After the rainfall Saturday night, the Cubs do not take batting practice Sunday morning. Wrigley Field is quiet as the New York Mets’ Keith Hernandez trots around the bases (working to rehabilitate his ailing knee), while Mitch Williams and Les Lancaster warm up in front of the Cubs dugout. Down in the dugout, encircled by a small group of reporters, Don Zimmer sits and talks. Zimmer, at these moments, is a pleasure to behold, and this morning he has even shaved for the occasion. A question about a certain player or a certain incident will set him off, reeling into the past for some ever-so-slightly related story. On this occasion a comment on Dwight Smith’s fielding recalls an event when Billy Williams was a rookie. “What year was that?” Zimmer says.
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The tale lacks drama, but even so it’s well told, in some mysterious way, and the moral is clear enough: rookies make rookie mistakes. Williams turned himself into a decent left fielder after a while, and the implication is that Smith will too. In the meantime, Zimmer says, he’s told Joe Altobelli to have Jose Martinez throw balls into the left-field corner–where Smith had suffered a particularly difficult episode the day before, costing the Cubs a run they eventually found they could afford–for the rookie to practice on. That, too, prompts a laugh, and as the Cubs emerge one by one from the clubhouse, a few reporters drift off to do other interviews, but most stay put. The atmosphere in the dugout is relaxed, placid, but with a serious tinge all the more noticeable for its being unstated. The atmosphere around Zimmer has changed subtly from previous months, because the season is now two-thirds over, the games are growing more important, and during the games the scoreboard is attracting more attention–not merely attention to the Cubs’ score, but attention to doings elsewhere. In short, it’s August, and the Cubs are in a pennant race, and Don Zimmer is doing his best to project an attitude reflecting that nothing has changed while also suggesting that things have changed markedly. He’s doing his best to keep the pennant race at arm’s length–and reporters at arm’s length from his younger players–because the pennant talk, and its companion pressure, will be on the team soon enough, especially if the Cubs continue to play as they have been playing.
Pennant fever is contagious; the ball players must feel it all around them, in the air they breathe and in the unusual behavior of those nearby. The Cubs, however, make few comments on the race. Their comfortable place in the standings is suggested only by their confident demeanor and serious approach to each game. It’s difficult to say just when the season shifts from an apparently endless string of games–best taken one at a time–to more consequential events, best taken an inning, an out, or even an at-bat at a time. Certainly, there is a heightened importance to the games both immediately before and after the All-Star break.
When a team wins a game like that–a game it was hardly even taking part in, a game it really had no business winning–it sets off alarms, not only for the fans but for the players. The Cubs played the Giants tough through the rest of the series, then went to Saint Louis, where they beat up on the Cardinals–with Vince Coleman killing a rally in one Cubs’ victory with a base-running boner; how’s that for a break?–then returned home, a week ago, to face the hated and fading New York Mets.
