Happy honeymoon, Don Baylor. Buying a year of grace or two at more than twice the price of Jim Riggleman is the cost of pretending, and cheap enough. The Cubs are masters of fantasy. Cubdom is built on daydreams and wishes, not on certifiable truth, rather like Camelot or musical theater.
How a hard, demanding sort such as Baylor will fit into this merry mix of congenital failure and perpetual mediocrity does not really matter, just as long as the beer is cold, the sun is warm and the wind is blowing out.
And Baylor’s explanation for taking the job sounds cheerfully and familiarly delusional. The chance to be the manager who manages to make the Cubs winners is a temptation that reality can not discourage.
“Just think if we ever won here,” Baylor said at his introduction.
That is the key to Baylor and why he took the Cubs job. Just think. In all the long, lost line of Cubs managers, not a one ever took the job without imagining himself sanctified by success, the one to fuse the illusion with the genuine.
Will it be Baylor? He’ll need every one of his four years, and maybe more. And maybe a new set of bosses, because he is secured at least two years beyond General Manager Ed Lynch. Hiring someone for longer than your own contract is a measure of faith on both sides, though you do assure yourself of having someone to drive you to the bus.
Are the Cubs a better short-range mission than the Angels in California or the Brewers in Milwaukee? Hardly. Will the Cubs succeed before the Orioles in Baltimore or the Indians in Cleveland? Can’t believe that.
And yet Baylor took this job instead of those, proving he is either a visionary or a fool. The Cubs’ dugout always has had room for both.
The Cubs will not win with Baylor as the manager anymore than with any other, not even if Baylor is the channeling vessel of Joe McCarthy, Walter Alston and Mandrake the Magician.
Now, buying Ken Griffey Jr. might be a life-changing purchase, though apparently the Cubs would need to tear out the ivy and plant orange groves to meet Griffey’s peculiar comfort zone.
Griffey wants to be near his family and his family wants to be near fresh citrus, so that reduces the acceptable working destinations to Apopka, Fla., and the produce section of Dominick’s.
Still, the Cubs will be expected to make the Junior gesture, just as the White Sox will. The season ticket-holders must be satisfied that the home club is making an effort to keep up with the Turners and the Steinbrenners.
Griffey is ideally unreachable, the skinflint’s dream. The Cubs and Sox can lie as loudly as they want to about trying to get Griffey to Chicago and have no fear that he will actually come.
The Cubs are a little more experienced at this than are the White Sox, who generally send authentic, high-salaried talent in the other direction. As we recall, the Cubs just missed getting Mike Piazza and were so close to landing Randy Johnson and very nearly got Candy Maldonado. Oh, that’s right.
And speaking of the White Sox before I get back to Baylor and the Cubs, their little town meeting of 300 “satisfied” Sox fans is bound to carry more weight than the 30,000 Sox fans who wouldn’t bother to show up for regularly scheduled baseball games during the season. Jerry Reinsdorf hears what he wants to hear, and he can pick a whispered “yes” out of a roar of “no’s.”
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As for Baylor, his first bit of managerial territory marking was to attack his star player, Sammy Sosa. Too one-dimensional, said Baylor, who had a long and rewarding career being one-dimensional.
Sosa needs to steal more bases. Sosa needs to play better defense. Where Baylor got these notions is unclear, considering that Sosa practically beat up his old Colorado Rockies all by himself, even when Sosa was not the home run creature he has become. And this last season against the Braves, for whom Baylor worked, Sosa whacked three home runs in seven games.
While this appears to be a tactical maneuver from Baylor to show who the new boss is and that things are going to be different, Sosa might not be the best example to be picking on. Sosa was not the reason for even one of the Cubs’ 95 losses.
Can Baylor be the reason the Cubs win the 95 games they will need to be a playoff team? I’ll take my chances with Sosa.