100 Things Cubs Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (7 page)

15. Merkle’s Boner

Before Steve Bartman, there was Fred Merkle. And before a century of black clouds, bad baseball, and bad luck, the Cubs were the beneficiaries of the most controversial on-field moment in baseball history.

The 1908 National League pennant race was coming down to the wire with the Cubs, New York Giants, and Pittsburgh Pirates all within striking distance of each other. There were still about two weeks left in the season when the Cubs and Giants met on September 23 at the Polo Grounds,
and there is no doubt the Cubs should have lost 2–1 on that fateful day.

The play that should have ended the game was exciting but routine. With two outs and the score tied 1–1 in the bottom of the ninth, Merkle was on first and Moose McCormick was on third. Giants shortstop Al Bridwell singled to center to easily score McCormick, who touched home plate with what should have been the game-winning run.

But Merkle, just 19 years old and making his first start of the season in place of the injured Fred Tenney, failed to touch second base before heading to the Giants clubhouse to avoid the happy mob of fans racing onto the field. That was never really in dispute despite later claims from some Giants that Merkle did indeed touch second.

It wasn’t that Merkle forgot to touch the bag; he was simply following the accepted protocol of the era. Even though the rulebook stated that a runner must always touch the next base even when a winning run is scored, the little-known rule wasn’t always followed or enforced.

In fact, on September 4, 1908, the Cubs were playing in Pittsburgh when the Pirates got a bases-loaded single in the bottom of the ninth to win the game. But the Pirates’ Warren Gill, just as Merkle would later do, ran to the clubhouse instead of touching second base.

Johnny Evers, the Cubs cranky but astute second baseman, retrieved the ball and alerted umpire Hank O’Day that Gill should be a force out at second and the run should not count. O’Day, who later managed the Cubs to a 78–76 record in 1914, would not change the call and despite a protest filed with the National League the call was upheld and the Cubs lost the game.

Nineteen days later, the Cubs were playing in New York and as fate would have it, O’Day was one of the two umpires working the game. Of course, Evers was manning second for the Cubs and it was his quick thinking that led to Merkle’s being called out.

After Bridwell’s hit, Cubs outfielder Solly Hofman threw the ball back to the infield but it rolled to Giants pitcher Joe McGinnity. Just what happened to the baseball at this point is still in dispute, but Evers told his version of the story in John Carmichael’s
My Greatest Day in Baseball
.

“We grabbed for his hands to make sure he wouldn’t heave the ball away but he broke loose and tossed it into the crowd,” Evers said. “I can see the fellow who caught it yet
…a tall, stringy, middle-aged gent with a brown bowler hat on. [Harry] Steinfeldt and Floyd Kroh…raced after him. ‘Gimme the ball for a minute,’ Steinfeldt begged him. ‘
I’ll bring it right back.’ The guy wouldn’t let go and suddenly Kroh solved the problem.

“He hit the customer right on top of that stiff hat, drove it down over his eyes and as the gent folded up, the ball fell free and Kroh got it. I was yelling and waving my hands out by second base and Tinker relayed it over to me and I stepped on the bag and made sure O’Day saw me…he was waiting for that very play…he remembered the Pittsburgh game…and he said, ‘The run does not count.’”

There were thousands of fans on the field, and as word spread that O’Day had called Merkle out, a near-riot ensued. There was no way to continue the game even though the score was still tied 1–1. Protests were filed with the National League office by both clubs with the Giants claiming they won fairly and the Cubs claiming they should be awarded a forfeit victory since the Giants fans had made the game impossible to complete.

The outcome of the game wouldn’t matter if one team was able to win the pennant outright, but the Cubs beat the Pirates
5–2 in their final game to eliminate them and the Giants won their final three games to end the season tied with the Cubs. A decision was made to replay the tied game in its entirety on October 8 at the Polo Grounds.

Despite Cubs manager Frank Chance getting bloodied by a beer bottle thrown from the stands and starting pitcher Jack Pfiester not making it out of the first inning, the Cubs won 4–2 to win the pennant as Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown came on in relief to outduel Christy Mathewson. They went on to beat the Detroit Tigers in the World Series in five games.

While the Giants had lost the pennant, Fred Merkle had lost his good name. Newspaper accounts had referred to his “boneheaded” decision, and the expression “Merkle’s boner” quickly was adopted as the catch-all for the entire affair. Fair or not, Merkle had to live with his last name becoming a verb that came to represent doing something stupid.

By all accounts, Merkle was a good and intelligent man. His teammates never blamed him for what had happened, and he stayed with the Giants until 1916. A year later, ironically enough, he joined the Cubs and helped them win the 1918 NL pennant. But after Merkle retired, the incident continued to haunt him and his family.

In
More Than Merkle: A History of the Best and Most Exciting Season in Baseball History
, Merkle’s daughter told Keith Olbermann about how the family was living in Florida in the 1930s when a visiting minister attended their church.

“I want to begin by admitting to you an ugly secret,” the minister said. “I am from Toledo, Ohio, birthplace of the infamous Fred ‘Bonehead’
Merkle.

The entire family got up and left.

16. Jolly Cholly

The numbers don’t tell the Charlie Grimm story, the laughs do.

You can go through the statistical record and discover Grimm played 20 years in the big leagues, including his last 12 with the Cubs after getting traded from Pittsburgh. You can see he was a pretty fair ballplayer, too, knocking out 2,299 hits during a career launched in 1916.

A glance at his managerial record reveals he won 1,287 games and three National League pennants in 19 seasons as a big league manager, including 14 spread over three separate stints with the Cubs. Those are the indisputable, important, impersonal numbers, and they only begin to tell the story of the man called Jolly Cholly by countless friends, teammates, and admirers.

“We’d book Charlie into the old Wisconsin and Riverview theatres during the off-season,” Bill Veeck Jr. told the
Chicago Tribune
after Grimm passed away in 1983. “He was a wonderful entertainer. He would sing and play the banjo, and he was a great storyteller. Many of us believed he could have been a professional vaudevillian.”

In the foreword to Grimm’s 1968 autobiography,
Jolly Cholly’s Story: Baseball, I Love You!
, co-author Ed Prell relays the story of the time Grimm was struck by a beanball in an era when players didn’t wear helmets. Several men in the stands rushed to Grimm’s side and one of them, when asked his qualifications to help, said he was not a doctor but a pharmacist. This perked up Grimm, who managed to blurt out, “What do you charge for a pint of gin, Doc?”

Grimm’s good humor and laid-back approach is widely credited for turning around the 1932 season for the Cubs, who were disintegrating under Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby, a remarkable player but an uninspiring and difficult manager. With his trademark banjo by his side, Grimm took over as player-manager in late July and led the Cubs to a 37–18 record and the NL pennant.

Grimm stayed on as manager until 1938 when it was his turn to get ousted in the middle of the season. But unlike Hornsby, who left in a huff, Grimm switched to the broadcast booth and cheered on the Cubs as they again won the NL pennant.

In 1944, with the Cubs again in need of a change, Grimm returned for his second term as manager and in 1945 took them to their fifth World Series in 17 seasons. Although he wasn’t manager during the 1938 Series, Grimm was the only person to be in a Cubs uniform for each of those five pennant-winning seasons.

“Oh, Jesus, Charlie was really funny,” former Cubs second baseman Don Johnson told author Peter Golenbock in
Wrigleyville
. “In [the minors with
] Indianapolis one ballgame, it started to rain about the seventh inning. It just rained, rained and rained…and the umpire wouldn’t stop the game.

“Grimm found a great big beach umbrella someplace. Where in the hell he ever got it, I don’t know. He walked out to protest to the umpire, and subconsciously the umpire got under the umbrella with him! When he realized what he had done, he kicked Grimm out of the ballgame with his umbrella.”

Cubs owner Phil Wrigley found Grimm to be one of the few people in baseball he could trust, and after the 1959 season he installed him for the third time as Cubs manager. Instead of presaging another pennant, however, it turned into one of the oddest baseball trades of all time. After just 17 games, Grimm and WGN Radio broadcaster Lou Boudreau swapped jobs.

Grimm remained with the Cubs as a vice president for many years, and when Wrigley sold the Cubs in 1981, one of the stipulations was that Grimm would remain on the payroll. When he passed away in 1983, Grimm’s last wish was that his ashes would be scattered at Wrigley Field.

“Charlie Grimm was great,” Boudreau told author Carrie Muskat in
Banks to Sandberg to Grace
. “He was great for ballplayers, great for the fans, and great for the Cubs.”

17. The Comeback

No game was really over for the 1989 Cubs, who made a habit during their march to the National League East crown of finding a way to win when all hope seemed lost. From July 20 to August 27, the Cubs won six games after trailing in the seventh inning or later, including four when they trailed in the ninth.

One of the most miraculous comebacks came on July 20 at Wrigley Field when San Francisco led 3–0 with two outs in the ninth before rookie Dwight Smith and reserve infielder Curtis Wilkerson tied the game on run-scoring singles. An 11
th
inning double by Les Lancaster, a relief pitcher, won it for the Cubs. It was Lancaster’s only RBI of the season.

But there didn’t seem to be any room for miracles on August 29 when the Cubs fell behind the Houston Astros 9–0 before 25,829 on a Tuesday afternoon at Wrigley Field. Mike Bielecki, a former first-round pick of Pittsburgh who finally was living up to his promise with a breakout season, had one of his few poor starts and didn’t make it out of the fifth.

By the time the Astros worked over reliever Dean Wilkins, who gave up a grand slam to light-hitting shortstop Rafael Ramirez, they had their nine-run cushion. This was a game that was over. This became clear when both club’s skippers made moves to indicate they thought the outcome was settled.

Even after finally getting on the scoreboard with a pair of two-out runs in the sixth, Cubs manager Don Zimmer pulled Andre Dawson to start the seventh, replacing him with Smith, an NL rookie-of-the-year contender who was in a dreadful 2-for-30 slump.

Meanwhile, with their lead down to 9–5, Houston manager Art Howe let reliever Brian Meyer labor through the eighth so Howe could save his bullpen for the following day. But Meyer gave up a single to rookie catcher Joe Girardi, and after Vance Law flied out to center, Jerome Walton reached on an error. Ryne Sandberg’s RBI single made it 9
–6.

“I’m thinking we’ve got it won,” Howe said.

There was at least one person in Wrigley Field who believed in the Cubs, and not surprisingly that person was parked in the bleachers. The legendary Arne Harris, who was WGN’s executive producer of Cubs telecasts for many years, located a fan in left field holding a notebook with the numbers 1–9 written on it followed by “More To Go.” As the comeback progressed the fan, dutifully putting an “X” through another number, kept track of how many runs the Cubs needed to tie the game.

After Sandberg’s single, Howe finally replaced Meyer with Danny Darwin, who promptly gave up an RBI single to Lloyd McClendon, a former Little League World Series hero. Lefty reliever Juan Agosto came in to face Mark Grace, whose base hit made it 9–8.

Smith, a lefty, was up next, and Zimmer wouldn’t have shocked anyone by pinch-hitting him for Darrin Jackson, a righty. But Zimmer always managed with his gut, and on a day when faith mattered he put his in Smith, whose sacrifice fly tied the score.

Neither team scored in the ninth, and the Astros went down in order in the 10
th
, but the Cubs rallied in their half. Walton, who beat out Smith as the NL’s top rookie, walked and moved over to second on a Sandberg bunt. The game almost ended on McClendon’s single to center, but Walton had to hold up. After an intentional walk to Grace, Smith came to the plate again.

With the crowd in a frenzy, Smith dropped a single into right field as Walton raced home to complete the Cubs’ biggest comeback of the 20
th
century. The 1930 team also came back from a nine-run deficit to beat Cincinnati 13–11, but that game was on the last day of the season and the result didn’t have pennant implications.

“I’ve been asked so many times lately, ‘Is this the biggest game you’ve won?’” Zimmer said afterward. “This was the biggest.”

18. Listen to Lee Elia’s Rant

If you want to hear Lee Elia’s infamous 1983
postgame news conference ripping Cubs fans, it’s not hard to find. All it takes is a quick Google search for “Lee Elia tirade,” “Lee Elia rant,” or if you want you can just go with a simple “Lee Elia.”

Lee Elia will never be able to escape the incident in which his use of the “F” word isn’t even as shocking as the way he ripped Cubs fans. The rant will be in the first paragraph of his obituary no matter how the rest of his life turns out, and so a few years ago he finally tried to have some good come out of it.

As the 25
th
anniversary of the rant approached, Elia partnered with a collectibles company and autographed baseballs with the words, “And Print It!”—one of the most memorable non-expletive portions of the rant—written on the bottom. Part of the proceeds went to Chicago Baseball Cancer Charities.

There may not be a more well-known, not to mention cuss-filled, rant in baseball history, and if it weren’t for longtime Chicago broadcaster Les Grobstein’s tape recorder Elia’s three-minute speech would have disappeared into thin air.

The April 29 game itself had been a disaster. Cubs closer Lee Smith threw a wild pitch in the eighth inning to let in the game-winning run in a 4–3 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers, dropping the Cubs to 5–1
4. Afterward, Elia was meeting with reporters when he let loose. Grobstein was the only reporter to record the event.

Knowing he had gold on his hands, and realizing Elia’s job was about to be in danger, Grobstein hustled to get the audio edited and within an hour or so it was airing on WLS-AM. Separately, he played the tape for Cubs officials, including General Manager Dallas Green, who summoned Elia to his office.

A press conference was hastily called, and Elia spent the entire time apologizing and desperately trying to take back what he had said. In an interview with the
Tribune
’s Fred Mitchell in 2008, Elia said the sight of fans cursing and throwing beer at right fielder Keith Moreland and shortstop Larry Bowa had set him off.

However, in a
Tribune
story that ran the day after the incident, Elia said he wasn’t aware Moreland had almost gone after a group of fans. “My frustrations just peaked,” Elia said in the news conference about his tirade. “It’s obvious the fans have the same frustrations, and I was out of line.”

Elia hung onto his job but only for another 104 games. It was another postgame comment by Elia, this one about how the Cubs had never heard of Atlanta Braves rookie Gerald Perry after Perry had homered against them that Green cited on the day Elia was let go. He didn’t mention the rant.

Elia, who was 46 at the time of the rant, briefly managed Philadelphia in the late 1980s and has been a respected coach and adviser for many years since, including his current stint as the Atlanta Braves hitting coach. In an interview with the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
during spring training in 2011, Elia admitted that after 25 years he had finally listened to the tape.

“Pulled the tape out of a drawer about three, four years ago,” he said. “Hadn’t heard it since it happened. Me and my wife sat there and listened to it, about 10:00 in the morning over a cup of coffee. We couldn’t stop laughing.”

A Bleepin’ Excerpt

“We’ve got all these so-called fuckin’ fans that come out here and say they’re Cub fans that are supposed to be behind you rippin’ every fuckin’ thing you do. I’ll tell you one fuckin’ thing, I hope we get fuckin’ hotter than shit, just to stuff it up them 3,000 fuckin’ people that show up every fuckin’ day, because if they’re the real Chicago fuckin’ fans, they can kiss my fuckin’ ass right downtown and PRINT IT.

“My fuckin’ ass. What the fuck am I supposed to do, go out there and let my fuckin’ players get destroyed every day and be quiet about it? For the fuckin’ nickel-dime people to show up? The motherfuckers don’t even work. That’s why they’re out at the fuckin’ game. They oughta go out and get a fuckin’ job and find out what it’s like to go out and earn a fuckin’ living. Eighty-five percent of the fuckin’ world is working.

“The other fifteen come out here. A fuckin’ playground for the cocksuckers. Rip them motherfuckers. Rip them fuckin’ cocksuckers like the fuckin’ players. We got guys bustin’ their fuckin’ ass, and them fuckin’ people boo. And that’s the Cubs? My fuckin’ ass.”