Simple job, really, managing the Cubs. Keep Sammy Sosa happy, signal to the bullpen with your fingers crossed. Anybody can do it. And has. Don Zimmer did it, for crying out loud.
The stands are filled, the fans are full, the ivy is ripe, the flagpole standings are meaningless.
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This is the happy and immutable world of Cubdom, ever so, ever so.
The Cub job is a summer cruise, a nap before dinner, a holiday from authentic baseball, from gut-wrenching, stomach-grabbing choices. Nobody loses his hair or his lunch managing the Cubs.
Jerk around Matt Karchner if you need to, play Elian Gonzalez at shortstop if that’s your whim, sing along with the croak-of-the-day during the seventh-inning stretch. Trade Henry Rodriguez. Please. There is plenty to do.
Keep Sammy happy and the music low in the clubhouse. This is neither rocket science nor the knot-tying section of the seamanship test. This is the Cubs.
This is how it works: Every decade or so the planets line up, serendipity smiles, the rainbow ends at second base and the Cubs violate their nature. They win. In between, there is only Sammy, or one like him. Andre Dawson. Ryne Sandberg. Ernie Banks.
The Cubs are not unlike intermittent windshield wipers. Sooner or later everything may be made clear, but the delay is the exciting part. Is that a deer in the headlights or Ed Lynch?
You exhilarate in the Cubs’ successes because successes are scarce. If the Cubs won every year, they would be the Yankees, or every other year, they would be the Cardinals. And nobody wants that.
Let the Yankees have the dynasties, the Braves the curse of never being quite good enough. The Cubs serve a higher purpose. They provide comic relief, like the rodeo clown and California architecture.
Unluckily for Baylor, he has fallen in between these magic moments. The Cubs are not due to win again until he, and Sosa, too, alas, are elsewhere. Not Tribune Co. money, not the baseball pedigree of Andy MacPhail, not the farm system, surely, will change what is unchangeable.
So keep Sammy happy. Shrug when he misses the cutoff man. He was doing that long before late-comers began pointing it out. Sammy does not bunt. Sammy does not hit-and-run. Shaquille O’Neal does not make free throws. You count your blessings and hope you get the rebound.
We all knew the wrong guy was fired when Jim Riggleman was sacrificed. It should have been Ed Lynch. It will be Ed Lynch, and eventually it will be Don Baylor. But Lynch first.
Baylor knows this. Baylor is immune to everything that happens to the Cubs, a team worse now than when he was hired to restore it. He will get his three or four years. The team will turn over again. Baylor will fail. Baylor will move on.
The only way Baylor can look bad is to upset Sosa and continually remind all of us that none of this is his fault.
He has managed to do both to no good purpose, other than to gratify some compulsive ego itch. Baylor irritated his best players in Colorado, defending himself as he has here: He pushes players to make them better.
Baylor lost his players there; he will lose his players here. All managers who try to manage, even Joe Torre, lose their players. Casey Stengel once said that the secret to managing is to keep the five players who hate you away from the five who are undecided. On the Cubs, Sosa is worth 10 players.
Should Sosa be treated differently than the other Cubs? Of course he should. He is better than the other Cubs. He is the Cubs.
Sosa hasn’t gotten worse. Sosa is the same. Everybody else is worse.
Including the manager.
Should Sosa be traded? Well, he has to be now, doesn’t he? The happy home has been violated. Words said cannot be unsaid. And Baylor said them first.
Someone has to go, and Baylor isn’t worth a third baseman, a starting pitcher and a left-handed power hitter.
Even when he was a player, a very good player if no Sosa, Baylor wasn’t worth that.
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How can any manager alienate his best player, the most valuable pony in the petting zoo that is the Cubs? This is not leadership, this is envy.
Just keep Sammy happy. No one should have had to say this out loud.