100 Things Cubs Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (11 page)

28. Spend a Night in Room 509 of the Sheffield House

There’s an old hotel at 3834 N. Sheffield Avenue, roughly four Dave Kingman moon shots north of Wrigley Field, where back in the day a few Cubs resided during the season.

It used to be called the Hotel Carlos but is now the Sheffield House, and on July 6, 1932, it’s where Violet Valli, a drunk and lovesick 21-year-old chorus girl, went to Room 509 with a loaded pistol and shot Cubs shortstop Billy Jurges.

Not only did Jurges survive taking bullets to his left hand and ribs, but he was back in the Cubs’ lineup 16 days later. Jurges hit in seven straight games immediately upon his return and then hit .364 in the 1932 World Series. The shooting was a huge news story in Chicago and really took off as Jurges’ relationship with Valli was revealed.

The two had been an item for around a year, and their relationship only came to an end at the urging of veteran Cubs right fielder Kiki Cuyler, a teetotaler, who thought Jurges was being led down the wrong path by Valli.

A note police discovered in Valli’s room at the Hotel Carlos following the shooting illustrated how distraught she was over the break-up. “To me life without Billy isn’t worth living,” she wrote. “But why should I leave this earth alone? I’m going to take Billy with me.”

While Jurges was recuperating in a hospital, Valli, who suffered a gunshot wound to the wrist during a struggle for the gun, immediately started talking to the press from her own hospital bed. In a
Chicago Tribune
story published on July 8 she blamed what she had done on “too much gin.”

“I had been drinking before I wrote that note,” she said. “And when I went to Billy’s room I only meant to kill myself. He knows that. I got a note from him today, after I wrote him one. He said he’d do anything he could to help me.”

And in fact, he did. Jurges refused to press charges against Valli, and nine days after the shooting the two stood feet apart from each other in a Chicago courtroom as Judge John Sbarbaro set Valli free.
“The case is dismissed for want of prosecution,” the judge said. “And I hope no more Cubs get shot.”

Some believe this incident was the inspiration for Bernard Malamud’s
The Natural
, but the 1952 novel was actually based on the shooting of Philadelphia’s Eddie Waitkus, an ex-Cub who in 1949 barely survived being shot by a deranged fan at Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel.

An Earlier Tragedy at the Hotel Carlos

At about 2:00
am
on May 28, 1930, veteran Cubs pitcher Hal Carlson woke up from his bed in the Hotel Carlos with tremendous pain in his stomach. Less than two hours later, with an ambulance on the way, he died in the lobby of the hotel from a stomach hemorrhage.

The 38-year-old Carlson had been gassed during World War I, according to a May 29, 1930,
Chicago Tribune
article, and he had experienced health problems since joining the Cubs in 1927. But he had started on May 23 and was apparently ready to make his next start when he passed away.

Carlson had been a sub-.500 pitcher with Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but after the Cubs acquired him in a mid-season trade in 1930 he went 30–17 while being used as a starter and a reliever.

On May 30, the
Tribune
wrote, “No official announcement was made but it was learned yesterday that the club will pay to Mrs. Carlson the salary due on the unexpired portion of her husband’s contract.”

29. Go to Spring Training

The weather is perfect, the setting is slow and intimate, autographs are plentiful, and chances are pretty good you’ll run into old Cubs like Fergie Jenkins or Ernie Banks wandering around the HoHoKam Park concourse.

So why is it again you haven’t gone to spring training?

At least once in your life you have to make the easy trek to Mesa, Arizona, the spring home of the Cubs since 1979 and for the foreseeable future. On
November 2, 2010, Mesa voters approved legislation to let the city spend $99 million on a new facility that is expected to include an entertainment complex. It will be on the site of Riverview Park, about 3½ miles west of HoHoKam, and it will open in either 2013 or 2014.

With the ability to fill stadiums no matter where they play, it was paramount that Arizona keep the Cubs and the estimated $138 million they bring to the local economy from leaving. That is why the Cubs owners, the Ricketts family, had the hubris to try to get the Arizona legislature to pass what became known as the “Cubs tax.” This would have added a surcharge to every Cactus League ticket sold, all to benefit the Cubs’ new complex.

The ill-conceived plan was shot down by Commissioner Bud Selig and they moved on to the next plan, which became reality after the Cubs started negotiating to move their spring operation to Naples, Florida.

As with almost everything they touch, the Cubs are a phenomenon even for spring-training-crazed Arizona, where they’ve had eight of the top 10 highest single-season attendance marks in Cactus League history. Tickets to HoHoKam can be difficult to come by, but with road games just a few minutes away, your chances of seeing the Cubs are always doubled.

Even if you can only make it there in February before Cactus League play begins you’ll be able to be part of spring training. The Cubs spend the first couple of weeks working out at Fitch Park, about a half-mile south of HoHoKam, where you can watch their light workouts and then hit them up for autographs as they leave the field.

There’s plenty to do in Arizona but one can’t-miss place to stop when you’re away from the ballpark is Don & Charlie’s restaurant in Scottsdale, where on any given day you’re likely to find scouts, broadcasters, coaches, and players from every Cactus League club.

30. Ferguson Jenkins: In a Class by Himself

Go ahead and try to pigeonhole Ferguson Jenkins. It’s just not possible. If you try to squeeze him into one category of pitcher you’ll come up short, which is the way he wanted it.

The 6'5" Canadian wasn’t just a power pitcher, though he struck out 3,192 hitters in his 19-year major league career. His fastball, almost always low and away, was better than most but not on par with the great power pitchers of his day like Bob Gibson, Tom Seaver, and Nolan Ryan.

He wasn’t just a control pitcher, though he’s one of only four pitchers—
along with Greg Maddux, Curt Schilling, and Pedro Martinez—to have given up fewer than 1,000 walks while striking out more than 3,000. He was almost always unflappable despite the frustration of pitching in Wrigley Field, where baseballs flew into the bleachers by the case, though during one memorable game in August 1973 he coolly walked off the mound before throwing bat after bat out of the dugout in the general direction of the home-plate umpire.

Hell, Jenkins wasn’t even just a baseball player. Hockey was his first love growing up in Chatham, Ontario, and he was a solid prospect before signing with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1962. Following the 1967 season he even toured with the Harlem Globetrotters for a handful of games.

So if any other hockey-playing, globetrotting, power pitchers with unusually good control are out there, let him come forward now. Fergie Jenkins was simply one of a kind, and on September 8, 1972, after he won his 20
th
game to reach the milestone for the sixth straight season, he announced that to the world. “I think that Ferguson Jenkins belongs in a class all by himself,” he told the Cubs’ beat writers.

It was an unusual burst of arrogance for Jenkins, whose arrival in Chicago as a 22-year-old rookie in April 1966 was so unheralded that the
Chicago Tribune
’s headline referred to him as one of the “others” brought over in a trade with Philadelphia. The Cubs also got center fielder Adolfo Phillips and John Herrnstein and sent pitchers Larry Jackson and Bob Buhl to the Phillies, both of whom were out of baseball within three years. If this wasn’t the greatest trade in Cubs history, it’s certainly on par with the best of them.

It took Jenkins five months to break into the rotation, but his first appearance in a Cubs uniform was a strong indication of things to come. On April 23, 1966, he threw 5⅓ innings of shutout relief and also homered in a 2–0 win over Los Angeles. It was the first of 167 games he would win in a Cubs uniform.

Ferguson Jenkins delivers a pitch en route to a victory at Wrigley Field on Friday, April 24, 1983. He beat the San Francisco Giants and recorded his 279th career win and the first of this season. Chicago won the game 7-2.
(AP Photo/John Swart)

During the next six seasons, Jenkins put together a resume nearly unimaginable in the 21
st
century. He went 127–84 with a 3.00 ERA that was punctuated by
—and this is not a typo—140 complete games. It’s been three decades since Philadelphia’s Steve Carlton became the last major league pitcher to throw 300 innings in a season. Well, Jenkins
averaged
306 innings during his incredible six-season run as arguably the best pitcher in baseball.

His only Cy Young Award was won in 1971 when he went 24–13 with a 2.77 ERA, but some think his 1968 campaign was his best as a Cub. Jenkins finished 20
–15 but on five occasions was on the losing end of 1–0 decisions.

Jenkins came to the Cubs just a few weeks after Leo Durocher—who Jenkins once called “tougher than a night in jail”—managed his first game on the North Side. Their relationship was tested in 1969 when Durocher told Jenkins he was a “quitter” in front of the whole team the day after a late-season loss to Pittsburgh. But Jenkins, who towered over Durocher, didn’t have a problem with him.

“The thing to remember about Leo: the next day the slate was clean,” Jenkins told former
Tribune
columnist Rick Talley in his book,
The Cubs of ’69
. “He just gave me the ball and didn’t take it away from me until I didn’t pitch right. I knew that faith was there, and that’s one reason I had so many complete games.”

The end of Jenkins’ first go-round with the Cubs—he returned in 1982 for two seasons and notched his 3,000
th
strikeout in blue pinstripes—approached as his contract demands and his chagrin over having to pitch in Wrigley continued. Jenkins asked the Cubs to trade him following the 1973 season and they accommodated him, dealing him to Texas for Vic Harris and Bill Madlock, a young third-base prospect. Jenkins won 25 games in 1974 for the Rangers and later played for Boston, winning 110 games from 1974–80.

In 1980, his reputation took a major hit when was arrested in Canada for drug possession, although charges were later dropped. Jenkins went on to win 20 games again for the Cubs, but it was stretched out over his final two seasons. He went 14–15 in 1982 and 6–9 in 1983, and he was cut the following spring just 16 victories shy of his 300
th
win.

Instead of going after that important milestone, Fergie signed on with a semi-pro team in Ontario and settled into a life away from Major League Baseball that has too often been touched by tragedy. In 1990, Jenkins’ wife, Maryanne, was critically injured in a car accident and died four days after word came that he had been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Two years later, Jenkins’ girlfriend, Cynthia Takieddine, committed suicide and also took the life of his 3-year-old daughter near their Oklahoma ranch.

Jenkins and Greg Maddux, another legendary Cubs pitcher who had a memorable but abbreviated stay on the North Side only to return years later, had their
No. 31 retired together in 2009 in a ceremony at Wrigley Field.

Years earlier, after Jenkins had been released by the Cubs in 1984, he told the
Tribune
how proud he was to be the final player from his era to still be with the organization. And that’s how he wanted to be known.

“I want people to remember me as the last Cub,” he said. “The last of the real Cubs.”

31. Visit the Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown Memorial

It’s only about a three-hour drive from Chicago to Nyesville, Indiana, the tiny town where Hall of Fame pitcher Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown grew up and earned his nickname.

Don’t expect to find much besides the typical joys of small-town life, but that’s not the reason for a Cubs fan to pay a visit. You’ll go to see a 3' granite memorial erected in 1994 by devoted relatives and to imagine that day, more than 100 years ago, when what turned out to be a happy accident altered Brown’s life forever.

It’s within walking distance of the memorial that Brown, at either the age of five or seven depending on who’s telling the story, took a dare from one of his brothers and stuck his hand under a corn chopper. The blade tore into his right index finger, causing it to be amputated, and damaged his pinkie.

A few weeks later he fell and injured his hand again, leaving him with no index finger and three disfigured digits. The result was a badly mangled hand that was able to do magical things with a baseball.

Brown started out playing semi-pro ball and didn’t make it to the big leagues until he became a 26-year-old rookie with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1903. He was dealt to the Cubs in 1904 after he went 9
–13 his rookie season. The Cubs only made the deal, according to Glenn Stout’s book
The Cubs
, because ace Jack Taylor, for whom Brown was traded, had been telling people he had been on the take during a postseason exhibition series against the White Sox.

It turned out to be a steal. During the next eight seasons Brown used his devastating curveball to win 186 games and lead the Cubs to World Series titles in 1907 and 1908. He threw a seven-hit shutout in his only start of the 1907 Series and the following year won Game 1 in relief and then threw a four-hit shutout in Game 4. Brown’s streak of six consecutive 20-win seasons, accomplished from 1906–11, has only been matched by Ferguson Jenkins in Cubs history.

Brown went to Cincinnati after the 1912 season and spent time in the short-lived Federal League, including a year with the Chicago Whales when brand-new Weeghman Park, later renamed Wrigley Field, was their home field.

Brown, who finished his career with a 239–130 record, returned to the Cubs for one more season in 1916 but only appeared in 12 games. On September 4 he lost to old friend and fierce rival Christy Mathewson, who Brown had once beaten nine straight times in their heyday, in what turned out to be the final game of both their illustrious careers.

There was some concern among Chicago sportswriters as Brown and other players from his era were initially bypassed for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, which opened in 1936. But in 1949, a year after his death at the age of 71, Brown was enshrined.

The memorial in Nyesville wouldn’t exist if not for the determination of Fred Massey, a great-nephew of Brown who came up with the idea and turned it into a labor of love. Many others contributed, as well, including Three Finger’s descendants Scott Brown and Cindy Thomson, who published
Three Finger: The Mordecai Brown Story
in 2006.

In it they share sweet tales of Cubs fans leaving tributes to Mordecai, like the time during the 2003 playoffs when a Cubs coaster, a can of Bud Light and a baseball were found by the memorial. On the baseball, according to the book, the fan had written:

“Thank you, Three Finger Brown! The Cubbies couldn’t have done it without you. This Bud’s for you. Go Cubs!”