by Dallas Green
The Dodgers were also shopping Ron Cey, one of the best third basemen in the game. I shared my plan with Gordie: “Let’s go after Cey. If we get him, we’ll move Sandberg to second base.”
A few weeks later, we acquired Cey in exchange for two minor leaguers. One of the first people I contacted after making the trade was Larry Bowa. “Bow, I trust you,” I told my shortstop. “You have to help Sandberg make the transition to second base.”
I would have much preferred Garvey at first instead of Buckner, but I couldn’t complain about how the rest of the infield was shaping up.
To further help Sandberg, I hired my old friend, Ruben Amaro Sr., as an infield instructor. I hoped Ruben would join me in Chicago when I first got hired, but he chose to keep his Phillies job that allowed him to split time between the United States and Latin America. When I asked him again to come to Chicago, much to my delight, he said yes.
* * *
We lost six consecutive games to start the 1983 season, giving up seven runs to our opponents in three of the losses and eight runs in another. Our defense and relief pitching were terrible.
It was only April, but boos started ringing loudly through Wrigley Field.
I tried to keep my cool amid a growing chorus of criticism that I was full of shit and had no plan for turning the Cubs’ fortunes around. On my radio show and in the newspapers, I reminded everyone that I never promised overnight success.
Lee Elia, who shared my temperament but not my patience, also got beat up in the press. He let his emotions bottle up until he famously blew a gasket after a tough loss to the Dodgers at Wrigley Field.
The loss on April 29, 1983, dropped us to 5–14. Lee could see it was going to be a long, frustrating season. In front of an assemblage of reporters, one of whom recorded the outburst for posterity, he made his feelings known.
“I’ll tell you one fucking thing, I hope we get fucking hotter than shit, just to stuff it up them 3,000 fucking people who show up every fucking day, because if they’re the real Chicago fucking fans, they can kiss my fucking ass right downtown!” Lee raged.
That was a pretty memorable sound bite. But Lee wasn’t nearly finished yet.
“Those motherfuckers don’t even work. That’s why they’re out at the fucking game! They ought to go out and get a fucking job and find out what it’s like to go out and earn a fucking living! Eighty-five percent of the fucking world is working. The other 15 percent come out here!”
He went on to call Wrigley Field “a fucking playground for the cocksuckers,” a colorful phrase but not exactly in keeping with how we wanted to market our stadium. At least Lee finished on a hopeful note, expressing confidence that the Cubs would hit a groove and start playing better baseball.
Lee didn’t know he was being taped. After he calmed down, I don’t think he even remembered half the things he said. But before leaving the ballpark, he realized he needed to call me.
“I was a little tough with the media today,” Lee explained.
By that time, I already knew, because, with heavy bleeping, the recording was on the local news.
“I’d like you to come up to my office,” I told him.
“Dal, I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? I need to get the hell out of here. I’m going to go watch my daughter play softball.”
“No, Lee, you need to come up here right now. If you don’t, I’m going to remove you from your job.”
That got his attention.
When he saw the news report, I could tell he was shocked by his own words.
I decided to back him, however, because I still thought he was the best man to manage the Cubs. Plus, I knew a thing or two about going berserk in a baseball clubhouse. We weathered that storm, but Lee never quite lived down that incident.
It was another dust-up with the press later in the season that ultimately forced my hand.
Lee was off by himself after another loss, this time trying to keep his emotions confined within the four walls of his office. When he saw a WGN cameraman coming up the steps, he shouted, “No TV!” But the guy kept coming. That set Lee off. “Goddamn it, I said no TV!” he repeated. He then pushed the guy, who took a tumble down the steps, causing the camera to crash to the ground. The Tribune Company, which has owned WGN for years, didn’t take too kindly to the assault on its equipment.
I really appreciated that Lee tried to bring pride and character to the Cubs. But the restaurant incident, the tantrum directed at the fans, and the attack on the cameraman did him in.
Three strikes and you’re out. It’s always been that way in baseball.
The team’s poor play obviously didn’t help his cause.
With our record at 54–69, I let Lee go in August 1983. It was the most difficult personnel decision I ever made in my career. Lee was one of my best friends, after all.
Looking back, it might have been premature. We played well during certain stretches of the season and had started to put a competitive team together. As a first-time manager, Lee had yet to learn how to deal with all the attention directed toward him. He probably would have gotten better at that over time.
Lee was a great baseball guy. It’s just that when his fuse was lit, it went off big-time. That probably hindered his career. After managing the Cubs, he became skipper of the Phillies for parts of two seasons in the late 1980s. But that was his last managing job. He and I remained close, and when George Steinbrenner hired me to lead the Yankees in 1989, I brought Lee on as a coach.
Lee never held his firing against me. Looking back on his time with the Cubs, he says, “It was the first time I managed a major league ballclub, and I didn’t have enough experience with the media to understand that you had to conduct yourself in a certain way. I’ll always feel bad about how things played out there. The main reason I feel bad is because I let my buddy down.”
* * *
Charlie Fox, a veteran baseball guy I had with me in the front office, went down to the field and saw our fifth-place season to completion.
I tried to stay positive. Though we showed no improvement from 1982, I liked a lot of what I saw, especially from our offense. Ron Cey hit 24 home runs and knocked in 90 runs. Sandberg further established himself as a star in the making. Bowa responded to my early-season appeal to take Ryno under his wing and help him master his new position. Thanks to Bowa’s leadership, Ruben’s coaching, and Sandberg’s raw talent, Ryno won a Gold Glove in his first year at second base.
While we were struggling to win games, the Phillies won another pennant in 1983, the year Pat Corrales got fired as manager with the team in first place. Pope came down from the front office to lead the team to the World Series, where they lost to Baltimore. I was proud of Pope and in no way measured myself against what was happening in Philadelphia. I was on a new adventure and determined to move past my choppy first two years in Chicago.
The White Sox were also riding high, fresh off a 99-win season and a division title. At an off-season banquet, White Sox manager Tony La Russa wondered aloud why his team wasn’t getting the credit he felt it deserved. “I don’t know why you’re giving the Cubs so much attention,” he told the assembled reporters. “We’re the team that just won a division.” That was Tony’s way of jabbing, but he had a valid point. In good times and bad—mostly bad—the Cubs were the team that captured the imagination of the city.
It was fun to think how excited people would get if we actually started winning.
16
After two years in Chicago, I certainly wasn’t feeling a great sense of accomplishment. At the same time, I didn’t feel any real pressure, either. I had faith in my ability to make the Cubs successful.
Though the major league club had struggled to win games during my tenure, I could point to the scouting and drafting of future Cubs as areas where we excelled from the very beginning. That was thanks to farm director Gordon Goldsberry. Before I arrive
d, the Cubs relied heavily on the Major League Baseball Scouting Bureau, a centralized office through which scouts provided reports to every franchise. It was a way of scouting on the cheap, and my farm director and I were dead set against it. We wanted our own scouts to produce reports that didn’t become communal property.
My time in Philadelphia taught me the importance of identifying and developing young prospects. The Phillies wouldn’t have won the 1980 World Series without the players who were first spotted and signed by our organization’s scouts in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Cubs had a severe lack of homegrown talent. Pitcher Lee Smith and outfielder Mel Hall were two of the few players on the major league roster in 1983 who came up through the system. I could only do so much to build the team through trades and free agent signings. At some point, we needed to develop talent from within.
Scouting is all about projection. I can send my wife out to a high school game, and without too much difficulty, she’ll point out the best player on the field. Raw ability is easy to spot. The more difficult task is projecting how a talented player will grow and develop at the professional level. To do that, scouts have to try and get inside a player’s head and heart.
Vedie Himsl, who preceded Gordon Goldsberry as Cubs farm director, believed in the scouting bureau. We worked to convince him that sharing information with other teams wasn’t the best way to land players. To his credit, he showed a willingness to try things our way.
I put Vedie in charge of our scouting department. He and Gordie ended up working well together. I’m not sure Vedie ever really bought into our program, but he had no choice if he wanted to keep his job. In the end, he became more of Gordie’s assistant than a true scout.
Our lousy record dating back several seasons had the benefit of giving us a pick at or near the top in each year’s amateur draft. That was the reason behind the draft, after all—to help the have-nots compete with the haves. In 1982, we made a high school kid from Brooklyn named Shawon Dunston the first overall pick of the draft. Shawon became a productive member of the Cubs for many years. Only two of the top five picks that year made much of an impact in the major leagues. The other was Dwight Gooden, who went fifth overall to the Mets.
In June 1984, Gordie took pitchers Greg Maddux and Jamie Moyer in the second and sixth rounds, respectively. He also drafted catcher Damon Berryhill and outfielder Dwight Smith that year. In 1985, he selected outfielder Rafael Palmeiro in the first round, and in what proved to be a real coup, he got Mark Grace in the 24th round.
* * *
The drafts helped make our future appear brighter, but in the here and now, I had several crucial decisions to make.
The hiring of a new manager was at the top of the list. Charlie Fox returned to his role as a scout and adviser, and I set out to find someone who could help turn us into winners. I considered a lot of different guys before ultimately settling on my counterpart in the 1980 World Series, Jim Frey. Our pitching coach, Billy Connors, who had held the same position in Kansas City under Frey, gave us positive feedback about Jimmy. After getting several other upbeat reports about Jimmy’s ability to handle and teach players, I decided he was the right guy for the job. An added bonus of hiring him was that he brought Don Zimmer with him as a coach. I loved Don. He was a helluva baseball guy.
Early in my tenure in Chicago, the Cubs got the nickname “Phillies West.” My first manager came with me from Philadelphia, as did a couple of coaches, a bunch of executives, and a handful of players.
The distinct Philadelphia flavor in our clubhouse and front office was a matter of curiosity for most baseball fans, but it remained a sore point for Cubs supporters who wondered why the organization had become so reliant on a division rival for talent and ideas.
I wasn’t trying to trample on tradition by bringing in outsiders. I just happened to know the Phillies had a lot of gifted people.
On the heels of two losing seasons, I guess I could have decided to stop importing from Philadelphia.
But I didn’t.
After we lost 18 of our first 21 spring training games, I scrambled to make sure 1984 wouldn’t be a repeat of every season since 1972, the last time the Cubs finished above .500.
Bill Buckner was still our best trade chip. I badly wanted to move him, for the reasons previously stated, but also because he didn’t figure into our plans in 1984. We had decided to switch Leon Durham from the outfield to his natural position at first base. That meant Buckner would go to the bench. It also left us with a hole in left field.
That situation prompted a phone call to Philadelphia. I knew the Phillies didn’t care much for young outfielder Bobby Dernier, because I had put in a waiver claim for him before the Phillies pulled him back. Now I wanted to acquire him by trade.
I had helped bring Bobby up through the Phillies organization. At Triple-A Oklahoma City in 1981, he and Ryne Sandberg were a dynamic one-two punch at the top of the lineup, stealing more than a hundred bases between them and playing hit-and-run at all the right times. I was confident they could replicate that performance in Chicago.
We quickly worked out a deal that sent utility player Mike Diaz and pitcher Bill Campbell to the Phillies for Bobby, left fielder Gary Matthews, and pitcher Porfi Altamirano.
Getting Sarge was a bonus. I loved everything about the guy.
That deal for Bobby and Sarge went a long way toward assuring we would play better defense and score runs in 1984. I’m not sure how well we would have fared without them.
* * *
In Durham, Matthews, Sandberg, Ron Cey, Jody Davis, and Keith Moreland, we had a lineup full of guys capable of knocking in runs. The challenge was going to be keeping our opponents from outscoring us.
In 1983, we were the only National League club with a team ERA over 4.00. If we didn’t rectify that problem, we would continue to go nowhere. A starting rotation of Chuck Rainey, Steve Trout, Fergie Jenkins, Dick Ruthven, and Dickie Noles just wasn’t going to cut it. Of those guys, only Trout and Ruthven would have been a top-four starter for most teams. And Trout was a question mark. After coming over from the White Sox, Trout, a Chicago native, won 10 games for us in 1983. He had a decent arm and good stuff, but he had a loose-cannon personality. He’d arrive at the ballpark from his Indiana home with a dazed look and his hair all over the place.
Our off-season acquisition of Scott Sanderson, a serviceable starting pitcher with the Expos, was a step in the right direction. But it hardly solved our problem.
If I was pulling a little harder for Dickie Noles and Fergie to stay in the rotation, it was because I had a special connection to both.
To me, Dickie was “Pie,’ a nickname he got from Pete Rose for the pie-eating grin on his face when Philadelphia fans gave him an ovation during a 1979 game that turned out to be his first major league victory. Pete was good at giving nicknames. He also came up with “Sarge” in honor of Matthews’ take-charge attitude on the field.
I brought Dickie up through the Phillies organization, always hoping his talent would help him conquer his inner demons. We knew from the get-go that Dickie was a wild kid. Wes Livengood, a Phillies scout, went to a North Carolina jail where Dickie had spent the night for fighting to present him with his first professional contract. He later admitted he consumed alcohol every day of his life between the ages of 16 and 26.
His drinking got him into a lot of jams, some more significant than others. After a heavy night of boozing while playing winter ball in Venezuela, Dickie started tossing furniture out the window of his sixth-floor apartment. As with many of his alcohol binges, Dickie didn’t remember a thing about the incident. Only when Venezuelan authorities came to kick him out of the country the next day did he learn what happened.
Whenever I suspected another player of having a drinking problem, I’d check and see if he was hanging around Dickie. Birds of a feather flock together, and Dickie was a thirsty bird.
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br /> Dickie drank to excess, but he also loved to play baseball and worked his ass off at the ballpark. You don’t give up on a guy like that.
That’s why I traded for him when I got to Chicago.
The change of scenery didn’t help Dickie.
In April 1983, Lee Elia and I took some local sportswriters to dinner during a road trip in Cincinnati. During the meal, I got a call at the restaurant from our traveling secretary.
“Dickie’s in jail,” he told me.
“Jail?” I repeated. “What for?”
I didn’t wait for the answer, because I already knew the answer.
At the police station, Connors and John Vukovich were waiting on us. The sergeant on duty told us Dickie got drunk and beat the shit out of a Cincinnati cop.
Enough was enough. After we bailed Dickie out of jail, I told him not to bother showing up for the game the next day.
“You’re going directly from here to rehab,” I told him.
“No, no, Dallas, I’ll be all right,” he protested.
“Dickie, you just decked a cop and don’t even remember doing it! Either you get some goddamn help, or I’ll make sure you never play an inning of baseball again. You have a chance to be a good man. But you need to go get yourself straightened out.”
Faced with banishment from the Cubs, Dickie could have appealed to the players union for guidance. But he chose to follow my orders and get himself dried out. He checked into a 30-day rehab program and took the first steps toward beating his addiction. Later that year, he was sentenced to 16 days in jail for his assault on the police officer.
He had a disappointing 1983 season, but more importantly, he took steps toward becoming a productive human being.
Dickie remained with us for the first half of the ’84 season, albeit relegated to the bullpen. Then he became crosswise with Frey and demanded a trade. He felt Jimmy never fully forgave him for the high-and-tight pitch he threw to George Brett in the 1980 World Series. Maybe that was it, or maybe Jimmy just didn’t trust him. Dickie wanted to go to a team that would put him in its starting rotation. He thought he needed a fresh start someplace else, so I honored his wish by trading him to the Rangers.