100 Things Cubs Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (6 page)

12. Take the Immortal Mike Royko’s Annual Cubs Quiz

“This is not an easy quiz, even for the most loyal fan. I wrote the test and every year I miss half the answers.”

—Mike Royko, April 9, 1969,
Chicago Daily News

For many years, the start of a new baseball season in Chicago brought boundless hope, renewed dreams, and legendary newspaper columnist Mike Royko’s annual Cubs quiz. Royko’s Cubs quiz first appeared during the 1960s when he rose to fame at the
Chicago Daily News
. The questions were ridiculous, the answers more so, and they often comically referred to players as being “immortal.”

As in, “What did the immortal Wayne K. Otto hit?” The answer: “Nothing. But Hack Wilson once hit him. He was a sportswriter, so he probably deserved it.”

Royko would sarcastically tout his quiz as being just as important as Opening Day. In 1969, he wrote, “Today is the big day for Cubs fans. That magic moment has finally arrived. Yes, today is the day they get to take my annual Cub fan quiz.”

Royko was born on September 19, 1932, just a few months after Cubs owner Phil Wrigley inherited the team. Royko loved the Cubs as much as anybody and poked as much fun at them as anybody. They were an easy target, sure, but Royko could have made the 1927 Yankees whimper with his biting wit.

For Royko, being a Cubs fan was a tortured existence and many of his wonderful columns were not really about the Cubs so much as how painful it was to live and die by them. In 1980, after he had moved to the
Chicago Sun-Times
, Royko announced he was becoming, of all things, a White Sox fan. It didn’t take, and the following year another column announced his allegiances had returned to the North Side.

The last column Royko ever wrote appeared in the
Chicago Tribune
on March 21, 1997, and fittingly it was devoted to the Cubs, specifically Phil Wrigley and the curse of the Billy Goat. The column was a historical look at Wrigley’s failings, which, he wrote, included not signing African American ballplayers until long after Jackie Robinson’s debut.

“So what might have been, wasn’t. It had nothing to do with a goat’s curse. Not unless the goat wore a gabardine suit and sat behind a desk in an executive suite. Yes, I know, so don’t grab your phone: The corporation that owns this paper has owned the Cubs since 1981. So why, you ask, haven’t they made it to the World Series?

“Because they haven’t been good enough. But I do know that if they thought a three-legged green creature from another planet could hit home runs or throw a 95 mp
h fastball, they’d sign it.

“And we’d cheer.”

A few weeks later, after Royko passed away on April 29, 1997, his wake was held at Wrigley Field.

Here are five questions from Royko’s 1976 Cubs quiz, some of which were used many times over the years. If you’re compelled to look up more of his wonderful quizzes, and there really can be no greater use of your time, Chicago’s Harold Washington Library keeps the archives of the
Chicago Daily News
,
Chicago Sun-Times
, and
Chicago Tribune
, the three newspapers for which Royko wrote his indispensable columns.

Q.
In 1969, when the Cubs blew the pennant to the New York Mets (Curse their souls!), Ron Santo got mad and screamed at the Cub center fielder because he goofed up. Who was this unfortunate young man?

A.
He was the immortal Don Young, and if I ever meet him, I’m going to scream at him, too.

Q.
The Cubs have had three home run champions since 1940. Which one spit the most?

A.
The immortal Bill Nicholson used to spit the most. He could spit 20' with the wind. One day, he accidentally spit on the immortal but tiny Peanuts Lowrey, and the game had to be held up while the trainer applied artificial respiration.

Q.
In 1958, the Cubs had a rookie who crossed himself every time he came to bat. Who was he, and can you come within 10 points of his batting average?

A.
The immortal Tony Taylor used to cross himself all the time. That year, he hit .235 and did not convert many atheists in the bleachers.

Q.
Who was tinier, Peanuts Lowrey or Dim-Dom Dallessandro?

A.
The immortal Dim-Dom Dallessandro was even tinier than the immortal Peanuts Lowrey, but he had enough sense to hide when the immortal Bill Nicholson was spitting.

Q.
In 1972, the Cubs got a pitcher named Bob Locker from the Oakland A’s. Who did they give away to acquire this all-time mortal?

A.
For the immortal Locker, the Cubs gave away Bill North, who has since been seen in numerous World Series games. Why do we remain Cubs fans? Are we all crazy?

The Ex-Cub Factor

Mike Royko didn’t discover the ex-Cub factor, but his many columns about the uncanny way in which the factor could predict the World Series loser made it famous. The man who discovered it was longtime Cubs fan and writer Ron Berler, who first introduced his theory in the
Boston Herald
on October 15, 1981, whimsically explaining the notion that having three or more ex-Cubs will kill a team’s chances of winning the World Series.

In that first article, Berler wrote how former Cubs have the chronic condition of “Cubness” in them, and any team with too much of it will suffer. For example, in 1981 the Yankees had five ex-Cubs—Oscar Gamble, Bobby Murcer, Dave LaRoche, Rick Reuschel, and Barry Foote—and Berler’s prediction that they could not win the World Series came to pass. They lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in six games.

When Berler first put forth his theory, there was one exception to the rule: The 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates had ex-Cubs Smoky Burgess, Gene Baker, and Don Hoak. However, Berler surmised, because Hoak was virulently and publicly anti-Cub he had somehow escaped his “Cubness.”

Incredibly, the ex-Cubs factor has twice been overcome in recent years. The 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks—with Luis Gonzalez, Mark Grace, Miguel Batista, and Mike Morgan—still managed to defeat the Yankees who had no ex-Cubs. It was also overcome in 2008 when the Philadelphia Phillies beat the Tampa Bay Rays despite having ex-Cubs Tom Gordon, Matt Stairs, Scott Eyre, and Jamie Moyer on the roster.

Who knows? Maybe the time is coming when having three or more ex-Cubs will be an indicator of World Series success instead of failure.

13. Visit the Jack Brickhouse Statue on Michigan Avenue

The school bells
rang and for kids all over Chicagoland the mad dash home to catch as much of the Cubs game as possible was on. Waiting faithfully at the finish line, as always, was Jack Brickhouse.

With a cherubic face and infectious enthusiasm that never seemed to dim, Brickhouse was exactly what the team that couldn’t win to save itself needed. Critics sometimes denounced him as being too nice and too much of a homer but so what? He was.

“I don’t want to be a stick-in-the-mud, but when you go overboard you don’t hurt just the athlete,” Brickhouse wrote in his third biography,
A Voice for All Seasons
. “You hurt his wife going to the grocery store and his kid going to school. Why? What does that prove?”

There was a timeless decency to Brickhouse, who received the Ford C. Frick Award from the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1983, that remained with him throughout his life. He was a mainstay at charity events, always quick to offer advice and encouragement to young journalists, and when the Cubs finally broke their color barrier in 1953 with Ernie Banks and Gene Baker, he gave them air time just like he would anybody else.

“Usually, the other guys would kind of back off a little bit,” Banks told the
Chicago Tribune
in 1998 shortly after Brickhouse died. “But Jack was always there. He interviewed us on the postgame shows and the pregame shows. He was right there to nurture us along. We talked about that a lot.”

John Beasley Brickhouse was born in Peoria, Illinois, on January 24, 1916. After getting his start on a Peoria radio station, Brickhouse made his way to Chicago and by the
1940s he was a rising star for WGN Radio. When WGN-TV televised their first Cubs game on April 16, 1948, the first thing viewers saw was Brickhouse.

And so it went uninterrupted for 34 seasons, a stretch of Cubs baseball that some might have found interminable. Brickhouse suffered, to be sure, but he remained the kindly uncle whose home run calls (“That’s pretty well hit! Back, back! Hey, Hey!”) enthralled even the most cynical fans.

He could always find a little good in everything and everybody. Well, almost everybody. Brickhouse and prickly Leo Durocher, who managed the Cubs for 6½ seasons from 1966 until he was fired midway through the 1972 season, never got along, which wasn’t unusual for Durocher. For Brickhouse, it was practically unheard of.

“I tried, but I failed,” he once told longtime Chicago baseball columnist Jerome Holtzman. “I just can’t get to like the guy.”

One man Brickhouse liked quite a bit was Harry Caray, who replaced Brickhouse in the Cubs’ broadcast booth in 1982 even though Caray was two years his senior. Their careers paralleled each other, and they had more than a few postgame beers together. With Brickhouse in retirement, Caray became a local and national phenomenon thanks to WGN’s nationally televised games, and he helped turn Wrigley Field into the world’s largest neighborhood tavern.

When Caray died shortly before the 1998 season, the Cubs quickly announced a statue would be erected outside Wrigley Field. While getting ready for Caray’s funeral, Brickhouse felt numbness in his leg and soon learned he had a brain tumor. He passed away on
August 6, 1998.

On the day the Caray statue was unveiled, the Cubs also honored Brickhouse by emblazoning his memorable “Hey, Hey!” home run call atop the left field foul pole. It seemed like Caray got the grand prize and Brickhouse was given a ribbon just for showing up.

Several friends of Brickhouse’s started a group called Citizens United for Brickhouse Statue (CUBS) and raised $150,000 to build and erect a statue in his honor. Brickhouse’s career was filled with so many achievements—he was the voice of the Bears for 24 years and the voice of the White Sox for 27—they needed all four sides of the statue to catalog them all.

The statue was dedicated on Thursday, September 14, 2000, and rests just south of the Tribune Tower, several miles from Wrigley Field.

14. Slammin’ Sammy

He was one of the greatest power hitters in baseball history whose role in the Great Home Run Race of 1998 electrified the nation, carried the Cubs into the playoffs, and turned a poor kid from the Dominican Republic into an international superstar sought out by advertisers, movie stars, and heads of state.

That’s slammin’ Sammy.

He was a petulant, selfish cheater who cared more about his own glorified statistics than he did winning baseball games, flashed a fake smile only when it suited him, and when the going got rough deserted his teammates then blatantly lied about it.

That’s slammin’ Sammy.

Who is the real Sammy Sosa? He’s certainly somewhere in between these two wildly diverging versions, but in the court of public opinion, the pendulum has swung far in the direction of the latter.

Samuel Peralta Sosa was born on November 12, 1968, in the baseball-crazed town of San Pedro de Macoris and signed with the Texas Rangers when he was just 16. He first arrived in Chicago during the summer of 1989 when the White Sox acquired him in a trade for Harold Baines. Less than four years later, his potential still unrealized, he was dealt on March 30, 1992, to the Cubs along with reliever Ken Patterson for veteran outfielder George Bell.

The trade was viewed as a swap of disappointing hitters, but there was still something untapped and unknown about the 23-year-old the Cubs had just acquired. Hall of Fame sportswriter Jerome Holtzman described him as having a “quiet personality.”

In Sosa’s first season with the Cubs he had two long stints on the disabled list, first due to a broken finger and then to a broken ankle that ended his year on
August 6. The following year Sosa, then a lithe speedster with good power, hit 33 homers and stole 36 bases to signal his arrival as a burgeoning star.

During the next four seasons he became the best player on mostly mediocre Cubs teams and wasn’t more than a regional hero, though in 1995 he finished eighth in the MVP voting as he put together his second 30–30 season and drove in more than 100 runs for the first time. Even so, in a postseason wrap-up, Cubs president Andy MacPhail presciently declared Sosa “has not reached his full potential.”

In 1996, with Ryne Sandberg returning from early retirement, Sosa was starting to take on a greater leadership role. Years later, Sandberg would use his Hall of Fame speech to lecture players who didn’t play the “right” way in what was viewed as a slap at Sosa. Ironically, back then Sosa looked to Sandberg as a role model. “I have to be like Sandberg,” he told the
Chicago Tribune
. “Do you want to be a leader? You go outside and do your job. When [a guy] goes outside and gives 100 percent, that’s what I call a leader.”

Sosa’s work ethic was never questioned over the years; he was viewed as someone who would do whatever it took to succeed in baseball. In 1998, all that work paid off in stunning ways. He slugged 13 homers during the first two months of the season, which was typical for him but amazingly he was hitting .343, well beyond his .257 career average at the time.

Then as June got underway, Sosa took the next step. After missing the final three games of May due to a swollen left thumb, he hit two home runs on June 1, including one off Florida rookie Ryan Dempster. The next game he stayed in the park but then homered in five straight. He went
on to post a three-homer game and had two more multi-homer games en route to finishing with 20 homers and breaking Rudy York’s 61-year-old MLB record of 18 in a single month.

When June ended, Sosa trailed Mark McGwire by four homers and their epic race to No. 62 and surpassing Roger Maris was on. McGwire got there first—on a September night at Busch Stadium against the Cubs—and beat out Sosa for the home run title 70–66. But it was Sosa who was named the National League MVP, and led his team to the playoffs and where McGwire was cautious and cantankerous, Sosa was wide-eyed and lovable. At least in the public eye.

It was about this time that Sosa’s growing entourage and demand for special treatment started to consume the Cubs. When he arrived to training camp in 1999, he began what would become his annual routine of arriving as late as possible and then asking, “Did you miss me?”

The Cubs chose to ignore the clubhouse issues mainly because Sosa was a cash cow who also kept up his incredible pace on the field, hitting 63, 50, and then 64 homers over the next three seasons. He then demanded—and received—
a four-year, $72 million extension that ran through 2005. But he started to lose his teammates, in no small measure because of his beloved boom box, which would play his favorite music—and only his music—over and over again.

By 2003, Sosa’s numbers started to drop to pre-1998 levels and his act started to get harder to stomach. Whispers of steroid use—which have never been proven—were nonetheless eating at his credibility but not nearly as much as on June 3 when
one of his bats cracked open during a game and cork flew out.

His detractors pounced and Sosa’s explanation—that he had accidentally grabbed a batting practice bat—was ridiculed. This was the beginning of the end for Sosa, who was no longer even the best player on his own team. In 2003, that honor went to Mark Prior, and in 2004 Moises Alou, Aramis Ramirez, and Derrek Lee were not only better offensively but stayed healthy. The “Gladiator,” as Sosa and Sosa alone referred to himself, spent a month on the disabled list after sneezing and tweaking his back. He was 35 and on his way out.

As the 2004 season wound down with the Cubs still vying for a playoff spot, Sosa embarrassed himself by prematurely doing the “bunny hop”—his reaction to a sure-thing home run—and started to jog to first base. Unfortunately, the ball hit off the wall and Sosa was thrown out at second.

Then on the final day of the season, with the Cubs eliminated, Sosa asked manager Dusty Baker for the day off, and his request was granted. After the game had started, Sosa quietly dressed and drove away from Wrigley Field before the first inning was over. Not only was this unacceptable, but Sosa then lied and said he had stayed until the seventh inning. The Cubs, done covering for Sosa after years of enabling him, released a surveillance tape that revealed the truth.

It wasn’t easy for the Cubs to deal a fading and insolent player owed $18 million, but as they’ve done so many other times due to bad contracts, they dumped Sosa on the Baltimore Orioles for Mike Fontenot, Jerry Hairston, and a minor leaguer.

That was the end of an era, but not the end of the story. By every statistical measure, Sosa should easily gain entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame when he becomes eligible in 2013. His 609 homers are good for seventh on the all-time list. But based on the reaction to other players linked to illegal performance-enhancing drugs, it’s unlikely he’ll get in for years, if at all. In 2011, McGwire’s vote totals decreased in his fifth year of eligibility.

The next question is simpler—can Sosa ever show his face again at Wrigley Field? He has yet to sing the seventh-inning stretch or participate in any team-sponsored event since he left in 2005. Either Sosa isn’t welcome in his “house” or he doesn’t want to go home.

And love him or hate him, that’s sad.

Cubs’ All-Time Home Run Leaders

Nobody is likely to crack the Top 10 for several years. With 132 homers at the end of the 2011 season, Alfonso Soriano is 15
th
overall but after him there’s a long wait to find the next active player still wearing a Cubs uniform. Geovany Soto’s 71 homers put him 37
th
overall. Next up are Tyler Colvin (26 homers) and Carlos Pena
(28 homers).

1. Sammy Sosa, 545

2. Ernie Banks, 512

3. Billy Williams, 392

4. Ron Santo, 337

5. Ryne Sandberg, 282

6. Aramis Ramirez, 239

7. Gabby Hartnett, 231

8. Bill Nicholson, 205

9. Hank Sauer, 198

10. Hack Wilson, 190