Going from the Bulls to the Cubs was going from one end of the sports spectrum to the other. A winning team–especially a championship team–gives off a hum of activity, the players are happy and comfortable with one another, and difficult achievements therefore come easily. A losing team, on the other hand, is quiet and sullen, stuck in the doldrums. The players show up to do their jobs and constantly expect bad things to happen. That’s been the apparent state of mind of the Cubs the last few weeks. They suffered through a long, brutal road trip on the west coast–where struggling Cubs’ teams have traditionally had problems and where they lost nine in a row–then they went east to Pittsburgh to win one and then lose a couple more, blowing a three-run lead in the ninth inning in one of them. The total record on the trip was 2-11. They returned home last Friday and were slaughtered 14-6 by the Saint Louis Cardinals. By the weekend, batting practice was quiet and businesslike, and not even the usually effusive Shawon Dunston had words of cheer for anyone around.
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Now, the Cubs of 1991 are not all that different from the division champions of 1989. Catching is a problem, with Joe Girardi out and Damon Berryhill struggling, but the Cubs won two years ago with Berryhill hurt at the end of the season and a young Girardi sharing the job with Rick Wrona. At first base, Mark Grace is a better player than he was two years ago; ditto Ryne Sandberg. At third, after replacing rookie Gary Scott, Luis Salazar is not noticeably worse than Vance Law. Dunston is struggling at short, but should even out in the second half; he usually does. In left, George Bell is even better than the ’89 platoon of Dwight Smith and Lloyd McClendon, and right fielder Andre Dawson has improved on his own play since he had knee surgery after the 1989 season. In center, Jerome Walton has drifted from his 1989 rookie-of-the-year form and has caught much of the blame–as center fielder and as leadoff man–for the Cubs not performing up to potential this season. Still, that’s five of eight positions where the Cubs are at least as good as they were two years ago, and the other three are not so diminished in quality–not enough to explain a fall in the standings from first to fifth.
Those injuries have caused other problems. Former manager Don Zimmer overworked the bull pen early, and that is something difficult for a team to overcome; starters have to put together a series of late-inning outings to give the arms in the bull pen a chance to rest, and the Cubs starting staff–suffering from injuries and general inconsistency–hasn’t been able to do that. During the Cubs’ skid, the team hit the ball well, scored early, and took leads into the late innings, but lost five times in the bottom of the ninth. A good team shouldn’t lose five games in a season in the bottom of the ninth, much less five games on a single road trip.
Last Saturday, with the wind blowing out, the Cubs finally caught a break, as the Cards’ starter Bob Tewksbury was slow to warm up on a very hot day, was hurt by an infield error, and then gave up a three-run homer to the Cubs’ latest catcher, Rich Wilkins. Of the Cubs’ six first-inning runs, five were unearned. Lester Lancaster, who has moved from the bull pen to the rotation to become something of the team’s stopper (he won the skid-ending game in Pittsburgh), seized on the lead like a puppy being swung by a sock clutched in its jaws, and handed a 6-3 game over to the weary Assenmacher in the eighth. Assenmacher allowed three hits and a run in the ninth, facing the Cards’ dangerous Pedro Guerrero with the tying run at first in the ninth, and all of Cubdom–the fans at Wrigley, those watching the CBS broadcast, and those listening on WGN–were expectant of tragedy. Guerrero grounded sharply out, however, and the Cubs had won one.
