It was midmorning Monday and the 0-6 Cubs had assembled at Wrigley Field, the final preparation for their home opener. Manager Jim Riggleman was in his clubhouse office unwrapping a new pair of baseball shoes that he was planning to send to his 14-yearold son, an 8th grader in Seminole, Fla.
Finally, someone asked if he was going to have a team meeting.
“We’ve had plenty of meetings, already,” Riggleman replied.
What about Tuesday, before the home opener?
“No.”
So the Cubs will take the field against the obviously much-improved Florida Marlins without the benefit of additional managerial wisdom. Which is just as well. They are men, professional ballplayers, not boys in need of another infusion of rah-rah.
“It’s a performance game,” said coach Tony Muser. “If you perform well, you win. That’s the daily challenge. It hasn’t changed in 130 years. Either you finish first, or you finish last.”
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As Jim Brosnan, who pitched for the Cubs in the previous generation, once said, “It’s a long season.” Brosnan also offered the cogent observation that the moment the schedule is printed all the clubs (except the pennant winners) are programmed for defeat.
Still, when a club staggers and stumbles out of the gate, an early burial is never advisable. The Cubs have 156 games to play, same as the St. Louis Cardinals who last season won the National League Central title. Like the Cubs, the Cardinals lost their first six games.
Catcher Scott Servais indicated he doesn’t have time to express concern.
“You have to keep playing,” Servais explained. “You can’t think about it. You can’t worry about it. We haven’t played too good and we know it.”
All good Cubs fans know it too:
– A .178 team batting average.
– A 5.18 team earned-run average.
– 11 errors in the first six games.
Veteran first baseman Mark Grace, the only Cub who had been hitting for a decent average, is on the 15-day disabled list with a severe hamstring pull.
Another loss Tuesday would equal the club’s worst start in the 20th Century, 0-7 in 1962.
Baseball often mirrors life and Riggleman was advised of a famous line President Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered in a speech during the early stages of his presidency: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
This same message, in effect, can be applied to the Cubs. The worst scenario is that the Cubs players, disappointed with the poor start, will turn tail and give up. It won’t happen, of course, because there is an even more appropriate dictum: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
Riggleman knows all this stuff. He also knows the players key off the manager. So long as the manager refuses to acknowledge defeat, the players always adopt the same attitude. When the manager folds, so does the club.
Which is why the White Sox had so many second-place finishes under manager Al Lopez. The Yankees, with one or two exceptions, had the better teams but Lopez drove his players until the moment of mathematical elimination.
“I’ve learned that,” Riggleman said. “You have to keep pushing. You can’t let yourself get down. The natural impulse is to become dejected. And so you have to say to yourself, `Hey, I’m not going to let that happen.’ You have to kick yourself in the pants.”
Coach Billy Williams, the Cubs Hall of Famer, insists a good start shouldn’t have been expected.
“We had to open against the two toughest teams in the league,” Williams said. “The Marlins went out and spent something like $89 million signing a lot of very good ballplayers. And the Braves, everyone knows they’re tough. They have the best pitching staff in baseball.
“We’ve played against some very good pitching and on top of that we made some mistakes. And we didn’t swing the bat. You have to have everything going when you play those guys.”
The second week of the Cubs’ schedule is just as cruel as the first: A two-game series against the Marlins and three more games against the Braves.
But the Cubs, according to slugger Sammy Sosa, will not be lying down.
“We’re going to start winning,” Sosa predicted.