If These Walls Could Talk: Chicago Cubs: Stories from the Chicago Cubs Dugout, Locker Room, and Press Box

ISBN-13: 9781629376547

Media Type: Paperback(None)

Publisher: Triumph Books

Publication Date: 06-04-2019

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

Series: If These Walls Could Talk

Jon Greenberg is the lead Cubs columnist and founding editor-in-chief of The Athletic Chicago. He previously covered Chicago sports for ESPN Chicago and wrote nationally for ESPN.com. This is his first book.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Chasing Ghosts

When the Cubs finally did it, when they won the World Series on a warm night in Cleveland in 2016, Jim Hendry was in his living room in Park Ridge, Illinois, 21 miles northwest of Wrigley Field. Like a lot of Chicagoans, he was rooting hard for the Cubs to win. He was cheering for front office executive Randy Bush, a friend of many decades who he hired back in 2005. He was rooting for Theo Epstein, Hendry's replacement, a different kind of baseball executive, but one who Hendry always liked. And Jim Hendry was happy for Joe Maddon, who Hendry knew would've gotten absolutely roasted if the Cubs had lost Game 7. He was rooting for Ryan Dempster, clubbies Tom "Otis" Hellman and Danny Mueller, Javy Báez, Matt Szczur, and Willson Contreras.

Jim Hendry was rooting for Cubs fans everywhere. After all, he still remembers the pain of 2003.

Hendry got a ring from the Cubs and he appreciated it. The Cubs held a little ceremony for him the following season in their office complex, a large building he could only dream about during his days in the cramped confines at Clark and Addison. He brought his son John, now a college pitcher, with him. It was a moment he had always dreamed about, though Hendry imagined he'd be the one passing out the rings.

So it goes. That was the famous line by Kurt Vonnegut, who spent some time in Chicago, and while Hendry doesn't seem like a Vonnegut guy, he lives his life by that mantra. He doesn't dwell on the past.

In his first season as GM, Hendry was five outs from the World Series. The Cubs could never get back to that peak.

"We were good in '04," Hendry said. "We were good in '07 and '08. Even when the things changed and it was up for sale and it was getting so at the end you probably couldn't have won, it wasn't like I ever looked at it like, 'You know, we didn't have as much as they have now, or we had a small staff.' I mean, that's not the world I'm in.

"And so I was happy for them because I grew to appreciate the [Rickettses] very well, even though I had to go. And Theo and I have been friends since he first started in Boston. And Randy Bush and I, that's about a 40-year relationship there."

The Hendry era, from 2003 through 2011, was full of ups and downs, but it also represented a sea change for the franchise, which was finally trying to be competitive on an annual basis.

After the 2003 season ended in myth and shame — that has been well-documented enough over the years — the Cubs didn't cower. That off-season, the Cubs reloaded with Greg Maddux and Derrek Lee. But first, Hendry had to get over Games 6 and 7, Moises Alou, Steve Bartman, Alex Gonzalez, and Mark Prior.

"I think it took me a couple weeks to … you never really get over it, get over it," he said. "But it took me a couple weeks. I had to finally slap myself and say, 'Okay. Yeah. That's enough.'"

On November 26, Hendry got down to the business of remaking his team, first taking advantage of the financial straits of the team that had dealt the Cubs their heartbreak by trading a young first baseman in Hee-Seop Choi to Florida for the 28-year-old Lee.

"We loved Choi at the time and the only negative about it at the time was that [Choi] was left handed," Hendry said. "We lacked left-handed power and he was our first guy in the system we thought was going to be 'the Dude.' But I was a big Derrek Lee fan. And he was only 28. And he played great against us with the Marlins. And I had a history with his father [Leon Lee], who worked for me. At the time we made the trade he was our Pacific Rim guy."

Not only that, he was the guy who recommended signing Choi, who hailed from South Korea.

"So I knew a lot about Derrek," Hendry said. "Growing up I loved him. I thought he was going to blossom, 28 to 32 is what, I think back then, prime years for hitters. And I thought he was just on the cusp of greatness. Great athlete. Great defender. Great makeup. It was like, 'I've got to do this.' Right hand, left hand, didn't matter. And I remember the difference was Derrek Lee was making $7 million, Hee-Seop was making $300,000 or $400,000. So Andy MacPhail gave me the look like, 'Really dude. We just added $7 million and we need left-handed hitters.'"

Hendry can still laugh about how Lee hit .233 with two homers that April, while Choi hit nine and slugged .738 that month.

"So you can imagine the looks I was getting the first month or two," Hendry said. "But it worked out pretty good."

Choi would only hit six more homers the rest of the season and was later traded to the Dodgers.

Lee, of course, put together an all-time Cubs career, with 179 homers and a .298/.378/.524 slash line in seven seasons. In 2005, he led the NL in hits (199), doubles (50), batting average (.335), slugging percentage (.662), and OPS (1.080), and finished third in the MVP race for a losing club.

So in the span of four months, Hendry traded Bobby Hill, José Hernández, Matt Bruback, Choi, and Mike Nannini for Aramis Ramírez and Lee, who each manned the corner infield spots for nearly a decade and combined to hit 418 homers and drive in 1,380 runs over 2,048 games.

In early December 2003, Hendry went shopping for veteran pieces. He signed reliever LaTroy Hawkins to a closer's salary, but ostensibly in a role as a set-up man for Joe Borowski. A few days later he signed Mark Grudzielanek. On December 15, he traded one catcher, Damian Miller, to Oakland for another catcher in Michael Barrett. Three days later, he signed Todd Hollandsworth and, a day after that, reliever Kent Mercker. On January 21, he signed Ryan Dempster, who was rehabbing from Tommy John surgery.

Then, in mid-February, Hendry brought Greg Maddux home. Maddux, now 37, came up with the Cubs and won the first of his four straight Cy Young Awards with them in 1992. The Cubs foolishly screwed up his free agency and he wound up in Atlanta, which was probably for the best. Okay, definitely for the best for him, not so much for the Cubs. After winning 194 games (in 363 starts) with a 2.63 ERA with the Braves, he wasn't exactly at his peak in 2004 (he finished with a 4.02 ERA, his worst since his first full season in 1987). But the Cubs didn't need him to be.

Mark Prior and Kerry Wood were the top two pitchers, in any order, while Carlos Zambrano was the No. 3 and Maddux four. Matt Clement was slated to be the fifth starter.

In 2003, the Cubs surprised people behind Dusty Baker's leadership. Before the 2004 season, Wood was on the cover of Sports Illustrated with the headline: "Hell Freezes Over, The Cubs Will Win The World Series."

The Cubs would spend all of two nights in sole possession of first place: April 25 and April 28. The last time they would finish a day tied for the NL Central lead was May 23.

Injuries started to pop up, the kind that would decimate this group's run before it really began. In Wood's first six starts he put up a 2.52 ERA with 50 strikeouts in 422/3 innings. He was second in the NL in strikeouts to Randy Johnson.

Fifteen years later, a starter with a history of elbow problems, who had just pitched deep into the postseason, would never be allowed that kind of workload so early in the season. He pitched seven innings three times, eight innings once, and 82/3 once. But in his seventh start, May 11, he only lasted two innings, leaving with a tender right triceps that would sideline him for two months. He would make 15 more starts that season, but with a 4.14 ERA and 92 strikeouts in 952/3 innings. Wood's days as a premier starter were over, though no one knew that quite yet.

Mark Prior, meanwhile, didn't pitch that season until June 4. He had his moments — eight strikeouts in five scoreless innings in Houston on June 14 — but was otherwise very human. By the end of July his ERA ballooned to 4.69. It hit 5 after giving up seven runs to the Padres on August 10. A solid September (2.17 ERA over 371/3 innings) saved him from a truly unsightly line.

A team built on Prior and Wood looked incredible going into the season. But midway through, the cracks were evident. That season was the first full season in which I covered the team as a freelancer for both the Associated Press and MLB.com. I remember a heaviness of press conferences with no easy answers and an undercurrent of tension. Dusty Baker, a hero before that foul ball drifted into the stands in the eighth inning of Game 6 of the NLCS, was now morphing into an embodiment of the goat itself.

Pitch counts weren't quite the warning sign they are by this era, but Wood's in 2003 were alarming.

He threw 120 or more in 13 starts, including four times in September. In four playoff starts, he threw a combined 462 pitches, starting with 124 pitches in the NLDS opener.

While 100 pitches is an arbitrary number, he only went under 90 in five starts in 2003, and three of those starts were four innings or less.

Prior went over 120 pitches in nine starts and threw fewer than 95 in just one of 30 starts. He threw between 129 and 133 pitches in four of his six September outings, and the other two he threw 124 pitches and 109. In three playoff starts, he threw 368 pitches. These two threw hard, putting a bit of strain on their arms, from shoulder to forearm.

In 2003, the Cubs led the NL with starting pitchers averaging 104 pitches and a little more than 61/3 innings per start. (In 2004, the Cubs tied for the NL lead, averaging 99 pitches and more than six innings per start.)

To blame this on Baker would be too simple, as the Cubs weren't a sophisticated operation quite yet — these days front offices have a bigger say in pitching limits — but Baker was the face of the team and was sensitive to criticism, which only made it worse.

Throughout all these issues, the Cubs were safely above .500, but out of contention for the division. It would likely be Wild Card or bust. On July 31, they lost to Philadelphia to fall 101/2 games back of St. Louis, but Hendry pulled off a major trade.

Epstein and Hendry were part of a massive four-team deal with Montreal and Minnesota that launched Nomar Garciaparra to Chicago and landed the Red Sox Orlando Cabrera to play shortstop and Doug Mientkiewicz to play first base.

To jettison a big name like Garciaparra for two pluggers was a risk, but one that was backed up by analytics, a newfangled word in baseball circles, which was only just waking up to the "Moneyball" revolution that was slowly but surely taking over front offices.

While Epstein and his crew, whose team was 81/2 games back of the Yankees at the time, celebrated trading "Nomah" in Boston, for Hendry, landing Garciaparra was a coup and the move was celebrated across the city.

"Trade deadline day in '04, hell, people would have thought we were having the parade already," Hendry said in a phone conversation in December 2018.

"The deadline, to my recollection, back then was 3:00 Central," Hendry said. "And I'd worked on some things with Theo earlier in the week. And I was really hammering Nomar. And then, I think, about Thursday — I think it was Saturday, the deadline — I think at Thursday when I went to bed that night I didn't think I could get much done. My recollection was we didn't even get into a three-way until 1:00, 1:30.

"The four-way thing all happened in the last one to two hours and it came right down to the last second, to be honest. We were just wheeling and dealing. I've got to have Matt Murton too. And Omar [Minaya] had to have somebody else. And I think Terry Ryan kind of felt like he got left out. He deserved another guy because he and Theo had been working on some other deal the day before. So he thought they were all tied together and they weren't. There was some explaining to do and smoothing over after it was over too. It was just crazy. It was good. It was good."

After that deal, the Chicago Tribune Cubs beat writer Paul Sullivan wrote: "After turning the Cubs from pretenders to contenders last July by stealing Aramis Ramírez and Kenny Lofton from Pittsburgh, Cubs general manager Jim Hendry knew an encore performance would be difficult as this year's trading deadline approached. But in a move that rocked Wrigleyville Saturday afternoon, Hendry reached into his bag of tricks and pulled out Boston shortstop Nomar Garciaparra."

"The only way this could have been a more lopsided trade is if the Cubs had drunk the Red Sox's rum and carted off their women. Maybe there's some rum to be named later," Tribune columnist Rick Morrissey wrote for the August 1 edition.

The next year, in 2005, Cubs blogger Andy Dolan recapped the premature jocularity: "Do you remember where you were on July 31, 2004? Of course you do. The reason you remember is that was the day the Cubs acted like a real baseball organization and traded for a superstar. Not a washed-up superstar, but one who was only 31 years old, played the position the Cubs were weakest at, and the trade cost them pretty much nothing.

"You were giddy. You had dreams of another run through the National League playoffs. And you, and I, were wrong. Dead wrong."

Garciaparra was fine, actually. He played 43 games in August and September, slashing .297/.364/.455. But he only played 62 games in 2005 because of a nasty groin injury. His Cubs tenure was short and not particularly meaningful beyond the details of the trade itself. Naturally, he signed with the Dodgers in 2006 and made the All-Star team at 32. You can still see Cubs fans wearing worn-out Garciaparra shirseys at games.

But Cabrera and Mientkiewicz were difference-makers for the Red Sox and that trade helped cement Epstein's reputation as a gifted dealmaker at the beginning of his career. Winning the World Series in Boston certainly helps one's legacy, as you might imagine.

"I knew Theo did awfully well too," Hendry said. "Because I tried to get Cabrera for two or three weeks before that. So, it took that four-way thing at the last minute to pull it off. But we were happy with Nomar too. And he did fine for us. The next year he got hurt again and all that, but yeah, he wasn't the reason why we didn't win."

If the 2003 Cubs were a revelation, the 2004 edition was more proof that the organization was incapable of sustaining success.

The Cubs finished with 89 wins that season. They looked poised to make the postseason for consecutive seasons for the first time since 1907–08, until a 2–7 finish, which began with a walk-off loss in New York against the Mets. The Cubs lost two of three in Queens, three of four at home against Cincinnati, and two of three at home against the Braves.

"We're playing with a lot of confidence now," reliever Mike Remlinger said the day before Diaz's heroics, according to the Tribune. "No matter who we're playing, we feel good about our chances on that given day."

"We were good enough to win it again," Dempster said, 14 years later. "At least to have a chance to win it and we really struggled offensively the last 10 days of the season, especially with runners in scoring position."

Dempster was already a veteran with 156 starts under his belt when Hendry signed him in January 2004, only months after Dempster had Tommy John surgery in August. He was able to work out an enviable situation once his rehab turned into minor-league work. He would rehab in Chicago; pitch in Lansing, Michigan; and return to Chicago.

One day Mark Prior was making an injury rehab start and Dempster had a little fun. There were actual posters around the ballpark advertising Prior's appearance, "So I put up like little pictures of me. 'And also, Ryan Dempster.' I was like the follow-up act."

While he only pitched five games for the Class-A Lugnuts, it seemed like he was there for an entire season.

"Jim Hendry was hilarious," Dempster said. "He actually made up a fake press release that I made the Midwest League All-Star team because I had been with Lansing for so long. I went back and forth. I'd go pitch and then I'd come back here and throw my bullpens, then I'd go back there."

As Dempster got healthier and ready for action, he had an idea.

"Our rotation was good," he said. "It was great. Guys were throwing the ball great. And then, I think, everybody was healthy and I was like, 'What do I do?' So I called up Jim and Dusty and was like, 'Why don't you put me in the bullpen, so I can help out of the bullpen?' So then I just came over in August and pitched out of the bullpen in August and September."

The bullpen was a hot-button issue in Chicago, as it is most years. Young flame-thrower Kyle Farnsworth had a 4.73 ERA, a 1.50 WHIP, and a regular shift at the late-night bar Tai's Til 4. Borowski didn't last in the closer's role and Hawkins, typically a media favorite in most cities, was unpopular with reporters and fans.

After he got the closer's job, Hawkins asked Cubs PR to call a press conference for him in the dungeon-like media room. When everyone was there, he told the media he wasn't going to talk to them. "I can do what you guys do, [you] can't do what I do."

Hawkins, a native of Gary, Indiana, was actually a very personable guy who finished a proud 21-year career in 2015, but he bristled with the over-the-top coverage and just the regular ol' coverage in Chicago. It happens.

---

Excerpted from "If These Walls Could Talk: Chicago Cubs"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Jon Greenberg.
Excerpted by permission of Triumph Books LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

<

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Conversation on the Concourse,
1. Chasing Ghosts,
2. One Last Run at the Brass Ring,
3. The Hangover,
4. A Fan Buys the Cubs,
5. Theocracy,
6. The Future is Now,
7. A Season in the Sun,
8. Fall Classics,
9. The Hangover II,
10. Big Business at Wrigley Field,
11. Enigmatic '18,