to see whether Wrigley Field was built over an ancient burial ground?

Banks to Sandberg to Grace and Take Me Out to the Cubs Game take a look at the players’ points of view. These two oral history collections give the viewpoints of the men who lived through the debacles and disappointments–the players, coaches, and behind-the-scenes personnel.

Carrie Muskat’s Banks to Sandberg to Grace contains brief vignettes from dozens of Cubbies over the past fifty years, beginning with Phil Cavaretta and ending with longtime clubhouse attendant Yosh Kawano. Some players relate a single, seminal event or season; others, the joys of playing in Chicago or the comradery among their teammates. Many of the anecdotes further confirm Castle’s and Claerbaut’s reports about Durocher. “Leo was not a guy who played young kids. He liked veteran players,” according to Phil Reagan, the overworked reliever on that 1969 team. Others relate how Durocher had his problems with the veterans as well (he wanted Banks off the team), playing them into the ground, or how subtle front-office racism infiltrated the team — but also how, through it all, the fans stood behind them.

A fair portion of the Cubs personnel are not household names outside the Chicago area, especially in more recent years, and some served briefly with the team.

Take Me Out to the Cubs Game is more profile than oral history and includes players mainly from the 1940s through 1960s, with a handful of personnel from the 19705 and beyond. The book also has a statistical section, noting the Cubs’ record versus their opponents, with special attention paid to the “Wrigley Field Factor” (home/road totals) and the “Lights Factor” (home wins vs. road wins before and after the lights were installed), and essays on the “Philip K. Wrigley Factor” and the “Fan Factor.”

The problems with oral histories stem from the editing process, both by the writer and by the writer’s subjects. Selective retention by the players can throw into question the veracity of who’s telling the tale. It may not be intentional, but over the years, stories have a habit of magnifying in significance.

As if in bittersweet remembrance of glories past, we have the simply named The Chicago Cubs, originally published in 1946, when memories of quality teams were still relatively fresh in the minds of the hometown fans. Written by Warren Brown, one of the premier sportswriters of the time, it follows the history of the team from the days of Cap Anson to the final, fateful appearance of the Cubs in the postseason. The author’s style is at once familiar and removed, compared to the styles of Castle, Claerbaut, and the other authors considered here. His perspective also offers an interesting angle from the more recent offerings. His syntax, slow and elegant, differs from the hectic pace of present-day prose.

Southern Illinois University Press has reprinted this classic (as well as one for the St. Louis Cardinals) from the original series from G. P. Putnam’s Sons, which consisted of books about seventeen of the eighteen Major League franchises (missing is one for the Philadelphia Athletics).

Light on narrative, heavy on rare photographs, Baseball Between the Wars is a collection focusing on the Cubs and White Sox, although it seems that just about anyone who played in town as an opponent was eligible for inclusion. The sepia-toned snapshots evoke an old-style feeling and feature such fan favorites such as Lon Warneke, Ray Schalk, Charlie Root, Charlie Grimm, Eddie Collins, Hack Wilson, and Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, as well as the Stars of the era: Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Honus Wagner, and Ty Cobb, to name a few.

As of this writing, admittedly early in the season, the Cubs had spent a fair amount of time either in first place or vying for the top spot, making news along with the Twins and Mariners by doing unexpectedly well. By the time you read this, who knows? After all, Baseball America picked the Cubs farm system as one of the best in baseball. Maybe they will finally shed their mantle as “lovable losers.”

This article appeared in the Spring 2002 issue of Nine.