100 Things Cubs Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (21 page)

62. Phil Cavarretta: From Lane Tech to Wrigley Field

Growing up in the shadow of Wrigley Field, Phil Cavarretta didn’t have money for an elevated train ride let alone a ticket to see the Cubs. So he and his pals would sneak aboard and, after arriving at Wrigley Field, seek out a kindly policeman.

“We’d be there,” Cavarretta said in Glenn Stout’s
The Cubs
. “And he’d boost us over the fence and into the ballpark.”

A few years later, still a teenager, Cavarretta no longer needed any help getting into Wrigley Field. He’d just walk right in with the rest of his Cubs teammates. Cavarretta was just 17 when the Cubs signed him out of Lane Tech High School in the summer of 1934, and in September they called him up to join the Cubs for a few late-season games.

In his first game at Wrigley Field, by now the ripe old age of 18, Cavarretta hit a solo homer on the first pitch he saw in his first at-bat in a 1–0 victory over Cincinnati. It was quite a debut for a hometown boy who would spend the next 20 seasons starring for the Cubs, the longest tenure in team history. Cavarretta’s arrival was perfectly timed, as longtime first baseman Charlie Grimm was retiring and a spot was available.

Cavarretta stepped right in as a rookie in 1935 and played like a veteran, hitting .275 with eight homers and 82 RBIs to help the Cubs win the National League pennant. There was little Cavarretta didn’t accomplish during his many years with the Cubs. In addition to 1935, the Cubs made it to the World Series in 1938 and 1945, a year in which he hit .355 and was named the NL’s Most Valuable Player despite only hitting six home runs. He didn’t have much speed or power, but he had a wonderful batting eye. Over the course of his career he hit .293 and only struck out 598 times while drawing 820 walks.

You don’t play 20 years in one town without earning the respect of the fans, but he also won over the opposition, specifically a first baseman from the New York Yankees by the name of Lou Gehrig. Playing in opposite leagues, Cavarretta and Gehrig hadn’t come across each other until they met in the 1938 World Series. In
Wrigleyville
, Peter Golenbock’s oral history of the Cubs, Cavarretta explains what happened when he spoke with Gehrig at first base.

“So I was on first base,” he said. “Lou was holding me on. Lou was very quiet. Looking back, I could tell from his voice he was starting to get sick then, as young as he was. His voice was very weak. It wasn’t a good strong voice.

“He said, ‘Young man, you’ve been in a couple games, but I’ve watched you play. From what I’ve seen of you, the way you hustle and the way you give it your best’—this I’ll always remember—‘don’t change.’”

It’s no wonder Gehrig took notice. Cavarretta hit .462 against the Yankees in that Series, despite the Cubs losing in four straight. Seven years later, the Cubs reached the 1945 Series against Detroit and Cavarretta again was a standout, hitting .423 with a homer and five RBIs.

In this September 12, 1945, photo, Phil Cavarretta takes batting practice at Wrigley Field in Chicago. (AP Photo/File)

Cavarretta took great pride in the way he played, and later on when he became the player-manager of the Cubs in 1951, he remained honest to a fault. Right before the 1954 season started, Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley asked him to assess the club.

“I told him that our catching staff was shaky, that [Clyde]McCullough isn’t getting any younger, and that a year ago [Joe]Garagiola had talked about quitting baseball,” Cavarretta told the
Chicago Tribune
. “I reminded him that only a couple of our young ballplayers looked like prospects and that some of our regulars were getting along in baseball age.”

For Cavarretta’s honesty, after 20 seasons with the Cubs, Wrigley fired him.

Philibuck, a nickname given to Cavarretta by Cubs great Charlie Grimm, moved over to the White Sox for his last two seasons before retiring and becoming a coach and scout for many years. The humble, hard-working kid from Lane Tech passed away on December 18, 2010, at the age of 94 with obituaries stating he was the last surviving player to compete against Babe Ruth.

63. Spend a Day as a Ballhawk

The Golden Age of ballhawking at Wrigley Field is over. It came to an end with the 2005 bleacher expansion as well as the welcome demise of rampant and unchecked steroid use.

The ballhawk’s lifeblood—a precious major league baseball—just doesn’t fly out onto Waveland and Sheffield Avenue with the same frequency anymore and as a result there aren’t as many regular ballhawks as there used to be.

But if you go to the corner of Waveland and Kenmore about three hours before any home game, you’ll still find longtime ballhawk Dave Davison, and much of the time you’ll find regulars like Mark Weyermuller, the legendary Moe Mullins, as well as some others. And if you went there before a Cubs-Cardinals night game on August 21, 2011, you would have found me. This was the first day I ever spent as a ballhawk, and it won’t be the last.

There’s a little fear in trying something new, and in this case it was heightened knowing I was heading onto “Bad Boy” Davison’s turf to try something he and Mullins had already perfected. It was their game I was trying to play, and I didn’t know if they’d snub their noses at me or act territorial.

There was none of that. Turns out Davison’s friendly, a bit of a talker, and within a few minutes we began chatting and he introduced me to Mullins. Later on Davison gave me a chair to sit on and quenched my thirst with a beer. The corner of Kenmore and Waveland is a welcoming environment.

Between the two of them, Davison and Mullins have caught more than 10,000 baseballs in more than 60 seasons as ballhawks. They were the stars of a documentary called, appropriately enough,
Ballhawks
, and it was narrated by Bill Murray. The website for the film describes Davison as the “Bad Boy Ballhawk.”

Batting practice typically begins about three hours before first pitch, but it doesn’t always take place. Sometimes it gets canceled if there’s a day game after a night game, if it’s raining, or if there’s just the threat of rain. On this gorgeous afternoon, BP began sometime after 4:00
pm
and I decided to stand on Kenmore and focus my gaze at the blue sky. Then I waited. And waited. Then I saw something! It was moving fast, and I made my move!

Turned out to be a bird. Later on, Dave told me it happens to everyone. “At the end of batting practice if I don’t have one I’m jumping at everything,” he admitted.

Just before batting practice I had sent a message via Twitter to former ballhawk Johnny Rosenstein, an old colleague who had moved away a few years earlier, asking if he had any tips. He tweeted back: “u won’t have chance against pros they r 2 quick. Stand on either end
—down the line or left-center—hope to get one on bounce.”

With “u won’t have a chance” still ringing in my head, I took my spot among the half dozen ballhawks as well as a few passersby without gloves who appeared to just have stopped by out of curiosity. At 4:42
pm
, a shout of “Ball! Ball!” rang out moments before the initial baseball of the day cleared the wall, took one bounce, and landed in the gloveless hand of a passerby.

“Passerby,” Dave said, “is a very good ballhawk.”

That first ball was the only one to reach the street while the Cubs took BP, and the next one didn’t sail out until the Cardinals were taking their whacks 50 minutes later. By now, I had definitely lost some focus. Instead of looking straight to the sky, I was thinking about how I should have worn a hat and how tired my arm was and that’s why I didn’t see the next baseball fly over the wall until a split second before it landed squarely in Dave’s glove.

As I was admiring Dave’s catch, another ball left the park. And then seven minutes later, while I was still desperately trying to figure out how to pick up a baseball as it came out of the sky, I looked over just in time to see Moe, with his Jedi-like reflexes, almost blindly snare a ball that sailed through some leaves. It was uncanny how they were both in the right place at the right time.

There were maybe 10–15 ballhawks, including myself, who showed up at some point during BP. A total of eight balls left the park. (I saw seven but Dave said eight. You learn to trust Dave.) One resulted in a minor scrum.

I should tell you now that I did not get a ball during BP and didn’t really even come close. I moved around a lot, tried to track the wind as Dave suggested, and kept my foot on the curb to try and get a good push off when the time came. None of that helped, at least it didn’t help me.

Up to this point in 2011, only six balls had reached Waveland or Sheffield all season, or about one every 10 games. So it was no surprise the ballhawking herd thinned considerably after BP was over. For the next 3½ hours I played some catch on Waveland, said hello to Ronnie “Woo Woo” Wickers when he stopped by, and whenever the big hitters came up, I stared into the sky for a few hopeful seconds. The Cardinals hit four homers, including one by Pujols. None left the park.

After Geovany Soto struck out to end the Cubs’ 6–2 loss, I grabbed my glove, said my goodbyes, and headed down Waveland toward the “L.”

I had a ball. Sorry to say, I only mean that figuratively.

64. Horrible Playoff Collapses, Part 3: 1984

Wrigley Field may never have been more beautiful than it was on October 2, 1984. The sky was clear, the sun was shining, and it felt like the center of the universe. If there was a comparable feel to that day it would have been Opening Day, what with the bunting hanging all around and Ernie Banks—Mr. Cub himself—throwing out the first pitch.

But Opening Day is routine; ready or not it comes ever year. To the thousands of Cubs fans there to see Game 1 of the National League Championship Series, it felt magical if not surreal. After 39 years, their Cubs were in the postseason.

Five days later, Wrigley Field was empty. The magic, if there actually had been any, was nowhere to be found and if you weren’t numb, then you were sick to your stomach. After 39 years, the Cubs had collapsed in the postseason. The focus will always be on Game 5 and the horrors that befell the Cubs that day in San Diego, but the 1984 National League Championship Series had gotten off to an auspicious start.

Speedy Cubs center fielder Bobby Dernier’s home run on the second pitch of Game 1 from Padres starter Eric Show began an onslaught that seemed to exorcise demons that were badly in need of some exorcising. After Ryne Sandberg struck out, Gary Matthews—Dernier’s companion in the outfield and the man he was traded to the Cubs with six months earlier—also homered.

Matthews added another home run as did Ron Cey and Cubs starting pitcher Rick Sutcliffe, whose bomb to right field was even more impressive than the two hits he allowed in seven innings. The final score: 13
–0.

Dernier got back to basics in Game 2, singling off Padres starter Mark Thurmond and then going from first to third on a routine ground out to third base. It was an incredible show of speed, and when Matthews hit a grounder to short, Dernier came home to again give the Cubs an early advantage.

Steve Trout, whose father, Dizzy, pitched against the Cubs in the 1945 World Series and was the Game 4 winner, took a 4–2 lead into the ninth inning before exiting after a one-out walk that brought the tying run to the plate. Lee Smith came on to strike out former Cub Carmelo Martinez and then terrified the crowd as Padres catcher Terry Kennedy lifted a pitch high into the sky.

Henry Cotto settled under it on the warning track in left field to secure a 4–2 victory and give the Cubs a 2–0 lead in the best-of-five series. The World Series was now one win away. Never before had a National League team won the first two games of a series then lost the final three. This one was in the bag. So when the Padres routed the Cubs 7–1 in Game 3, there wasn’t that much worry. Can’t win ’em all, right?

Even when Game 4 ended on Steve Garvey’s two-run homer off Lee Smith in the bottom of the ninth to set up the series finale a few hours later, there was concern and angst but belief that Sutcliffe, winner of 15 straight games, could not be beaten. And for five innings he looked unbeatable.

While the Cubs were building a 3–0 lead on Leon Durham’s two-run homer and Jody Davis’ solo shot, Sutcliffe just did his thing. He gave up two hits and a walk before a pair of sacrifice flies in the sixth got the Padres on the board.

Then came the seventh inning, and the series and season crumbled away. It began with a walk to Carmelo Martinez, who the Cubs had dealt for starting pitcher Scott Sanderson. After a sacrifice, Tim Flannery hit a grounder right at Durham. The ball went right under his glove, which had accidentally been soaked with Gatorade during the previous inning. Maybe you don’t believe in curses, but if you do, remember that you can’t spell Gatorade without G-O-A-T.

Even after the run-scoring error, the game was still tied at 3, but just as Mark Prior remained in too long 19 years later, so did Sutcliffe. He gave up three straight hits, including a two-run double by Tony Gwynn that nearly decapitated Ryne Sandberg, before Cubs manager Jim Frey finally yanked him.

The Cubs brought the tying run to the plate in the eighth off Goose Gossage, but Gary Matthews struck out to end the threat. And an inning later when Jody Davis hit into a force, it was all over. One impossibility—the Cubs making the playoffs
—had given way to another impossibility. The Cubs really could blow a 2–0 lead.

“It was my loss,” Durham said afterward. “My loss. And I don’t know quite how to describe the hurt.”

Nearly 30 years later, it still hurts just as much.

True or False: Did No Lights Cost the Cubs Home-Field Advantage in the 1984 NLCS?

In Carrie Muskat’s terrific book
Banks to Sandberg to Grace
, former Cubs president and general manager Dallas Green pins the blame for the Game 5 loss in the National League Championship Series to the San Diego Padres on the absence of lights in Wrigley Field.

“That’s the reason we lost in 1984, in my mind, because we lost the home-field advantage because the television people wouldn’t let us have that extra game.”

Well, that’s false.

In 1984, home-field advantage for the playoffs and the World Series was not based on a team’s record or some asinine system of awarding home-field advantage to the winner of the All-Star Game. It was based on a rotating system set up years earlier in which the NL East would get home-field advantage one season, then the NL West the next season. It worked the same way for the World Series. The Padres—winners of the NL West—were entitled to home-field advantage in the 1984 playoffs, just the way it played out.

The confusion has likely come out of what would have happened had the Cubs made it to the World Series that year. In 1984, the NL was due for home-field advantage. But faced with angry NBC-TV executives, baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn decreed instead that the AL would get home-field advantage.

Cubs manager Jim Frey called it “a stinkin’ shame,” and shortstop Larry Bowa said, “That’s hard to believe.” Dallas Green blamed Wrigleyville residents, saying, “I guess the neighborhood got what they wanted then, didn’t they?”

So a terrible decision was made to deny the Cubs home-field advantage in 1984. But it was for the World Series, which never came to pass.