The Mouth That Roared (30 page)

“We are trying to work out our problems and stay and work in peace with the Wrigley Field community and the people of Chicago,” I told reporters.

We had struck out in the courts, the legislature, the court of public opinion, and with Chicago aldermen. Other than some buddies at Murphy’s Bleachers, a bar that wouldn’t have minded nighttime patronage at their Sheffield Avenue address, we had few allies.

I asked some aldermen to set up a town meeting in Wrigleyville, so that I could take my point of view to the people in an interactive, face-to-face setting.

A couple hundred people showed up to hear me give my old speech about how the beloved 1969 team faded in the final weeks of the season because of the wear and tear of so many day games. I talked about how TV was taking over the game and that the Cubs would lose playoff games if Wrigley didn’t get lights.

I loved day baseball, I told them. It’s what made Wrigley Field special. But Major League Baseball was trying to impose its will upon us. Under the circumstances, a limited slate of night games seemed the only reasonable option.

“We have to live like everybody else in the game of baseball, or we’re not going to be able to win championships,” I told them.

Soon I was drowned out by booing, screaming, and hollering.

“They’re going to piss on my lawn!”

“The dogs will bark all night!”

“Lights will be a pain in the ass!”

I put up with the heckling for a few minutes. Then I restated my point, a bit more firmly this time.

“I’ve told you what I think is necessary to build a championship team, and we’ll do everything we can for the neighborhood. But I’m tired of only hearing about what’s negative about lights. The positives are very simple. If you want a championship baseball team in Chicago, you better put lights in there.”

Okay, it was a little more profane than that, but that was the gist of it.

The leader of the neighborhood group, Nancy Kaszak, told reporters that our disappointing season had clouded my judgment.

“One of the things I like about Dallas is that he always speaks from his gut, and I think like the rest of Chicago, he’s just upset about the losses,” she said.

For Nancy’s information, I was perfectly capable of being upset at more than one thing at a time.

*

A lot of people in Chicago wanted to wring my neck. But at least I had a pretty amicable relationship with the local media. I think the writers liked my bluntness and the opportunity to verbally mix it up with me. I got along particularly well with
Chicago Tribune
columnist Jerome Holtzman. Jerry and I had one important thing in common: we both could be antagonizing as hell. He knew I wouldn’t lie to him, and I knew he’d research the hell out of a story before having it published. He understood the ins and outs of the lights situation and did a thorough job representing all sides in his column. Jerry also got in the occasional jab at me. When asked by a reader in 1985 whether I should make a trade for a “take-charge guy,” Jerry responded, “Dallas has already made a half-dozen deals for take-charge guys, and, from the looks of things, they’re taking charge of fourth place.” A sentence like that made me feel like I was back in Philadelphia.

Twenty-five years after leaving Chicago, I still get calls from reporters there. Usually it’s for a story or just to yak about baseball. But our personal bond also prompted a lot of them to drop me a line when my granddaughter was killed in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011.

I may have had trouble convincing some people that I had the right vision for the team, but at least I felt Chicago’s baseball writers gave me a fair shake.

*

As Jerry pointed out in his column, many of our players had down years in 1985. Our fourth-place finish was doubly disappointing coming on the heels of a division-winning season and a promising start in ’85.

We had looked forward to having Sutcliffe for a full season, but a pulled hamstring meant he wound up starting just as many games in 1985 as he did in a partial season with us in 1984, posting only half as many wins. Eckersley was the only pitcher on our staff to reach double-digit victories. And only two players, Ryne Sandberg and Keith Moreland, reached the 80-RBI mark, compared to six players in ’84.

It was a rough season in many ways. In August, a story broke linking Eckersley and Steve Trout to cocaine use earlier in the 1980s, before either joined the Cubs. We had heard rumors that Eck and Trout had dabbled in drugs when we traded for them. I was confident they were now clean.

The issue of drugs in baseball weighed on my mind, however. I didn’t think it was a rampant problem, but I still supported mandatory drug testing for all players. I felt it was the only way to prove that drugs hadn’t in fact taken over the game—at least not yet.

For the time being, I had more pressing problems to deal with. Keeping the team intact in ’85 didn’t work out.

In August, when it became apparent we wouldn’t compete for another division crown, I released Bowa, who was in a seesaw battle with Dunston for the starting shortstop job. It was a tough decision. Bowa and I had waged some highly publicized battles in Philadelphia, but my respect for his work ethic and passion prompted me to bring him to Chicago. He was an undrafted free agent out of high school in 1965 who became a starting major league shortstop for 16 seasons. In the course of his career, he collected more than 2,000 hits and won a pair of Gold Gloves. I could only hope that Dunston would have as impressive a career.

The release of Bowa signified larger changes for the team.

“Every effort will be made to bring in new blood to increase the competitive spirit,” I said after a six-hour meeting with manager Jimmy Frey and our coaches and scouts during the final week of the season.

Dunston represented a significant part of my hopes for the on-field future of the team. I just wished there had been more promising news about a major off-the-field matter.

As the season drew to a close, the Illinois Supreme Court unanimously upheld the ban on night games at Wrigley Field. In addition to trying to help the team win again, I also had to deal with the prospect of the Cubs moving out of Wrigley.

And to think just a year earlier we were celebrating a division championship and the dawning of a joyous and successful new era on the north side of Chicago.

*

A down season forced me to get tough. I issued an ultimatum to all Cubs players eligible for free agency: if you put yourself on the open market, we’re done with you. That convinced Gary Matthews, Scott Sanderson, and Chris Speier to bypass free agency and re-sign with us.

I then traded for Manny Trillo, one of my favorite players from my Phillies days. I managed Manny at Class-A and again in Philadelphia. He wasn’t a vocal guy, but he went about his business in a professional way. In the twilight of his career, Manny wasn’t going to have a major impact on our team, but his versatility as an infielder would allow Jimmy to give third baseman Ron Cey and second baseman Ryne Sandberg an occasional day off.

The only other significant addition to the roster was Jerry Mumphrey, a veteran outfielder who made the 1984 All-Star team with the Astros. We picked him up in exchange for a young outfielder named Billy Hatcher. They were similar players, but I hoped Mumphrey’s experience would help us more in the short term.

Some people expected us to go after Kirk Gibson, the best available free agent that off-season. Gibson had helped lead Detroit to a World Series title in 1984 and put up even better numbers in ’85. Rumors of our interest in Gibson persisted until I spoke up and quashed the speculation. “We’ve told Kirk’s agent that we were going to the winter meetings with the hopes of making a couple of trades, and we made the deals,” I said. “We told his agent we weren’t interested in other people’s free agents.”

The second part of that quote got the attention of Marvin Miller and the players union.

A month after Gibson resigned with the Tigers for almost twice his previous salary, the players union threatened to file a grievance alleging owners were acting in collusion to prevent free agents from signing deals with anyone but their current teams.

It is true that major league teams had become acutely aware of the escalating costs of free agency. And we took steps to try and keep those costs down. We didn’t call it collusion, because there was no overt conspiring to keep player salaries at a certain level. As baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth correctly noted, we were simply using common sense. And that meant sharing information with each other, a well-established practice among player agents. The opportunity to see other teams’ ledger books was a real wake-up call. As I told the
Chicago Sun-Times
in 1986, “It was like the first chance to get to see somebody else’s checkbook. We looked [at the books] and said, ‘Ugh.’”

As a result, we general managers made a gentleman’s agreement not to pursue other teams’ free agents. That practice eventually landed us in court.

I had developed serious concerns about lucrative, long-term free agent deals.

“The facts are there,” I said at the time. “After a guy signs a multiyear, guaranteed contract, the next year he breaks down. Well, that’s scary. Especially when you’re not talking about nickel-and-dime guys. You’re talking millions of dollars. You can’t come out of that decently.”

Before the 1986 season, major league teams shrunk rosters from 25 to 24 players, a move allowed by our contract with the union. That only increased tension with Marvin and his gang.

One thing was certain. The hostility between management and the union wasn’t going away.

*

I believed we could make waves again in the National League East. We still had the core of players who won a division title in 1984, and they all had another year of seasoning under their belts.

Much would be said later about how I let the team grow old, but that was another example of second-guessing. Age shouldn’t have been an issue in 1986. Our oldest starting pitcher, Eckersley, was only 31. And five of our everyday position players were in their twenties.

To help recapture the intangibles that had turned us into winners two seasons earlier, I hired former Cubs great Billy Williams as our hitting coach. I figured it had to be a positive influence for our guys to have a legend like Billy around the clubhouse. I also invited former Gold Glove outfielder Jimmy Piersall to work with our guys during spring training.

Jimmy and I had a history. Back in 1963, he showed me up by running the bases backward after taking me deep for his 100
^th
major league home run. At the time, I was pissed off by his antics. I stalked him as he rounded the bases, swearing up a storm. But I came to like Jimmy. More importantly, he had been one helluva defensive outfielder. I knew he could teach our guys a thing or two.

The tough love carried over into spring training. I set weight limits for players, most notably Rick Sutcliffe. I asked Sut to shed 20 pounds. He complied and reported to camp complaining that his clothes didn’t fit him anymore.

As good as we had been in 1984, it wasn’t 1984 anymore. In press interviews, I took aim at Ron Cey, Bobby Dernier, Gary Matthews, and Jody Davis, hoping to light a spark under them.

I also spoke candidly about Jimmy Frey. “In 1984, Jimmy was a great manager,” I told reporters. “In 1985, he was a lousy manager. We won in ’84. We lost in ’85. That’s what managing is all about, I guess.”

I was mostly referring to the public perception that a manager is only as good as his team’s record. It’s always been that way, and it always will be. If our team hadn’t been so banged up in 1985, we might have made another playoff run. To lay the blame on Jimmy was unfair. I was simply stating he had a chance in 1986 to show he could help make us winners again.

The press jumped all over my comment and repeatedly asked Jimmy to respond. When we got off to a lousy start, losing eight of our first 10, the Chicago sports pages were suddenly filled with stories about impending managerial changes in the Windy City. Tony La Russa was about to lose his job with the White Sox, and according to the articles, Jimmy was next.

*

We learned in May that if we won the division in 1986, our home playoff games would be played in Busch Stadium, the National League East ballpark (with lights) located closest to Chicago, not to mention the home field of our fiercest rival.

When asked to comment on Major League Baseball’s decision, all I could really muster was a “told ya so.” Nobody in the Cubs front office got too worked up about the news. It had a definite silver lining, in fact. We knew it gave us leverage to renew discussions about getting lights at Wrigley Field. “Chicago doesn’t do anything until it’s a crisis,” I said.

By the time of the announcement on May 19, when we were already 10½ games out, it was evident these hypothetical playoff games wouldn’t take place, not in 1986 anyway. On June 12, we were 17 games behind the division-leading Mets.

Jimmy hadn’t recaptured the magic of 1984. It was time for him to go.

After the firing, third-base coach Don Zimmer came to me and said he could work with whomever succeeded Jimmy as manager. But I concluded that he and Jimmy, who had been high school classmates in Cincinnati, were tighter than he and I were. I felt it might be disruptive to keep Donnie around, so I let him go, too. I regretted that decision almost immediately. On his way out the door, Donnie told reporters, “I don’t think God could have come down and made this team win.”