Whatever else I may have failed to accomplish in life, one memorable day, back in 1977, I was Cub Reporter for a Day.
That year, the Cubs led the National League East from May to August before fading badly and finishing fourth. Rick Reuschel was the best of their starting pitchers. Bruce Sutter ruled the bullpen with his incredibly unhittable split-finger fastball. Bobby Murcer, Bill Buckner, Larry Biittner, Jerry Morales, and others supplied big hits.
(As an aside, the Cub went from 25 games over .500 at one point in late June to an exactly .500 finish—81 and 81. No other major-league team has ever failed to finish about .500 in a season where they were 25 games over at any time—but that’s the kind of manager that Herman Franks was.)
As a donation to a cancer charity, the Cubs PR department offered the gift of being Cub Reporter for a Day. The Reporter would do things real reporters do—eat in the press cafeteria, go on the field for batting practice, visit the clubhouse, watch the game from the press box. Somehow, there’s always money to be found for the most important things, so my brother and I set out to make the highest bid for this item—and we were delighted when we were informed that we had won the prize.
We reported to Wrigley Field’s Clark Street entrance promptly at 11 a.m. on July 28, as we had been instructed to do. We were met by a hearty, bespectacled fellow named Buck Peden, who was the Cubs’ PR director and our keeper for the day. He looked surprised to meet two grad students in their 20s; he probably expected two perky kids half our age. But Buck rolled with it.
He first took us to the Pink Poodle, the press hangout and dining room, where we lunched on barbecued beef sandwiches and were introduced to several live, honest-to-goodness, for-real reporters. We met Lou Boudreau, who was concerned about Buck getting an autographed ball to a kid. (We had always suspected that Lou was a genuinely nice guy.) We met Jack Brickhouse. Jack had plans to have Phil Donahue, then a rising national talk-show star, in the booth that day, and irritably asked Buck if he had “taken care of that [expletive] Donahue thing.” (We had always suspected that Brickhouse was a phony and a jerk.)
After hobnobbing with our fellow scribes, it was down to the field to gad about the batting cage while the Cubs took batting practice. Funny the things one remembers: I recall now how perfectly cut the grass was, how the famous scoreboard towered above all else from field level, how the southwest wind blew the infield dirt out toward the bleachers. Around the cage, the unaffected Biittner was friendly, asking us what *we* did for a living. Cubs coach “Peanuts” Lowery took time out from hitting fungoes to chat with us as if we, too, were baseball lifers like himself. Morales and Jose Cardenal were cool, appraising us as interlopers, I think.
Then Buck walked us toward the left-field corner and led us into the Cubs clubhouse, which one entered in those days through a door just outside the foul pole. We had heard that the clubhouse was small by major-league standards, but it was even smaller than I expected. (It has since been remodeled and greatly enlarged.) Buck brought us into the locker room. A pre-game schedule was taped to the wall, telling what time batting practice began, and infield practice; when to change into game uniforms, etc. Players’ names were written on cardboard nameplates mounted above the lockers, which were actually small dressing cubicles. There was something endearingly hamische about the whole set-up.
I remember seeing spacey Cubs starting pitcher Bill Bonham sitting in the training room, in a T-shirt, shorts, and leggings, eating one of those cheese-and-crackers things. Reuschel and pitcher Pete Broberg, the old Washington Senator who was briefly with the Cubs that season, sat on a bench, chatting. Murcer, lolling in a rocking chair, was listening to country music, just as I had read he did. And then there was Sutter, clad only in a jockstrap, looking anything but imposing with his pasty skin and pop-bottle physique.
Then it was up to the press box to watch the afternoon’s game against the Reds. The press box was then part of the mezzanine that hung from the upper deck, between home and third. We sat on card-table chairs set up in the first two rows, just to the left of home plate.
That was the setting where we met, among others, a Runyonesque old-timer, Jimmy Enright, an ex-reporter who served as the Cubs’ p.a. announcer. He seemed to think we were real reporters on our first assignment, and said, “Well, you got a great day for it.”
Indeed we had. It was a warm summer day, with the wind blowing straight out, the kind of day that can produce slugfests at Wrigley Field. That day, it produced one of the most exciting and memorable games in Cubs history. Barely were we in our seats when the Reds scored six first-inning runs off Ray Burris. But the Cubs came back immediately to get four of their own, and the race was on. The Cubs led 7-6 after two; the Reds then retook the advantage. The Cubs tied the game at 10 after four innings, but then the Reds pulled away again. Three runs in the eighth and one in the ninth got the Cubs into a 14-14 tie and sent the game into extra innings. The Reds scored a run in the top of the 12th, but the Cubs answered minutes later with a home run by catcher George Mitterwald.
Both teams began to run out of players, as often happens in this kind of game. Murcer, the Cubs right fielder, was pressed into service to play middle infield in the top of the 13th; he would switch between second and short with the Cubs back-up, back-up shortstop, Dave Rosello, depending on the handedness of the batter. (Franks was really managing, for a change.)
People in the press box were beginning to say it was the best game they had ever seen, with its riveting action and increasingly unlikely comebacks. In the bottom of the 12th, Jimmy Enright said, “Well, at the end of this inning, win, lose or draw, I’m hitting the head.” Then, as he passed by Julian and me, he commented, “You fellas are getting one hell of a baptismal.” Not “baptism”–*baptismal*.
Finally, the Cubs won the amazing game in the bottom of the 13th, when Rosello, the weakest hitter on the team, singled in the lumbering Reuschel from third. Reuschel, who rarely showed emotion on the field during his long career, crossed home plate with his arms in the air, pumping his fists. I still see him.
I had taken public transportation from Hyde Park to get to Wrigley Field that day—the #1 bus and the Howard-Jackson Park El. As I rode home, I wondered if just going to the game and sitting in the stands would be good enough from then on. But it has been. I was Cub Reporter for a Day. I have been something more important—a Cubs fan—for life.
