Posted by
Ed Lilly on Sunday, October 05, 2008 2:58:49 AM
Growing up as a fan of the Cubs and Bears in the 70s and 80s, I saw a lot of bad teams and awful players. But I was fortunate enough to still be in high school and then college when da Bears put together a juggernaut team under Mike Ditka and won a Super Bowl. An actual world championship for a Chicago team in my lifetime! Amazing!
Of course, at the same time that Bears team was rising to prominence in the NFC, the Cubs exploded into a contender in 1984 with a team put together masterfully by Dallas Green. Cubs fans well remember the meltdown that fall in San Diego, but it seemed going into the playoffs the Cubs had a legitimate shot to go to the World Series at last. Sure, it would have been tough facing the Tigers that year, but anything can happen. The sense was very real that the 1984 Cubs team was something special that might finally break through and win it all.
In 2003, the year of the Bartman incident, there seemed to be a similar vibe about the Cubs. They looked like a team that was pretty well put together with pitching, defense and hitting. They were a handful of outs from the World Series. Still, it didn't happen.
Other Cubs playoff teams of the past 25 years seem, at least in retrospect, to be more like this year's model. Good regular season clubs that fell apart in a hurry in the post-season. They never managed to take the fans to the edge of getting to the World Series, and so the disappointment in their failing is somewhat muted.
Perhaps the 1989 squad's collapse against the Giants was a bit more painful than 1998 or the past 2 years, as the '89 team seemed to have some toughness, character and leadership that the later teams never did. In '89 there was Sandberg, Dawson, Maddux, Sutcliffe, and a young Mark Grace playing their hardest for Don Zimmer.
The '98 team 'won' the wild card behind a steroid fueled Sammy Sosa and flamed out for Jim Riggleman.
I was actually excited when the Cubs hired Dusty Baker as manager. While he never won a World Series, he seemed to get the most out of his teams in San Francisco, so I thought he might be the kind of guy who could somehow catch lightning in a bottle on the North Side, and he almost did in 2003.
Now having seen Lou Piniella preside over six consecutive post-season thumpings, and that the team exercised its option to pick up an additional year on Lou's contract just before the playoffs began, it's hard to see how Lou ever gets even as close to the World Series with the Cubs as Baker did.
Maybe I'll be surprised and the Cubs will find a way to again be competitive in the NL Central (ugh, how I hate all these new divisional groups), but given the way teams so often have difficulty in winning year after year, I think it's more realistic to think that injuries, disappointment, and the rise of other teams will combine to bring another season of misery to Chicago next summer. It may even be so ugly that Piniella is no longer managing the team by the end of the year.
I can't imagine who the Cubs ownership, whoever it may be by then, would try to bring in to right the ship if that's the case. Conventional wisdom is that baseball teams alternate between tough guys who ride their teams hard and are hated by the players and "players' managers" who make almost everyone on the roster happy and are beloved by the team.
I've lost track of where the Cubs are on this supposed cycle. Regardless whether it's Lou or someone else who next manages to take the Cubs to the post-season, I'll be curious to see how the team is put together. On paper, this year's squad seemed like it should have captured my heart and had me believing that, yes, after 100 years everything had finally come full circle and we were on the verge of a World Series title.
But I never believed in this team. More to the point, I never loved this team. There was never anyone on the team that made me think they would do anything to win a title. The '84 squad had those kinds of players, and I loved them for it.
It's probably more my perception than anything, but with the possible exception of Mark DeRosa, I don't see any "gamers" on the current Cubs roster. They have plenty of solid players on paper. But none that seem to exude leadership or appear to be great teammates that you would love to have in your locker room to make a pennant run.
So we end another baseball season with that familiar, optimistic cheer: "Go Bears!"