Last Sunday there was unfamiliar crispness to air; it gave one room to breathe for the first time, it seemed, in months. The sun was bright, and the sky was visibly blue. Wispy clouds rose far north along the lakeshore. As we sat in the upper deck reading the media notes for the day, we felt a freshness in the air–as if the poison had been turned into sweat and expunged an optimism that had been missing the previous Thursday. when the Cubs had resumed play for the second half of the season after the All-Star break. The hot, sticky weather had broken with rain on Saturday, turning a 2-2 tie game between the Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers into a nonevent where only the statistics count, and so Sunday’s game turned into a doubleheader. As game time neared, the players came onto the field to play catch in front of the dugouts, and even in the upper deck we could hear the crisp slap of ball in glove. It was still morning–game time was just after noon–and the grandstand was, for the most part, empty. The occupied seats were dotted here and there in colored shirts and pants amid the greater and prevailing green of the empty seats themselves. The sounds of the ballpark seemed fractured, separate. The usual din that surrounds one in a ballpark had been torn; noises came at one individually, one at a time–a whistle over here, a vendor’s call of “Pepsi!” over there, the sharp slap of one of those aluminum hot dog boxes echoing off the upper-deck roof, and, of course, the softer slap of leather as the Dodgers played catch down below. When the game began, and the scoreboard operators scurried to change the umpires’ numbers from yesterday’s positions to today’s (third base moving to second, second to first, first to home, and home taking a well-deserved day off down at third base), we felt we weren’t the only ones just catching up with the day; we felt, in fact, that initial optimism growing, as if it reflected what surely must be going on in the minds of our Cubs.
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Thursday’s first game, unfortunately, established the tone for the series. The Cubs got a man on base against the Dodgers’ pitcher Tim Leary in each of the first six innings–two men on in the first and fourth–yet the only man they could get to third base was Andre Dawson (who tripled with two out in the first after Shawon Dunston was caught stealing, and who watched Ryne Sandberg then ground meekly to third ). Then they went out not with a bang but a whimper, the last ten batters going down without incident, a full half of them striking out. In being shut out, the Cubs wasted a typically gruff outing by Rick Sutcliffe, who deserved the loss only in that he allowed his counterpart, Leary an RBI single with two out and an O-and-2 count in the second inning. It was the only run the Dodgers got.
The Cubs’ loss in the nightcap was different but equally bitter. They got men on base, they ever managed to score a few, but they lacked the big hit that would blow the game open, right down to the end, when Dave Martinez signaled his departure from the Cubs by leaving two men on. After the game, he learned he had been traded to the Montreal Expos for Mitch Webster. (More on this later.)
Zimmer’s comment on Martinez’s baserunning was that he was “timid” and wouldn’t run on the green light. What kind of horse-shit manager’s excuse is that? If a base runner isn’t running when the manager gives him the sign to run, then the manager throws that sign in the garbage and brings out the very same sign and instead of calling it a “green light” he calls it a “go” sign and if the base runner doesn’t go on that pitch he’s fined $100. Martinez is, no doubt in my mind, a timid player. Not everyone is Pete Rose. Yet he showed early an ability to respond to challenges, when Gene Michael told him to hit or go back to Iowa, he started to hit, and he wound up last year hitting .292. I think Martinez would, eventually, have become a pretty good base runner–and will yet–but we’re talking subjective rather than objective assessment of talent here, and that puts us on uncertain footing.
