Between Sammy Sosa’s home runs, Kerry Wood’s strikeouts and Rod Beck’s high-wire act, the 1998 season will go down as one of the most intriguing in recent memory for the Cubs and their long-suffering fans.
Manager Jim Riggleman himself referred to it last week as a season filled with “exhilarating wins and excruciating losses.”
And he wasn’t exaggerating.
The atmosphere was electric in Wrigley Field on May 6 when Wood struck out 20 Astros to tie a major-league record; when Sosa’s third home run off Milwaukee’s Cal Eldred landed on the second-story porch of a house on Waveland Avenue on June 15; when the ivy chewed up a White Sox hit, took a run off the scoreboard and paved the way to a Cubs victory on June 6; and when Jose Hernandez singled home the winning run off San Francisco’s Robb Nen in the bottom of the ninth inning on Aug. 21.
Anyone who was there can tell you baseball doesn’t get much better than that.
But the atmosphere in the Cubs’ clubhouse was almost funereal when Detroit’s Bobby Higginson tied a game with a two-out, two-run, ninth-inning homer off Beck in an eventual Cubs loss at Tiger Stadium on June 24; when Beck coughed up leads on gopher balls in successive innings in a 9-8 loss in 13 innings in St. Louis on Aug. 8; and when Terry Mulholland’s throwing errors on comebackers to the mound led to extra-inning losses in Houston on Aug. 15 and in Cincinnati on Aug. 27.
Anyone who was there can tell you baseball doesn’t get much more agonizing than that.
Through all the triumphs and all the turmoil, Riggleman insisted his hair has not turned gray and his team has not given him an ulcer. Does his stomach go up and down like a bungee jumper on Sears Tower during those nailbiters?
“A little bit,” he said. “I’m churning in those situations. But for the most part you’ve got to try to separate yourself from it so you can think about what you’re going to do next.”
One main reason why Riggleman has been able to keep his stomach lining from turning inside-out is the fact that his team is loaded with veteran players who have a “been there, done that” mentality. Eleven Cubs players have playoff experience, and a handful of others have been around long enough to know that a come-from-ahead loss isn’t the end of the world and a come-from-behind win doesn’t mean the Cubs are October-bound.
“We’ve got a group of guys here who basically are not going to panic,” Mulholland said. “These guys are all true veterans, true professionals. They’re not going to give you a four- or five-inning effort. They’re going to give you nine innings every day. A veteran realizes you can only play one game at a time, and the only game that matters is that game today. You can’t be overly happy about what you did yesterday or overly down. You can only worry about today.”
But how difficult is it to throw away a game, like Tuesday night’s mind-numbing 10-9 extra-inning loss in Cincinnati?
“Well, it wasn’t real difficult to throw that game away,” Mulholland slyly replied, referring to his costly error.
That’s part of the trick. If you can poke fun at yourself after such a crushing failure, you’re halfway home. Baseball is a game played by people with very short memories.
There is no other way to play it.
“If you’re always looking forward, always looking in front of you, it’s very hard to see what’s in back of you,” Mulholland said. “That’s the approach you have to take. We’re paid way too much money to play a 162-game schedule and get caught up in a game that we may have thrown away in May, and now it’s August.”
General Manager Ed Lynch not only looked for experienced players when he set out to reconstruct a 94-loss team–he also was looking for winning players. Beck, Jeff Blauser and Mickey Morandini had all been to postseason play in recent years, as have in-season pickups Glenallen Hill and Gary Gaetti, both of whom already have made significant contributions to the Cubs’ playoff push.
How important a factor is experience at this time of year?
“It’s a big factor,” said Beck, who ranks second to Trevor Hoffman in the National League Rolaids Relief Man of the Year standings. “Experience is something you don’t know when you’re going to be able to use it. Different situations come up all the time. If you have been through it, that experience pays off. If you haven’t been in that situation, your experience is useless. The more people with experience, the more people here who know how to handle it.”
Mark Grace hasn’t been to the playoffs since 1989, but he can certainly remember what it’s like. Grace hit a sizzling .647 against San Francisco in the NL Championship Series, but couldn’t carry the Cubs in their 4-1 series loss. Felix Heredia is only 22, but he pitched in four World Series games last October, allowing no runs and only two hits in 5 1/3 innings. Mulholland and Kevin Tapani have both started a pair of World Series games, and Gaetti was the MVP for Minnesota in the 1987 ALCS against Detroit.
Morandini, who played with Mulholland on the ’93 Philadelphia club, which lost to Toronto in the World Series, said the Cubs have gone through many of the same experiences as the ’93 Phils on their way to the playoffs.
“I think we were six games ahead of St. Louis at one point that year, and we went in there and they kicked the living stuffing out of us, similar to what Houston did to us last week,” Morandini said. “But we bounced back. The veterans on the team–the Darren Daultons and Lenny Dykstras, those type of players–they didn’t put too much emphasis on those three losses.
“It sounds kind of corny, but it’s very important to take it one game at a time, and having veterans on your team who can do that.”
Tapani is the only Cub who genuinely believes that experience is overrated in stretch runs.
“I think how you’re playing or how you’re pitching is more important than the experience factor,” Tapani said. “If you’ve got experience and you’re hitting a buck-twenty and striking out all the time, experience isn’t going to do you a whole lot of good. It still comes down to playing the game.”
If Tapani is correct then, the fact that he has a World Series victory under his belt doesn’t give him any advantage at all down the stretch over a kid pitcher like Wood, who will be pitching in September for the first time in his professional career.
“No, it doesn’t,” Tapani conceded. “Not when you’re out there on the mound. It all depends on how well you perform. Kerry will be fine. He controls his emotions pretty well. Everyone has a first time. You can’t really say that just because you’ve never been there before that you’re not going to perform well. Once you’ve gotten this far, you’ve played so many games that experience is just a carryover effect.”
So then there really is only one thing that matters for the Cubs as they head into September with a chance to scratch a 90-year itch.
“As always, the team that pitches the best is going to win it,” Beck said.
