Is it too late to return to HoHoKam Park and start over? Arizona isn’t closed, is it? This Opening Day should have been for the Cubs. The 1997 season is supposed to honor Jackie Robinson, not Jackie Mason.
Ah, but it could have been worse. While they were losing all those groundballs in the sun, imagine if Jaime Navarro, the noted critic, had been pitching. Would they have switched him into a rubber room back at the hotel, or just fitted him for a straitjacket right there on the mound?
The Cubs were charged with two errors by Ryne Sandberg, but deserved four, another each by Shawon Dunston and Dave Hansen. And that doesn’t include a bunt Kevin Orie turned into a double. You can take the Cubs out of the Cactus League, but you can’t take the Cactus League out of the Cubs.
For eight innings, the somnolent Cubs were down 4-0. They were lucky to have 0. The only ball they hit hard was by Hansen, and that became a double play. Yet, amazingly, they had the potential winning run up before surrendering to Florida 4-2.
“What if we’d have pulled that one out?” mused Mark Grace, the only Cubs infielder who didn’t appear allergic to white. “Geez, Ryno might not make two errors the rest of the year.”
Grace added that, in his entire career, he’d not seen better stuff than Kevin Brown of the Marlins showed through seven innings. So, it might not have mattered. But we’ll never know. Maybe it was the heat. In April, the Cubs are more comfortable with mittens than gloves.
The victim of this dodgeball epidemic was Terry Mulholland, who pitched better than his teammates played. The Cubs hired him because he gives up a lot of groundballs. He wasn’t warned that some of them might go for extra bases.
Mulholland walked five Marlins, which is too many. But one was to Gary Sheffield on a 3-2 serve that looked suspiciously like Strike Three. That occurred just after Sandberg’s second miscue in 15 minutes, and precipitated a rally of two runs, both unearned, in the fifth inning, Mulholland’s last.
Sandberg later completed the hat trick when he was dinged in the head by a ball fouled off home plate.
“I was dazed,” he said. “I don’t remember the play.”
He might not recall his last two-error game, either. It was five years and one retirement ago. The Marlins’ infield is considered perhaps the truest in the National League, but the Cubs agreed the surface was harder than the New York Times crossword puzzle on Tuesday.
“The bunt I let go because I thought it was going foul . . . it was going foul,” said Orie, the rookie third baseman. “Then it just picked up speed and stayed fair. I’ll have to live with it. At least, I handled everything else my way.”
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Meanwhile, back at the bat rack, the Cubs were positively futile. Last year, they were 53-8 when leading after six innings, one of the best records in baseball. Then they bought Mel Rojas. But with Tuesday’s squirt-gun offense, there wasn’t any demand for a star closer. Much more of this, and Rojas could weigh 500 pounds by October.
“Grace is right,” concluded Orie. “Brown’s stuff was the best I’ve seen in my major-league career too.”
But the kid did slap a single for his first hit. The ball was retrieved and tossed for posterity’s sake to the Cub dugout, where it was fielded cleanly.