by Will, George
One—the one—good result of the College of Coaches is that the Cubs became the first team to have an African American coach. Buck O’Neil of the Kansas City Monarchs was thirty-seven when Jackie Robinson broke the color line, in 1947. He was too old to play in the major leagues, but he scouted for the Cubs, who made him a coach during the college era.
After the collapse of the College of Coaches, P. K. Wrigley said, in effect: No more Mr. Nice Guy. For the 1966 season, he hired Leo Durocher, who when introduced to the Chicago media said, “If no announcement has been made about what my title is, I’m making it here and now. I’m the manager. I’m not a head coach. I’m the manager.” And he was a prophet, of sorts. He promptly proclaimed that the Cubs, who had finished eighth in 1965–25 games behind, with a 72–90 record—were “not an eighth-place ball club.” He was right. In 1966, they finished tenth, 36 games out of first place, with a 59–103 record.
With the hiring of Durocher, climate change came to Wrigley Field. His salty memoir, published in 1975, when he was sixty-nine, is titled Nice Guys Finish Last. No one was more temperamentally opposed to Wrigley Field’s golly-the-ivy-is-so-green-and-the-sun-is-so-warm-and-the-beer-is-so-cold-and-the-ambience-is-so-gosh-darned-friendly-who-cares-what-the-score-is ethos.
“Nice guys finish last” is one of the most famous statements in baseball history. But Durocher did not say quite that. One day in the 1940s, when he was managing the Dodgers, his team was taking batting practice before a game with the Giants at their Polo Grounds. There he said of the Giants, “All nice guys. They’ll finish last. Nice guys. Finish last.” Journalists “improved” what he’d said. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has the correct version.
“Give me,” Durocher liked to say, “some scratching, diving, hungry ballplayers who come to kill you.” And: “If I were playing third base and my mother were rounding third with the run that was going to beat us, I’d trip her.” He said he believed in rules, because “if there weren’t any rules, how could you break them?” He illustrated that philosophy by telling how in the 1930s, when he was a shortstop with the St. Louis Cardinal Gas House Gang team, he would “file his belt buckle to a sharp edge,” and when a Cardinal pitcher was in a jam, he would visit the mound and scuff the ball.
Durocher, the distilled essence of everything the Wrigley Field ethos is not, disliked the man who embodied this ethos. In fact, Durocher detested Ernie Banks, one of the best players ever to wear a Cubs uniform, and unquestionably the most beloved player in the team’s history. Banks liked to be loved. Durocher reveled in his role as a human cactus, which may have been the main reason P. K. Wrigley hired him.
Another reason was that the turnstiles at Wrigley Field were turning more and more slowly. In 1965, attendance had sunk to 641,361, an average of 7,727 per game, and the club had lost $1.3 million, which was real money in a year when the average player salary was $14,341 and the average team payroll was $573,640. Wrigley’s business model—serve cold beer in a pretty place and the score will not matter—was not working. And it was becoming expensive.
Durocher adored P. K. Wrigley: “Simply the finest man to work for in the world. The most decent man, probably, I have ever met.” Wrigley probably reciprocated Durocher’s affection because in Durocher’s second year, 1967, the Cubs were making money and finished third with a winning record (87–74), the first time they had finished in what was then called “the first division”—the top half of a league—since 1946. In 1968, the Cubs again finished third (84–78) but drew more than a million customers (1,043,409) for the first time since 1952. In 1969, they drew 1,674,993, breaking a franchise record that had existed since 1929. They also set a Chicago record, topping the one set by Bill Veeck’s White Sox of 1960. This at a time when Wrigley Field’s capacity was just 36,667 and all games were played in the afternoon; lights were still nineteen years away. The 1969 attendance record would survive until 1984, when the Cubs played in their first postseason since 1945. Yet 1969, like 1984, would not end happily.
The Cubs started the season by winning eleven of their first twelve games and on August 7 were in first place, with a nine-game lead. But August is when the first four months of the season have taken their toll in injuries and drained energy, and before the challenge of September can revive the adrenaline of a pennant contender. Durocher, then sixty-four, was more impatient than ever to win, and he would not rest his key players, who wore down just at the moment when the “Miracle Mets”—a franchise just seven seasons old—were becoming white hot.
By September 8, the Cubs’ lead was down to two and a half games as they entered Shea Stadium for their final two away games against the Mets. They lost both, their slide accelerated, and they finished the season in second place, eight games behind the Mets, who went on to defeat Baltimore’s heavily favored Orioles 4–1 in the World Series.
The remainder of Durocher’s stay in Chicago was an exercise in disappointment, a fact that he blamed on Banks and perhaps the second-most-popular Cub of all time, third baseman Ron Santo. “Right in the middle of the lineup,” Durocher complained, “I had two men who couldn’t run.” Durocher says he tried to trade Santo but could get no takers. What he says about Banks is scalding. He concedes that Banks was a great player in his time but adds, “Unfortunately, his time wasn’t my time.” Durocher knew how to nurse a grudge, and when he published his memoir, just three years after leaving the Friendly Confines, he offered an unfriendly assessment of Banks:
He couldn’t run, he couldn’t field; toward the end, he couldn’t even hit. There are some players who instinctively do the right thing on the base paths. Ernie had an unfailing instinct for doing the wrong thing. But I had to play him. Had to play the man or there would have been a revolution in the street.… Ernie Banks owns Chicago.… How does he do it? You could say about Ernie that he never remembered a sign or forgot a newspaperman’s name.
Durocher was just warming to his theme:
With every other player, we had the usual signs, an indicator followed by a combination. With Ernie we had to have flash signs. One sign. Like the Little League. Ernie, you’re always hitting unless we flash something at you. If I tip my hat, now you’re taking. Pull up my belt, it’s a hit-and-run. In my first year, when he could still run a little, I’d sometimes want him moving on a 3–1 count [when he was the runner on first] with Santo at bat to break up the possible double play. From the bench, you could see his whole body just rear back and he’d look at the coach as if he were saying, “You got to be kidding.” Your little boy knows that it’s percentage baseball to get a runner moving on a 3–1 count under those conditions. But not Mister Cub.
Both of Banks’s knees were shot by the end of his career, which came after the 1971 season. Durocher says, “He’d come up with men on the bases and if he hit a ground ball they could walk through the double play.” In the field, “if the ball wasn’t hit right at him, forget it. He’d wave at it. Two feet away from him—whoops—right under his glove.”
That is the brief for the prosecution. Now for the defense.
Not that Ernie Banks needs any defense in the environs of Wrigley Field, where a statue of him stands on Clark Street, near the home plate entrance. He is the face of the Cubs franchise, as much as Stan Musial, Bob Feller, Ted Williams, Robin Yount, Tony Gwynn, and Cal Ripken are the iconic players of the Cardinals, Indians, Red Sox, Brewers, Padres, and Orioles, respectively. Just as Wrigley Field is, for better or worse, a summation of the Cubs’ experience, Banks embodies the post-1945 franchise, for two reasons. First, his disposition, win or lose—and it was mostly lose—was as sunny as the ballpark in which he never performed at night. Second, his play demonstrated that even in a team game, a player can achieve greatness with precious little support from his teammates.
It is odd that in the 1950s, a decade in which the Cubs’ record was 672 wins and 866 losses (.437), two Cubs players won a total of three National League Most Valuable Player awards. In 1952, left fielder Hank Sauer led the lea
gue with 37 home runs and 121 runs batted in. This was four years before the Cy Young Award was created for pitchers, so pitchers were as eligible as position players to be named MVPs. Indeed, Bobby Shantz of the Philadelphia Athletics was the 1952 American League MVP, with a record of 24–7 and a 2.48 ERA. The 1952 National League award should have gone to another pitcher from that city, Robin Roberts, who had a phenomenal 28–7 record and a 2.59 ERA for a mediocre fourth-place team with a 87–67 record. Sauer won the award even though Roberts was responsible for 32 percent of his team’s wins.
In 1958 and 1959, Ernie Banks won the MVP award even though in those two seasons the Cubs had a cumulative record sixteen games under .500 (72–82 and 74–80). The next player—and, as of this writing, the last NL player—to win the MVP award while playing on a team with a losing record was another Cub, right fielder Andre Dawson, who had 49 home runs and 137 RBIs with the 1987 Cubs, who finished sixth, which was last place in what was then the National League’s East Division.
Banks could have been a Cardinal. In the spring of 1953, one of that team’s scouts saw him playing shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League and sent a favorable report to St. Louis. The Cardinals sent out another scout for a second opinion, which was: “I don’t think he is a major league prospect. He can’t hit, he can’t run, he has a pretty good arm but it’s a scatter arm. I don’t like him.” In the annals of misjudgments, that ranks with the report on the screen test of a young Fred Astaire: “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little.”
On July 28, 1953, Hugh Wise, a scout for the Cubs, submitted the report reproduced here on this page. On the nineteenth line down, on the right, the question is how many years it will be before Banks can play in the major leagues. Wise said: “Can play now.” Forty-two days later, Banks came to the Cubs. Golenbock says that when Banks got to Wrigley Field he did not own a glove, so teammate Eddie Miksis lent him one.
The rise of the White Sox to temporary baseball supremacy in Chicago in the 1950s began in 1951, with the arrival on the South Side of Saturnino Orestes Armas Arrieta Minoso. Minnie Minoso, as he was known, was a Cuban who integrated Chicago baseball two years before Banks got to Wrigley Field. Banks came from the Monarchs in September 1953. Second baseman Gene Baker, also an African American, came to the Cubs three days later. They signed Baker partly because he was a gifted player, but also because in those days players slept two to a room on the road and it was assumed that a black player had to have a black roommate.
At that time there was, it is important to remember, uneasiness all around. When Banks had left the army, Abe Saperstein, the owner of the Harlem Globetrotters, had asked him to play with the team in a game. Banks said that when Saperstein invited him to sit down and talk about the opportunity, “I’d never sat down next to a white man, and I wasn’t sure what to do.” Different African Americans had different coping strategies for navigating the changing social terrain. Frank Robinson, arriving in the big leagues with the Cincinnati Reds shortly after Banks came to the Cubs, brought a prickly ferocity that served him well. Banks’s unshakable, even preternatural, amiability served him even better.
Banks’s signature words as a professional athlete were: “It’s a beautiful day, let’s play two!” But when he was a child in Dallas, his father had to bribe him with pocket change to get him to play catch. At Booker T. Washington High School in that city’s segregated school system, Banks was a football, basketball, soccer, and track star. In that time and place, however, athletic proficiency was not, for an African American, a reliable ticket to a professional career. So at age seventeen, Banks began playing baseball with an African American barnstorming team that paid him fifteen dollars a game. One of the greatest black players, Cool Papa Bell, spotted Banks and signed him for the Monarchs. Banks returned to them after being drafted into two years of service in the army, and in the summer of 1953, when Banks was twenty-two, the Cubs signed him and soon brought him to the North Side.
He had 35 at bats in 10 games, with 11 hits, 2 of them home runs. In 1954, he played in all 154 games and hit 19 home runs. Then came one of the most remarkable six years of slugging in major league history. His home run totals were:
1955 44
1956 28
1957 43
1958 47
1959 45
1960 41
His major league contemporaries in the second half of the 1950s included future Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson, and Duke Snider. Snider hit more home runs in the 1950s than anyone else in either league. In the second half of the decade, however, Banks hit more home runs than any of them. In 1955, the year he hit a record five grand slams, he switched to a lighter, thin-handled bat and changed the idea of what a shortstop could do at the plate.
Since the 1917 retirement of the Pirates’ Honus Wagner, the greatest shortstop in baseball history, potent hitters had rarely played that position. Before Banks, no National League shortstop had hit even 25 home runs in a season. The NL shortstop home run record was 23, by the Giants’ Alvin Dark in 1953. Only one American League shortstop, Vern Stephens of the Red Sox, a right-handed hitter taking aim at Fenway Park’s Green Monster wall down the short (310 feet) left-field foul line, had hit more: 29 in 1948, 39 in 1949, and 30 in 1950.
Then along came Banks, who, like Henry Aaron ninety miles north, used extraordinarily strong wrists to whip a light, thin-handled bat through the strike zone. “His wrists,” said a teammate, “go right up to his armpits.” Although in 1961 Banks would be moved to first base and would play more games at that position than at shortstop, he blazed the path for slugging shortstops like Cal Ripken and Alex Rodriguez. What is especially remarkable is that Banks did this when it did not make much sense for pitchers to throw him strikes.
In 1955, the most common Yankees lineup had Yogi Berra, a hard-hitting catcher, batting behind Mantle. The most common Braves lineup had future Hall of Famer Eddie Mathews (512 career home runs) batting in front of Aaron. The most common Dodgers batting order had Duke Snider batting in front of future Hall of Famer Roy Campanella, who in 1955 hit 32 of his 242 career home runs and won his third Most Valuable Player award. Who was behind Banks in the most common 1955 Cubs batting order? Ransom Jackson, a.k.a. Handsome Ransom. He hit 103 home runs in a ten-year career. Banks has been faulted for not “working the count” to get a lot of walks. But what would have been the point—to hope Jackson would drive him in? In 1959, Banks became the first National League player to win a second consecutive MVP award. In the most frequent Cubs batting order that season, he batted in front of Walt Moryn (101 home runs in eight seasons).
Bill James, in the first version of his Historical Baseball Abstract, published in 1985, ranked Banks the fortieth best player of all time. By the time James’s 2001 version appeared, he ranked Banks seventy-seventh. James cited the fact that over his career Banks hit sixty-eight more home runs at Wrigley Field than on the road. This, James says, “makes him among the most fortunate home run hitters in history.” James presumably means that Wrigley is a hitter-friendly ballpark. It certainly is when the wind is blowing out, which many people assume is the norm in the Windy City. But during the five seasons from 2008 through 2012, the wind blew in 57.4 percent of the time, it blew out 24 percent, and there were either crosswinds or no wind the rest of the time.
Were this myth a fact, it is unlikely that in 1999 the Sporting News would have ranked Banks thirty-eighth on its “Baseball’s Greatest Players” list or that he would have been elected to the thirty-member “Major League Baseball All-Century Team.”
After the Braves’ third baseman Eddie Mathews, Banks was the second infielder, other than first basemen, to hit more than five hundred home runs. It is rare in baseball history that one player has been, as Banks was for a decade, the only reason—the only baseball reason—for fans to go out to see the home team. And through it all, Banks was unfailingly cheerful. (To someone with Durocher’s sensibilitie
s, Banks was maddeningly cheerful.)
Banks’s record of five grand slam home runs in a season was broken when the Yankees’ Don Mattingly hit six in 1987. So the only major league record Banks still holds is 2,528 games played without ever appearing in postseason competition. But through it all he played hard. Look again at the 1953 scouting report on Banks. Note the right side of the ninth line down, the space for assessing “attitude.” Scout Hugh Wise said: “Very good.” Quite right. In 1958, an opposing manager, Jimmy Dykes, noted, “Without Ernie Banks, the Cubs would finish in Albuquerque.” True enough.
On March 31, 2008, the statue of Banks in his upright stance, his bat almost perfectly perpendicular to the ground, was unveiled at Wrigley Field. The inscription on the base read, “Lets play two.” Two days later, the sculptor came to Wrigley early in the morning and added an apostrophe.
Getting things not quite right is something of a tradition around Wrigley Field. Another statue outside the ballpark is of broadcaster Harry Caray, who sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during thousands of Wrigley Field seventh-inning stretches and almost always sang it wrong. He sang “take me out to the crowd” rather than “with the crowd” and “I don’t care if I ever get back” rather than “if I never get back.” It was almost as though even off-the-field errors somehow authenticated the Wrigley Field experience. Caray was one of three famous baseball people to come from the Italian section of St. Louis. The other two were catchers: Joe Garagiola, who had a better career in broadcasting than as a player, and Yogi Berra. In 1945, Caray became the radio play-by-play broadcaster for the Cardinals and, briefly, for the St. Louis Browns, too. In 1953, the Cardinals were bought by August Busch II of the Budweiser brewery dynasty. According to Golenbock, Caray was fired by the Cardinals in 1969 for a reason that never became public knowledge: