Another Opening Day

Chicago is abuzz this week with great anticipation over the upcoming seasons for the major league baseball teams on both sides of town. A cynic might say, "haven't we heard that all before?" But a true fan (short for fanatic), cannot be a cynic, at least not this time of year.

For me, this year's opening day brings with it a touch of melancholy as here in this city, we're still mourning the recent loss of two of our most beloved players, Ernie Banks and Minnie Miñoso.

On a personal note, high school is right around the corner for my boy, meaning that his Little League career will end soon, bringing to a close a happy chapter of our lives together.

Like every recurring event on the calendar, another opening day brings to mind the passage of time and memories of things past. Of the handful of major league opening days I've attended in my life, two come immediately to mind. Both of them were historic games for the home team, the Chicago White Sox. I was at the inaugural game of US Cellular Field, (then called new Comiskey Park), in 1991, obtaining the hard-to-get ticket from a friend in exchange for photographing his son's Bar Mitzvah. In the end it turned out my friend got the better end of the bargain as the Detroit Tigers ruined the opening of the new park by pummeling the Sox 16-0. To make it worse, the demolition of old Comiskey Park across the street, a place I had spent countless happy hours of my life, had just begun. The south-east corner of the grand old ballpark was already gone, exposing a depressing view of the rubble-strewn right field where Babe Ruth once patrolled.

A more poignant memory is opening day 1976 at old Comiskey. My friend Jeremy Pollack had two tickets of his father's, and he invited me to join him. His dad was an advertising guy who had some pretty sweet grandstand seats between third base and home plate. I remember those seats well as it my first and only time in that old ballpark where I could see the entire field without some kind of obstruction blocking the view.

That opening day was historic because it was the first game of Bill Veeck's second run as owner of the White Sox. If you don't know him, you should; Bill Veeck was perhaps the single most colorful character in the history of baseball. Veeck was born into the game as his father, William Veeck Sr. was the president of the Cubs under the Wrigley family. After Veeck Sr. died, his son worked for the Wrigleys and was responsible for the building of two of the most beloved features of Wrigley Field, the hand operated scoreboard, and the ivy covered outfield walls.

Veeck Jr. became a renegade owner who stood the game on its head with his devil-may-care approach to running a team. For years he was derided by his fellow owners and some baseball purists for the circus-like atmosphere he brought to the game. He's probably best known for stunts like sending a midget up to bat when he owned the old St. Louis Browns in 1951, and the infamous Disco Demolition Night here in Chicago in 1979,

But Bill Veeck's legacy goes much deeper than that. After World War II when he owned the Cleveland Indians, he singly-handedly integrated the American League by signing Larry Doby who would become only the second African American to officially play in the big leagues in the twentieth century. While other American League teams steadfastly refused to include black players, Veeck continued to do so, including his signing of the first black Latin American player in the MLB, Minnie Miñoso, and the man who by some accounts was the greatest pitcher of any color to ever play the game, Satchel Paige.

Veeck's purchase of the White Sox after the 1975 season would be his last hurrah. As Jeremy and I took our seats before the game, who should pass right by us but these three gentlemen reenacting the famous Archibald MacNeal Willard painting, The Spirit of '76 (aka Yankee Doodle). That's Veeck himself, peg leg and all, on the right playing the fife. The flag bearer was Paul Richards who managed the team that year. The tableau vivant was in honor of the American Bicentennial, as the game took place just months before the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Upon close examination of the photograph, you can probably find Jeremy and me in the stands at the top right corner of the picture.

I just finished reading a splendid biography of Veeck, written by Paul Dickenson titled: Bill Veeck: Baseball's Greatest Maverick, picking it up on the recommendation of someone who told me the book's appendix addressed an issue I've been interested in since I first wrote about it in this space two years ago. The issue is this: did Bill Veeck make a serious attempt to purchase the Philadelphia Phillies in 1943, intending to fill the team with star players from the Negro Leagues, only to have the plan quashed by MLB execs?

Bear in mind that Jackie Robinson wasn't signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers until 1945 and would not make his debut with the team until two years later. If the story is true and Veeck had actually pulled it off, then he, not Branch Rickey, would have become the man lionized as the Moses who led baseball out of the dark ages of the color-line.

The story of Veeck's failed attempt to buy the woebegone '43 Phillies, was challenged in an article that appeared in a publication of the highly regarded Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). The article titled, A Baseball Myth Exploded: Bill Veeck and the Sale of the 1943 Phillies, alleges that Veeck made the story up. The authors' case for their accusation was that the only written documentation they could find of the event was Veeck's own description of it in his autobiography, Veeck-- as in Wreck.

I won't go into details but Dickenson makes a very good case for Veeck by debunking the SABR article, which has also been discredited by other baseball historians, including SABR members. In the end it hardly matters since with or without the Phillies episode, Veeck's credentials as one of the most important individuals responsible for integrating the game, are unassailable.

In his biography, Dickenson portrays Bill Veeck as a man of deep courage, generosity, and good will. Coming from a privileged background, he could have easily avoided military service in World War II, or at least sought out a cushy officer's commission. Instead, despite his age and family status, he insisted upon entering the Marine Corps as an enlisted man. On top of that, he requested a transfer from the backup position at Bougainville where he was assigned, to the Third Division which was about to invade the island of Guam in the South Pacific. The transfer went through but as fate would have it, word of the transfer didn't reach Veeck in time, so he ended up manning an anti-aircraft gun as part of a defense battalion, rather than being put directly into harm's way as he had wished. That transfer snafu more than likely saved his life. Still, injuries incurred during his service in Bouganville ultimately cost him much of his right leg below the knee, hence the wooden leg you see in the picture.

Despite Veeck's fame as promoter extraordinaire, his baseball acumen was right up there with the best of them. Consider this: between 1947 and 1964, the New York Yankees won the American League pennant in all but three seasons. Two of those seasons, they lost the pennant to teams owned by Bill Veeck, the 1948 Indians and the 1959 White Sox. The third was the '54 Indians, a team which still had vestiges of the Cleveland team that Veeck once owned. Despite being under-capitalized in his second go-around with the White Sox, in 1977 Veeck had the brilliant idea of obtaining big time players in their option year before they became free agents and commanded exorbitant money. That "rent-a-team" became known as the "South Side Hit Men" and, filled with sluggers like Oscar Gamble, Ralph Garr and Ritchie Zisk, led their division for most of the season, ultimately winning 90 games, and creating more excitement in Chicago baseball than had been seen in years. And the heart of the 1983 White Sox, the first Chicago team to make the post-season since Veeck's "Go Go Sox" of '59, was made up of personnel (such as right fielder Harold Baines and manager Tony La Russa), who were brought to the team by Veeck.

But what made Bill Veeck truly stand head and shoulders above his peers in baseball, was his accessibility to the fans, and the belief that he was nothing without them. Perhaps his greatest promotion was inspired by a tongue-in-cheeck letter from a Cleveland Indians fan by the name of Joe Early who wrote:

Now they want a Bill Veeck Night. It’s a good idea, but here’s another suggestion. Let’s have a Joe Earley Night. I pay my rent, and my landlord spends it on things that keep business stimulated. I keep the gas station attendant in business by buying gas regularly. I keep the milkman in clover by buying milk. He uses trucks and tires and as a result big industry is kept going. The paper boy delivers the paper, wears out a pair of shoes occasionally and the shoemaker wins. My wife keeps a grocer and a butcher (don’t we all) in business and the department stores as well. A lot of people depend on me (and you) so let us all get together, and send in your contributions for that new car for Good Old Joe Earley Night.

In response, on September 28, 1948 at Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, in the midst of a hotly contested pennant race, Veeck took the microphone and before 60,000 fans, officially declared that evening: “Good Old Joe Earley Night”, in honor not only of Joe, but of all the hard working Joes who represented the vast majority of the fans of the team. The crowd went wild, especially after Veeck handed out gag gifts to the Earleys including a broken down old horse, and a new house, actually an outhouse wheeled in from center field. The whole event wasn’t a complete gag, the team then presented the couple with a brand new convertible and other valuable take home gifts, as well as a handsome check in their names to their favorite charity, cancer research.

Until the day he died, Bill Veeck's telephone number was listed. I know this for a fact because a former workmate of mine, in perhaps a slightly altered state, picked up the phone early one morning and dialed the Veeck residence in Hyde Park to express some concerns about the White Sox. Veeck's wife Mary Frances picked up the phone (as Bill was probably still out on the town), and the two of them talked baseball for about an hour. Mrs. Veeck won my friend over to her husband's cause as she continues to do to this day as a spry 98 year old.

In the end, Veeck couldn't compete with the multi-millionaires who were taking over the game. He sold the White Sox in 1980 to the group that still owns the team. Put off by their comment that they were going to turn the team into a "first class operation", Veeck for a while boycotted the Sox for the team on the north side and their "friendly confines." There he could be found, usually shirtless in the bleachers he built, sitting in the cheap seats, holding court with the rest of the fans whom he felt knew the game the best. According to Veeck: "the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats." When the Cubs decided to sell the bleacher tickets in advance, thereby making them available to the highest bidder in the secondary ticket market, he left them too.

Bill Veeck is responsible for many aspects of baseball that we take for granted these days. He was an early supporter of the designated hitter rule, and a fervent critic of the reserve clause. He introduced the exploding scoreboard, players' names on the back of their uniforms, as well as many of the side show attractions that appeal mostly to kids and indifferent spectators. To many traditionalist fans, myself included, many of the things Veeck either supported or introduced to the game annoy us to no end. But Veeck understood that if a baseball team were to depend upon only the serious fans, it would be "out of business by July." To that end, one of his proudest achievements was vastly improving the condition of the ladies rooms of his ballparks. Those efforts paid off in spades as many of the attendance records his teams set were due in a large part to the numbers of "female members of the species" (as he preferred to call them) in the seats.

Despite all the antics and his puckish nature, deep down Bill Veeck truly had the best interest of the game, the fans and its players at heart, often at his own expense. Veeck understood that God did not hand down the rules of baseball on a tablet to Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown. He was the kind of guy who respected the spirit of the game, but didn't necessarily respect the letter of its rules, which he felt had been used time and again to strangle the game and the people who play and watch it. Toward the end of his book, Paul Dickenson quotes Veeck's son Mike who commented on how his dad would have reacted to his induction into the National baseball Hall of Fame in 1991. The quote I think sums up Veeck pretty well. Mike Veeck said:

My father would have loved Cooperstown. He would've loved to set up a table on Main Street, put a case of beer next to a sawhorse, and sign autographs for free while the other inductees charge $30 a copy.

His dad was one of the good guys in an industry where such things are few and far between.

We lost Bill Veeck in 1986. Ernie Banks and Minnie Miñoso are gone, and as of late last year, so too is my friend Jeremy. Because of their presence, the four of them all left the world a much better place than they found it.

The beautiful thing about baseball is that it ties together the past, the present and the future seamlessly. This is especially true on opening day when we remember fondly those who went before us, as our hope springs eternal, looking forward to a brilliant season, all the while playing the game in real time.

We trudge on without our fallen heroes knowing full well that everything we have we owe to them. The best thing we can do is pass on the stories of their adventures to those who will be around when we're gone too.

That's baseball, that's life.

Now lets go out and play some ball.

Ernie Picasso

You know I had to stop by to visit the statue of Ernie Banks at Daley Plaza today. Banks, the beloved shortstop and first baseman of the Chicago Cubs between 1953 and 1971, died last Friday and this city is in mourning. It was announced that the statue which normally graces the Clark Street entrance of Wrigley Field, would be temporarily moved to Chicago's most important public square to honor the man known by just about everyone who cares a hoot about baseball as "Mr. Cub". There was also supposed to be some kind of ceremony honoring him but that never seemed to materialize. Instead, a few local TV crews, about two dozen folks, a friend and I, turned out at lunchtime to stand around and take pictures of each other in front of the likeness of the late ballplayer.

As we walked away, the sight of that familiar batting stance as seen through the Picasso brought something to mind. Wasn't there some connection between Ernie Banks and Picasso?

It didn't take me long to figure it out.

Way back in 1967, the massive sculpture by the great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso was unveiled to a collective groan among much of the population of the city of Chicago. On the minds of most of the city after Mayor Daley the First pulled the cord to unveil the sculpture was: "what the hell is that?" The moment was best described by none other than Mike Royko, in his column the following day*.

Anyway, the uproar against the Picasso became pretty intense and the moment before I snapped the picture above, in a flash I realized the connection. After the sculpture was unveiled, one of our fine aldermen, mortified by the new work of Modern art, introduced a resolution on the floor of the city council, recommending that the Picasso be "deported", and replaced by a statue of Ernie Banks.

"Which alderman?" my friend asked. "I think it was Vito Marzullo" was my answer. That's my standard response to questions about the goofy actions of Chicago aldermen.

It turned out the alderman in question was actually the honorable John Hoellen of the north side 47th Ward, whom if memory serves, was the last Republican ever to serve in the Chicago City Council. That makes sense since A) Marzullo the Democratic machine politician would never have been so brazen to publicly challenge the mayor who supported the sculpture, and B) representing a south side ward, Marzullo would have been much more likely to support a statue of Nellie Fox or Minnie Minoso.

Anyway, it dawned on me after that realization that the long departed alderman finally got his wish, well at least half of it. Nobody today in their wildest dreams would ever think of getting rid of the Picasso. At nearly fifty years of age, it's as much a Chicago icon as the Wrigley Building, the Art Institute Lions, and of course, Ernie Banks.

I know many of my colleagues in the art world would be aghast. but personally, I think old Pablo and Ernie make quite the pair.

The Ernie Banks statue will remain on view in Daley Plaza this week, after which it will be returned to its proper home outside the ballpark that Mr. Banks christened the Friendly Confines.


*Apropos of the passing of Ernie Banks, after reading the Royko piece on the Picasso on the link I shared, please be sure to scroll down and read his brilliant account of attending Jackie Robinson's first appearance in Wrigley Field, written the day after Robinson's death.

Ernie Banks

This is not my tribute to Ernie Banks who died yesterday. I wrote that almost three years ago after having written too many tributes to dead people that should have been written while they were still alive.

Beyond the sadness of losing the man who was my greatest childhood hero, several thoughts came to mind since receiving the news of his passing last night.

Buck O'Neil and Ernie Banks

Ernie Banks, who in 1953 became the first African American to play for the Cubs, was one of the last major league ballplayers to have come out of the old Negro Leagues. Banks played for the Kansas City Monarchs, one of the preeminent teams in the glory days of Black Baseball. Banks was scouted and signed to his first contract with the Monarchs in 1951 by none other than Cool Papa Bell, one of the greatest players black or white, to ever play the game. His manager in KC was Buck O'Neil, a very good player in his own right, who would eventually become the first African American coach of a major league team, the Cubs. In that capacity, O'Neil signed Lou Brock to his first major league contract. Cubs fans the world over know exactly how that deal turned out.

O'Neil would later come to nationwide attention largely thanks to being featured prominently in Ken Burns' PBS documentary, Baseball. He spent the final years of his life helping create and drumming up support for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, and tirelessly spreading the news about the glory days of the Negro Leagues, dispelling the old notions that Black Baseball was a second class operation.

O'Neil was also instrumental in gaining induction of several Negro League players and executives into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Although he himself was inexplicably overlooked in the balloting, he graciously took to the podium on July 29, 2006 in Cooperstown, NY during the induction ceremonies of several of his fellow players:



We lost Buck O'Neil shortly after he gave that speech but his spirit lives on not only in the museum he helped build, but in the revival of interest in an often overlooked, yet very significant part of American history.

With Ernie Banks's passing, we have lost one of our last direct connections to that history.

Of course by the time Ernie Banks came to the Monarchs, the team and the rest of the Negro Leagues were in their death throes, having become virtually irrelevant on April 15, 1947, the day Jackie Robinson played his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The door to the majors was opened up that day, if only by a crack for African American players, who were banned from playing in "organized baseball" since the 1880s. It took twelve years before every major league team would have at least one black player on their roster. and most teams like the Cubs, were hesitant to have more than two or three at any time. Consequently, while there were opportunities for black ballplayers in the big leagues, those opportunities were few and far between. Unless you were a player of the caliber of say, Larry Doby, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Roy Campanella, Monte Irvin or Ernie Banks, your chances of making it into the big leagues were infinitesimally small. And with the drying up of the Negro Leagues, the twenty years or so following the "integration" of the game were particularly difficult ones for most black players.

Ernie Banks was not particularly outspoken about race and the injustices faced by people of color in America. For better or worse, he did not feel it was the athlete's responsibility to comment on such things. That probably worked to his benefit. Unlike players like Jackie Robinson who became a very prominent spokesperson for civil rights in America, Banks with his child-like enthusiasm, his easy-going demeanor, and his media-savvy, made him less threatening to white folks, especially during the fifties and sixties in the (at the time) lily-white north side of Chicago, playing on a team whose fans represented that demographic. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Mr. Banks's popularity eased the path for black players who followed him into the majors.

In time Ernie Banks became unquestionably the most beloved player in the team's long history. The question, and at this point it's purely an academic one, is this: was Ernie Banks the greatest player in the team's history?

One could argue that he wasn't even the best player among his teammates. Here's what baseball historian and statistician extraordinaire Bill James has to say about one of them:

Billy Williams was Ernie Banks without the PR.

In the comments section to my tribute to Banks, my friend, writer, historian, Cub (and Ernie Banks) fan, and expert on every aspect of the game of baseball, Francis Morrone, wrote this:

Leo (Durocher) got to where he couldn't stand the sight of Ernie. He just hated him, and hated how (as Leo perceived it) Ernie manipulated the press and the public. Leo wanted to bench Ernie (not without reason, as by the late sixties Banks was a complete liability in the lineup) and felt he couldn't.

Fightin' words to be sure to any dyed-in-the-wool Ernie Banks fan but unfortunately the facts and stats support them, especially in the twilight of his career. 

There have been several great players (though not many in our lifetime) who could challenge Ernie Banks to the title of greatest Cub ever. I'm about to stir the pot to boiling over with one of them.

His name was Adrian Constantine Anson. Anson played a remarkable  27 years of big league ball, 22 of them with Chicago. He came here in 1876, the same year the team's owner William Hulbert and his associates formed the National League. Anson, a first baseman, quickly became established as one of the stars of the game. In 1879 he became player/manager (where he got his nickname "Cap") and led the team, at the time known as the White Stockings, to five championships in eight years. 

As manager, Anson was an innovator in those early years of the game, credited with coming up with or perfecting strategies such as the hit and run, sending players signals from the bench, placing a coach at third base, the hook slide, hitting to the opposite field, all aspects that we take for granted today.

Such was Cap Anson's influence on the team that the nickname White Stockings was replaced with "Anson's Colts". When Anson finally departed from the team in 1898, his loss was so profound that the nickname was changed again, this time to" the Orphans". The team would keep that unfortunate name for four years, until a newspaperman reporting from spring training (another invention of Anson's), referred to the promising crop of new players on the team as "cubs." The name as you can imagine, stuck.

Cap Anson by many accounts is considered the greatest major league player and manager of the nineteenth century.

There was another side to Anson however. During an arduous road trip in 1883, his team was scheduled to make a stop in Toledo to play an exhibition game against the minor league Toledo Blue Stockings. Out of fatigue, he balked about playing a meaningless game but his boss, team president Albert Spalding insisted as the Chicago team's success assured a huge draw in the northwest Ohio city. Further complicating the issue, when he got to the ballpark, Anson refused to take the field unless an agreement was made that the Toledo catcher, Moses Fleetwood Walker, an African American, would not play. Charlie Morton, Toledo's manager refused to take his catcher out of the lineup and assured Anson that if his team refused to take the field, the Chicago nine would forfeit their share of the hefty gate receipts. Anson relented that time, but in later meetings with Toledo, and other teams that had black players, he got assurances that no black player would ever take the field against the Chicago team. 

In some circles, Cap Anson is given much of the credit (or blame), for the "gentlemen's agreement" among baseball club owners and officials, which banned African Americans from organized baseball for sixty years. 

Even for his day, Anson was a virulent racist who would make Ty Cobb look like a card carrying member of the NAACP. 

Despite that, Anson's contributions to the game are indisputable.

In his list of the 100 most important people in baseball, John Thorn, Major League Baseball's official historian, places Cap Anson at number 64, just below Jacob Ruppert, (the Yankee owner who signed Babe Ruth), and just above Bill Veeck. 

Sadly, the name of Ernie Banks is not anywhere to be found on the list.

Let me point out, it's Thorn's list not mine. 

If it were my list, highly biased of course, Ernie Banks would be near the top. When he became a big leaguer in the fifties, the game of baseball was in its doldrums. Attendance was down drastically, either because of TV or out of fear of the changing neighborhoods where the ballparks were located. In the sixties, teams built brand spanking new polyester-laden stadiums indistinguishable from one another, each with all the personality of a  block of styrofoam. The Cubs were holdouts in the National League and during the sixties, there was Ernie Banks, the lone voice in the crowd, extolling the virtues of day baseball, played they way it should be played, ("baseball in the daytime, loving in the nighttime" being one of the least quoted of the rakish Mr. Banks's favorite comments), played on grass in the "Friendly Confines" of Wrigley Field. Eventually, the burghers of baseball saw the light and dynamited all those concrete-clad mausoleums and replaced them with new ballparks all modeled after Wrigley Field. 

Baseball is back to at least some semblance of being the way it should be, played on real grass (if not in the daylight), in real ballparks, which in my estimation, is thanks in no small part to Ernie Banks. 

Now there's a contribution worthy of John Thorn's list if you asked me. 

Last night an amazing thing happened. As I was working on a website devoted to baseball, I was testing out a feature that retrieves ballplayers' stats. The random name I plugged in to test the program was what else, Ernie Banks. Not more than two minutes later, as his lifetime stats were staring me in the face on my computer, my son came in the room to deliver the news that Mr. Banks had died. 

I took that to be some kind of sign. 

Personally, what would put Ernie Banks at or near the top of my list of most important people in the game of baseball is this: He is the person who without a doubt, is most responsible for making me fall in love with the game. 

I have no doubt that I am not alone in that sentiment. And for that all I can say is this:

Thank you Mr. Cub, you wear that title well.

May you rest in peace.

 fIf it were or it than almost any other segment of American so in 1883ciety.

Mr. Cub

In assessing my work on this blog after three years, I realized that my posts in appreciation of specific individuals were mostly posthumous. I resolved to change that. In this post, the subject at 80 years of age, is still very much alive and well.

I asked my 11 year old son the other day who was his biggest baseball hero. He thought about it for a couple of seconds and said: "Ryan Theriot?" The question mark was his not mine. Now my son's baseball experience is much more participatory than mine was at his age, he plays a lot more than he watches. Yet he is very much aware of big league players throughout the Majors, way more than I am, and frankly his answer surprised me. Not that Ryan Theriot is a bad ballplayer. He was a decent shortstop and second baseman for the Cubs for six seasons before being traded in 2010 to the Dodgers. He spent 2011 with the Cardinals and this year he's playing for the Giants. While he's a lifetime .281 hitter, not bad for a middle infielder, most of his stats place him solidly in the realm of an average major leaguer. Frankly that's not a bad place to be considering the fact that he is after all, in the Big Show, and his annual salary is well above three million dollars. Still those kind of stats usually do not make a ballplayer a hero in the eyes of most children.

It could be something about Theriot's easygoing Cajun demeanor that appeals to my boy, or the fact that he can relate to the ballplayer's relatively modest size and stature. But I suspect Ryan Theriot became my son's hero when he drove in the winning run in the rain delayed, extra inning game that was to be my son's first visit to Wrigley Field, the day he fell in love with baseball.

I bring this all up because the other day, Ernie Banks was interviewed on a local radio talk show. Not that Banks had entirely left my mind but hearing his voice, still strong, optimistic and jubilant after all these years, brought back a rush of memories from my childhood.

Ernie Banks, Mr. Cub, was my greatest baseball hero. His only competition for greatest hero of all was Stan Mikita, the great centerman for the Black Hawks. All in all I'd say between the two, it was about a tie. Beside his great skills, Mikita's appeal for me rested on the fact that like my father, he came from Czechoslovakia.

Unlike Mikita, I came to Ernie Banks entirely on my own. Like my son's choice of hero, it was probably as much Banks' personality and demeanor that appealed to me as his on field performance. Ever the optimist, Banks would gleefully predict in verse the Cubs' chances at the beginning of each season:

• The Cubs are due in '62
• The Cubs will come alive in '65
• Wrigley Field will be heaven in '67
• The Cubs will be great in '68
• The Cubs will shine in '69

Only the last prediction would come true, for a while that is, until the team imploded in September in nearly historic proportions. As far as I can recall, that was the first year when I really followed baseball seriously, paying attention to the box scores and standings daily, until the collapse when it became too painful to watch the Cubs' 9 1/2 game lead in mid-August evaporate to the ultimate World Series Champions that year and the still despised New York Mets. As I mentioned in this space before, it was a tough lesson for a 10 year old.

As for Ernie Banks, outwardly he seemed unfazed, his prediction in spring training the following year was this:

The Cubs will glow in 7-0.

They did that for a while, but ended up finishing second, five games behind the Pirates in the weak Eastern Division of the National League. For Ernie Banks, time was taking its toll. Realizing that he would likely wrap up his long and distinguished playing career without ever winning anything must have been a bitter pill to swallow. But he never let on. That season, on May 12th to be exact, Ernie Banks hit his 500th home run. He went on to hit 12 more home runs, then hung up the spikes for good at the end of the 1971 season. 

Ernie Banks was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility in 1977.

Ever since he left the team, even though he moved away from Chicago, Ernie Banks has remained unquestionably devoted to the Cubs, just as he was during his playing years. I read a story about a recent conversation between Banks and a lifelong baseball fan as related by a third person. He described Banks ebulliently describing the joys and wonders of Cubdom to the man, completely winning him over. Someone said to the observer: "but that guy's a lifelong Yankee fan." The observer of the conversation said: "Well he's a Cub fan now."

Ernie Banks coined the term; "The Friendly Confines" to describe Wrigley Field, a term that lives on today. His number 14 was retired by the team in 1982 and a flag bearing his name and number flies over the left field foul pole, near the spot where so many of his home runs landed. Recently a statue of him was unveiled and currently stands on Clark Street, just outside the main entrance to the Friendly Confines. He's immortalized standing in his familiar batting stance, anyone who ever saw Ernie play can instantly recognize that statute from blocks away.

It would be remiss of me to fail to point out that Ernie Banks is not only a great person, inspiring teammate, and stellar promoter of his team, but he was unquestionably a great ballplayer, perhaps one of baseball's most overlooked stars. In his prime in the late fifties, an era where his competition included Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, and Henry Aaron, as well as several other baseball immortals, he was named National League MVP two years in a row. In addition to his 512 career home runs, (21st on the all time list, just behind Ted Williams and tied with Eddie Matthews), Banks was an 11 time All-Star, he had two seasons where he scored over 100 runs, eight seasons where he drove in over 100 runs, and five seasons where he hit over 40 home runs. He even won one gold glove award at shortstop, the toughest fielding position in the game. In case you're interested, here are his stats.

Still, like his longtime teammate, the late Ron Santo, Ernie Banks means so much to so many in ways that go well beyond the playing field. Because of my son's sheer joy and enthusiasm for the game, I've nicknamed him; "let's play two", after Banks' most famous quote. 

It would be hard to find a big league ballplayer today with that kind of enthusiasm. We hear more about agents and contracts than we hear about the love of the game. On kids' day at a White Sox game a few years ago, my son and I were standing by the visitors' dugout where we made friends with some Baltimore Oriole fans, a father and his children, who were following their team around the country. One of the kids was wearing a jersey with the name and number of the Orioles' star second baseman. The father told me that player's was the only autograph his son didn't have in his collection. The second baseman soon walked by only a few feet away from us, and as the kids begged him to come over and sign their caps, jerseys or whatever, he just kept walking, without so much as an acknowledgment of his faithful fans. My biggest thrill in the game that day was to see that particular player boot a routine ground ball. 

This reminds me of another of Ernie Banks' famous quotes. He once said: "It's important for ballplayers to sign autographs for kids because you never know, one day that kid could become your boss." Great as he was, Ernie Banks never made the same kind of money as that second baseman. He never even came close to what the journeyman Ryan Theriot makes. The last year I could get info on, the year it almost happened for the Cubs, in 1969 Ernie Banks made $85,000. When he broke into the big leagues in 1953, he was the first black player to play for the Cubs. I don't know this for a fact but I can only assume he suffered the same indignation that many of his contemporaries did as trailblazers in their game of choice. For better or worse, once again Ernie Banks never let on. 

It dawned on me the other day while listening to Ernie on the radio why I briefly lost interest in baseball around 1971, only to return as a fan of a different team a few years later. No it wasn't as I thought, because I was so bitterly disappointed by the 1969 and 1970 seasons. It was because Ernie Banks no longer played with the Cubs. When I think of Ernie Banks I think mostly of that image above, which was the very likeness of him included in my souvenir pack of black and white photos of my heros, Kessinger, Beckert, Williams, Santo, Hundley, Jenkins, and most of all, Ernie Banks. Somewhere I still have the portrait I painted of him based on that photo. When I think of him, I think of the lovely summer afternoons of my childhood spent at the half empty old ballpark, filled mostly with kids watching adults playing a kids game. The oldest adult of all those players turned out to be the biggest kid of them all.

Once he was gone, something was lost. Baseball for me became an adult game and I became a fan of a team where the fans were mostly rowdy adults, whose players smoked cigarettes in the dugout, and whose beer guzzling TV play by play man was funny, irreverent, and cynical. I became that way too. That's the time I lost my childhood for good. Eventually that play by play man would move to the north side and the age of innocence was officially lost for the Cubs as well. There was no turning back after they put lights up in the joint and started to play games at night. Sadly, Ernie Banks with his childlike enthusiasm, his eternal optimism, and his unquestioned loyalty to the Cubs, is an anachronism in the old ballpark now almost always filled to capacity, usually with beer guzzling, profanity spewing louts, too young to remember him, and too old to be children. In a complete reversal, seeing the White Sox play at U.S. Cellular Field is now a much more family friendly experience than seeing the Cubs play at the once Friendly Confines. 

Yes I became a White Sox fan after Ernie Banks left the Cubs. It's a story that the consummate Cub, Mr. Banks would hate to hear. That's why he was my biggest hero. 

It turns out as I realized the other day, he still is.