William Wrigley died in 1932, months before the Cubs lost the World Series to the New York Yankees (the infamous "called shot" seventh game - which, by the way, never happened: Ruth was pointing two fingers to mean two strikes at the Cub dugout's bench jockeys, not to the bleachers where he intended to hit the next shot, though the home run he did hit in that at-bat was a two-strike shot to the right centerfield seats). He was 79. (It would be his son, Philip K. Wrigley, who once admitted he wasn't even close to being the baseball nut his father was yet couldn't keep his hands out of meddling in the team, who would dumb the Cubs down into sad sackdom - Philip K. was the genius behind the laughable "College of Coaches" scheme of the early 1960s, who brought in Leo Durocher to manage the team to contention and avarice enough to cost one of the best Cub teams of them all a real shot at the World Series.)

Why is it now, re-reading William Wrigley, Jr.'s commentary, that I cannot help thinking this: If baseball had some owners today with the kind of heart and mind William Wrigley had in his entire span of owning the Cubs (he bought the team in 1916; he was known to pay his players generously and then some - "I want a contented club, and no man whose salary has been clipped can be satisfied"; he treated his managers and players like men and not chattel; he paid attention to his ballpark and maintained it as necessary and often enough beyond, which may be one reason why even now old Wrigley Field is a crowd pleaser no matter how the Cubs are doing in the race), baseball today wouldn't be in even half the mess into which its baronage has driven it? O Lords of Baseball 2001, listen and heed to the wisdom of one of your ancestors!

Sequel coming - For the Love of the Money: from "Contracting a Big League Ball Team." Co-authored by Carl Pohlad & Bud Selig, with a LOT of help from the rest of the greedy little men that own teams

In fairness, it isn't strictly a question of greed on the part of all the owners. Too many of them are of the kind of corporate atmosphere in which the profit must show quick and thick, rather than steady and climbing, and have been for a very long time. Such was the reason why, for one, George Steinbrenner spent all those years in the 1980s buying up the marquee (real or alleged) free agents and letting the Yankee farm system turn into a concentration camp network for disciplining "errant" name players he'd bought, rather than replenishing the farm, trading wisely, and going strictly for the one or even two strong free agents, as he finally learned how to do in the 1990s.

Such was also the reason why the Texas Rangers ended up becoming the Texas Rangers in the first place - Bob Short had bought the second edition of the Washington Senators in the mid-1960s, but his fortune had been made in the trucking industry and he was, as a former Senators I infielder turned future Rangers manager (Whitey Herzog) described him, "a fast buck kind of guy - the exact wrong temperament for baseball...(E)mpty grandstands...weren't what he'd had in mind when he decided to spring for a major league baseball team. He wanted to remedy that, so he swung into action. Matter of fact, he took to hyping the gate like one of those guys wearing the sandwich boards at the circus...You could have called him Short Term for the way his mind worked." Hyping the gate rather than building or rebuilding the baseball team that brings them through the gate (most likely, in part, because RFK Stadium was and remains the kind of place a baseball fan can barely tolerate). And then blaming the fans for not coming out.

No wonder he thought he could get out of town at the last minute in 1971 and get away with it, after promising fans (who had already been hosed when Calvin Griffith took the Old Senators to Minnesota, after he had proven himself the man his father wasn't, hewed to his bottom line rather than the baselines which really thicken the bottom line, and let a wonderful old ballpark go kind of to seed while spending little or nothing to keep a competitive team alive in the capital) all year long he would never move the Senators. Anyone who doubted Washington would keep a team alive didn't see what happened at the last-ever home game. The New Nats were winning their last home game ever, 7-5, going to the Yankee ninth - Frank "Capital Punishment" Howard had done his usual intercontinental ballistic home run hitting in the sixth; Paul Lindblad was an out away from nailing the save. Then the fans rioted, tore up the bases and home plate and letters off the scoreboard, and the game was forfeited. But there wasn't a baseball person alive who could have blamed them.

As a long-suffering CUBS fan, I thank you for posting. The 1969 Cubs (along with the 1922 St. Louis Browns and 1927 Philadelphia A's) may very well be one of the greatest 2nd place teams of all time.

In any other year or with average competition, they would've won easily. Ron Santo's book FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME while noting the idiotic College of Coaches idea, also stated that the Wrigley family treated the team with decency and respect even in those pathetic years. It is no wonder that the era produced not only the most loyal Cubs (Ernie Banks was the best, but not only example), but the most loyal Cub fans.

Despite fielding some truly pathetic teams, they've never asked the taxpayers for a subsidy, threatened to move or done anything to ruin the character of the same ballpark built in 1914-- truly the most beautiful and classic place around to play ball.

If all Ron Santo did was "note" the College of Coaches, it would prove he is generous of recollection - the concept could have ruined his career before it even got off the ground, much as it obstructed a number of younger Cub prospects for a time.

But Santo may also have something of a selective memory. The big blow to the 1969 Cubs, in my view, was Leo Durocher, whom Santo for one idolised (and still does). There may well have been more to the Cub shortfall in 1969 than people remember or believe. How comparable to his father's generosity could Philip Wrigley have been when the following could have been written in the aftermath of the 1969 pennant race?

The Cub clubhouse was a hustler's paradise. Hectic card games went on all the time. Some of the players skipped practise in order to stay in them. From June on, there was always an agent in the clubhouse. He got the players TV spots, recording opportunities, speaking dates; he sold Cub bumper stickers, Cub tumblers, Cub T-shirts...and Cub place mats. He aroused excitement - and avarice - about the fortunes that were there for the plucking. Cub players demanded money for talking on radio or TV for more than 90 seconds; they asked $18,000 for a 30-minute special on a local television station (and didn't get it); they insisted they be cut in on the income from a book to which they planned to contribute nothing but their gift for breathing. (Astonishingly, the publisher agreed, and when the players learned that, they upped their price.) "The greed in that clubhouse," says a TV man, "was unbelievable."

But the agent also brought them problems. Ernie Banks asked him to help clean the air when one sportswriter arranged to ghostwrite an autobiography. The agent fixed everything by bringing two more publishers and two or three more writers into the deal, telling them he had a movie contract set. He didn't; his movie studio contact had been fired. And all he wanted for this contribution was 15 to 33 percent of everything. Ultimately, Banks tried to solve the problem by dumping the man who'd worked out the first book contract, which was not to his taste or his temperament. Whatever the reason - or distraction - Banks batted only .156 during the crunch, thus helping to ruin the season for publishing a book at all. (Note: In due course, Ernie Banks would make the sensible deal and write the charming Mr. Cub. - BD.)

There were those who felt that the agent's clubhouse hustling was intruding on time the Cubs would have devoted to a) gin rummy or b) baseball. But Leo did not banish him, possibly because he stood to gain as much as anybody from the agent's hustling, maybe more. For everything the agent promoted went into a common pool from which the whole team would benefit, instead of just the name players. Durocher, openly avaricious, had to see this as the best of all possible worlds. Since his own side deals...were set up before the pool came into existence, he could draw money from it without contributing anything to it...

In any case, Durocher finally restricted the card playing; all games had to be over 60 to 120 minutes before game time. But he did not banish the agent from the clubhouse until the final day of the season. The agent, Jack Childers, though that showed a lack of gratitude. "Leo and his coaches got $3,000 each...and did absolutely nothing for it."

Leo fumbled his grotesque attempts to unite the ball club against outsiders before its internal tensions tore it apart...his umpire-baiting worked against the Cubs. They were the victims of some outrageously bad calls, and there was no place to turn; the league had become polarised against Durocher and the Cubs. Once, Leo was overruled by the league president, Warren Giles, on a protest involving a play that cost the Cubs a run and conceivably a ball game. (It was a judgment call on how many bases a runner could advance on a ball thrown into the stands.) Less than two weeks later, exactly the same play developed again, but with the team situation reversed, so that the Cubs - on the basis of the...precedent - would save a run and perhaps a game. "They can't have it both ways," Durocher crowed of the umpires' decision. He was wrong. They could and they did. Not only that, the league office upheld them when Durocher protested. Whether or not Leo ever united the Cubs against the umpires, he certainly united the umpires against the Cubs...

...(H)e brought an almost intolerable pressure on (his players). The first step was to withdraw from any discussion with any newsmen...The second step was to inspire doubts and anxieties in his players if they dared to answer questions...That they were reeling from fatigue was no secret. But they didn't want to talk about it, for Durocher's $500 fine edict had squeezed them neatly in the middle. (This started when he learned pitcher Ken Holtzman was afraid to admit whenever he did feel tired; when Durocher learned about it, he fined Holtzman and threatened to fine anyone else who lied to him about being tired. Holtzman went from 10-1 by June to 1-5 down the pennant stretch under the Durocher-inspired pressure. - BD.) If they lied about being tired, it would cost $500; if they admitted it and dropped out of the lineup, they risked the manager screaming "quitter" at them (This happened, in fact, to Holtzman. - BD.)...

The fact is that when it counted most, Don Kessinger at short and Glenn Beckert at second were letting ground balls by them that they'd have gobbled up earlier. And what Santo says about it now is, "Next season I'm sure Leo will rest the regulars from time to time."

...The manager had a refuge, his office. He could close his door, he could lock it. But when, inevitably, the reporters came to the players, they had no place to hide. They didn't worry over the kind of answers to give - most were cliches anyway - but over what Durocher would think about those who gave them. He can read, and remember. Anybody who talked to a reporter could go on Leo's bleep list. The anxiety grew until some of the players were thinking more about how to handle the press than how to handle a ground ball. Finally, they appointed a committee of Ron Santo and Phil Regan, Durocher's favourite relief pitcher, to go to the manager and ask him to take some pressure off by resuming normal relations with the press. Leo agreed. He'd just come from an all-night session with several reporters at which a truce of sorts could be arranged. It was, of course, too late. The Cubs had collapsed...

When the unbelievable flop became fact, Durocher was quick to spot the reason. The players, he said on his own pregame radio show, "quit" on him. It was a harsh, unjust judgment. Indeed, Leo himself struggled to qualify it. But the damage was done. The players sensed that Leo was shifting the responsibility for the team's failure as far away from himself as was possible. One Cub regular, who'd been taken from the lineup for a much-needed rest once the race was pretty much over, insisted on going back into the lineup. He didn't want to take the rap, he said, for being one of the quitters.

- William Barry Furlong, from "How Durocher Blew The Pennant," Look, 1970.

the early 1960s, who brought in Leo Durocher to manage the team to contention and avarice enough to cost one of the best Cub teams of them all a real shot at the World Series

I remember those days... Ernie Banks, Jim Hickman, Glenn Beckert, Ron Santo, Randy Hundley, Fergie Jenkins, Rick Monday...

Its no wonder I have survived as a Republican. I grew up as a Cub fan. We are used to losing.

"Frank "Capital Punishment" Howard had done his usual intercontinental ballistic home run hitting..."

Before Frank was a Senator, he patrolled right field for the great Dodgers teams of the early '60s, much to our everlasting amusement at his antics. It was often thought and said that one day he would actually swing at a pickoff throw attempting to catch Maury Wills.

Your sense of his strength is hardly an exageration--only Mark McGwire has ever had his strength. Indeed, with today's parks and pitching, ol' Frank might have gone for 70, too.

But his strength was in evidence on the field, also. I saw him go into the right-field corner at Dodger Stadium after a ball, whirl and heave it toward third base to catch the batter--only to have it sail over third and all the way into the tenth row. It was surely a heave of 450', easily the most awesome sight I have seen on a diamond (that is, before Derek Jeter's play).

The Senators II (a.k.a. the New Nats) were built almost like the ill-fated Red Sox of the late 1950s-early 1960s: a host of bombardier batsmen (for the New Nats, think also of people like Mike Epstein) and not such terrific pitching to hold the other guys' bats back. Various clubs around the league made it a kind of parlour game to line up for measuring the Senators' home runs.

The size of the park really wouldn't make a difference on a hitter like Frank Howard. (It was hitches in his swing, not strength or power, which kept him from making more hash in the hideous lay of the Los Angeles Coliseum or in otherwise pitcher-friendly Dodger Stadium than he did; he was traded in due course because the Dodgers needed another lefthanded pitcher in the event that the freshly-diagnosed arthritic elbow would reduce Sandy Koufax to a once-a-week pitcher...or to a premature retirement. Claude Osteen ended up becoming a terrific number three pitcher in the Dodger rotation until Koufax finally did retire after 1966.) To borrow a line George Will once used about McGwire, Frank Howard could hit rice pudding 500 feet. The real secret of the home run hitting of the last several years probably has more to do with the pitching - and especially more to do with the idiosyncrasies of the umpires' strike zones - than with the lay of the new ballparks. The new ballparks are precisely what baseball needs - individualistic, idiosyncratic fields, fan-friendly stands and styles, baseball-oriented rather than football pots into which baseball is shoehorned like the abominable cookie-cutters (which began, oddly enough, with the New Nats' RFK Stadium; "The Redskins," says ex-presidential speechwriter Carl Smith, "loved the Senators' new park). The sooner the rest of the cookie cutters go the way of the Kingdome (I only wish I'd had the honour of pushing the plunger and blowing that eyesore to smithereens!), the better.

B.D., please ping me on any baseball threads you post. I learn so much.

It was surely a heave of 450', easily the most awesome sight I have seen on a diamond (that is, before Derek Jeter's play).

I have seen a film of that throw. For distance, it's awesome. But Willie Mays's famous throw in the 1954 World Series makes his seem like a peg from second to third. What people forget about The Catch is that Mays whipped around and fired a strike from 465 feet or so in centerfield and hit the cutoff man to hold a baserunner. (Want an idiosyncratic outfield? The farthest reach of the Polo Grounds was 480 feet to dead center, below the clubhouses elevated above the back of the outfield.)

It's a deal, AD! I'll also ping you on any baseball books I write - since I have begun work on such a book.

Wow! Gimme! You MUST let me know when it is published so I can send some royalties your way. In fact, you must publish a post to let other freepers have the chance to buy it. That is great! Do you do sportswriting for a living or do you just hope to make it a lucrative hobby?

Ordinarily, I am a journalist. (I lost my last job in March; I was fool enough to reject an assignment which had breach of ethics and conflict of interest all over it, for which integrity I was rewarded with my head on a plate - I had been working for a business-to-business publisher at the time.) I have done predominantly hard news for small daily newspapers, radio, and trade publishing. When I could find no new full-time work in journalism by last August, I hired on as a security officer and have since held a post which puts me into a nice, isolated shack eleven hours a day (nice overtime if you can get it), with two desks, a superb view of my assigned grounds, and all the room I need to write in when I need to write.

In my newspaper and radio days, I did write periodic columns and on-air commentaries about sports and baseball in particular, but I was never a full-time sportswriter. In part because I did a lot of soul searching since March, remaking and rethinking just about my entire working life's thought, I came to realise that I took the proverbial wrong turn at Albuquerque when I set off on my career following my Air Force hitch in the 1980s.

I had wanted originally to be a baseball writer. Don't mistake me - I still love news and politics, and I always will, but I think I might better do to write of such things only occasionally and only when I have something to say of it. Call it burnout if you like. And as God is my witness, it was while writing an essay about the Yankees' unexpected loveability in the wake of 11 September, in which I alluded among other things to the Red Sox and the Cubs in the World Series (it happened for real, folks - 1918; the Red Sox beat the Cubs for their last Series win to date; the Cubs won their last Series a decade earlier), that I decided I was going to find a way to get back to where I once belonged, if you'll pardon my cribbing a line from the Beatles. (The essay on the Yankees, "Hell Freezes Over: The Yankees Become Loveable. Sort Of," was published on EtherZone.com late October and I also posted it here, one of the only times I have ever posted one of my own published writings here; I usually don't do that sort of thing.)

The allusion in that essay to the Cubs and the Red Sox set me to thinking that it is almost the centennial of each team's last known World Series win. Hence, the subject I have chosen for my first book, which I expect will take me at least a year and possibly more to research and write. But unless someone makes me an offer I absolutely cannot refuse, I cannot see myself as anything other than writing freelance from now on, with the aim of being able to make my living entirely as a freelance writer within three to five years. Better late than never. "You know, I think we live two lives," said Iris to Roy Hobbs in The Natural. "The one we learn from, and the one we live with what we learned." I think I'm beginning to live the second life, and it has a long, long way to go.

"Want an idiosyncratic outfield? The farthest reach of the Polo Grounds was 480 feet to dead center, below the clubhouses elevated above the back of the outfield."

Actually, you understate the case substantially. The Polo Grounds' fans exited after the game by walking across the field and out through center field through an opening just to the left of straight-away center--make it a point to notice the next time you see film of Willie's catch. So really a ball just left of dead center could roll perhaps 600' or so. Indeed, it is this feature of the fans on the field that caused Merkle's boner--he aborted his run toward second base and veered straight off the field in order to avoid the fans.

By the way, the Giants' relief pitcher, who was brought in specifically to face Vic Wertz and then lifted immediately, had this comment upon returning to the dugout after Mays' splendid catch 460' from the plate: "Well, I got my man!"

I remember the Polo Grounds well (the place was so old and rambling by then that I remember hearing some people refer to the park as the Polio Grounds) - I saw my first Mets game in the Polo Grounds (they played there in 1962-1963). I remember the overhand, too. I was thinking of the dimension painted on the post which supported that upper clubhouse. Mays actually hauled in that catch in front of the bleacher fence, which sat about a good fifteen feet in front of that support post. (I have a lovely painting of the catch in a splendid book, which catches about as close a view of Mays with the ball about to hit his glove in front of that bleacher fence.)

I also remember Casey Stengel coming out in full uniform to hector the crowd coming into the park: Come an' see my amazin' Mets. I been in this game a hundred games and I see new ways to lose I never knew were invented yet. He got a huge round of applause for that one.

The allusion in that essay to the Cubs and the Red Sox set me to thinking that it is almost the centennial of each team's last known World Series win.

The Cubs and the Red Sox, the Cubs and the Red Sox, everyone always talks about the Cubs and the Red Sox. However, those are not the two teams that have gone the longest without a World Series championship. That distinction would go to the Cubs and the White Sox. Cubs, 1908; White Sox, 1917. Considering that the city of Chicago has had two chances to win the championship of baseball every year since 1917 (with the exception of the 1994 strike year), that makes a grand combined total of 166 seasons--166!--without a baseball championship. This is a far, far longer drought than any other city has ever endured in any sport.

Since the Red Sox last won the World Series (1918), counting the years the Braves also were in Boston (through 1952), the city of Boston has had 116 chances to win the baseball championship. That's still 50 seasons behind Chicago! (Of those 166 seasons, I lived in the city of Chicago for 64 of them, 1953-84, before moving elsewhere. But the scars stay with me.)

The Cubs and the Red Sox, the Cubs and the Red Sox, everyone always talks about the Cubs and the Red Sox. However, those are not the two teams that have gone the longest without a World Series championship.

No, but they are the two teams which seem to have the greatest grip upon baseball romantics for their protracted Series droughts. (Part of it could well be, too, that each team was owned for a considerable amount of time by men who, unlike most of their peers or successors, really did love the game and let their players and managers know it - and also the fans. I mean, does anyone really have nostalgic feelings toward Charlie Comiskey?) Fair or unfair, it is probably so that the 1919 World Series fix and subsequent scandal kept the White Sox from attaining anything close to the romantic cachet the Cubs and the Red Sox have attained. (A very good book could probably be written as well about the 1919 Cincinnati Reds, who hold the dubious distinction of having been so inept for a pennant winner that they damn near blew the 1919 World Series to a team which was trying to hand it to them on a platter!)

I remember those days... Ernie Banks, Jim Hickman, Glenn Beckert, Ron Santo, Randy Hundley, Fergie Jenkins, Rick Monday... Its no wonder I have survived as a Republican. I grew up as a Cub fan. We are used to losing.

LOL! I use a similar line about being a Lutheran minister: Being a Cubs fan taught me the Theology of the Cross!

How well I remember those same years with the Cubs! I was born and raised on the north side of the city, just a few miles from Wrigley Field. I started going to Cubs games--a lot!--around 1961, when I was eight years old. I followed the Cubs intensely through about 1974, when I graduated from college. (The Durocher years were '66-'72, btw.) I went to Wrigley Field--it was cheap in those days for a kid to attend--basically every day I was not in school during those years (all home games were day games), and I saw most of the away games on WGN. I knew everything about the players you mention: their faces, their voices, their uniform numbers, their batting stances, the names of their wives and kids--those players were like part of our family.

I moved away from Chicago in 1984, but I still follow baseball and try to keep up with what the Cubs are doing. (I finally got cable this summer, just in time to see the Cubs collapse. Shades of '69--except this year's team was nowhere near as good as the '69 team, which should have won.)

I should add, to my post #17, that there could be other factors mitigating against the White Sox attaining the Cubs' romantic cachet. Rightly or wrongly. Considering that notorious Mayor Richard Daley was an unshy White Sox fan and hardly the most popular politician in the land, and that perhaps the most popular newspaper columnist in the city's history, Mike Royko, was equally unshy a Cub fan. Also considering that, for better or worse, Bill Veeck repulsed as many people as he appealed to in the two terms in which he owned the White Sox, even though he did build pennant winners both times (the legendary Go-Go Sox of the 1950s, who took the 1959 pennant; and, it was Veeck who built, before illness and finances forced him to sell the team the second time by 1980, the White Sox who took the American League West in 1983). And, don't underrate the power of the Cubs having had an extremely influential fan in Washington - George F. Will, whose earliest syndicated columns included the ones mashed memorably into a single essay, "The Chicago Cubs - Overdue," that got wide circulation - and an extremely influential, if loved/hated manager for a time named Leo Durocher.

I don't plan to ignore or undermine either the White Sox or the old Boston Braves in my projected volume, but history has its claim as well and, for better or worse, the White Sox and the Braves haven't quite the cachet of the Cubs or the Red Sox. (Though there is probably a terrific book to be written about the 1914 Miracle Braves and their legendary manager, George Stallings - who really did say, as he lay dying, in his final known utterance, "Oh, those bases on balls!")

Oh, I agree with you. The White Sox do not have the hold on the imagination that the Red Sox do. I think there are several reasons for this:

1) The White Sox have always been overshadowed by the Cubs--even when the Sox have had the better team. Here's why: a) In the years when WGN-TV carried both the Cubs and the Sox, they broadcast almost all the Cubs games, but not nearly as many Sox games. And in recent years, the WGN superstation has carried Cubs games all across the country. b) The Cubs have always had the nicer park. c) The Cubs' rivalry with the Cards has made the Cubs a regional team, not just a city team. The Sox fan base has historically been just the south side of the city and northwest Indiana.

2) The Red Sox get more attention than the Pale Hose because of Boston's proximity to New York: the Boston/New York media and literati (e.g., the Ken Burns' Baseball series), the rivalry with the Yankees, etc.

3) The Red Sox have had better teams, contending teams, more often than the White Sox (especially over the last 40 years), and at times they have come tantalizingly close. The Red Sox have had four pennant winners--1946, '67, '75, '86--since their last championship (1918), whereas the White Sox (since 1917) have had only two, 1919 and 1959.