Don Baylor likes to manage. He likes to play little ball, with sacrifice bunts and the hit-and-run. This is an odd tendency for a manager who previously served with the Colorado Rockies in Coors Field, the most homer happy of today’s new launching-pad stadiums, and who arrived in the majors with the Baltimore Orioles when Earl Weaver was preaching the benefits of pitching, defense, and the three-run homer. Baylor apparently was more influenced by the time he later spent with the California Angels under Gene Mauch, one of baseball’s fiercest proponents of the bunt.
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Cubs fans, ever a suspicious if hopeful bunch, have been slow to acknowledge the team’s prospects. When the Cubs returned home last week for their first two night games of the year (an earlier one was snowed out) after compiling the league’s best record for April, they were greeted by warm weather but crowds merely in the high 20,000s–a fireworks-night throng for the Sox but something of a disappointment at Wrigley Field, whose upper deck was barely more than half filled, with wide expanses of empty seats in the corners of the lower deck. To judge from the team’s first game back, who could blame those missing fans for their trepidation? With the wind blowing out, the San Diego Padres–an even more anemic group of hitters than the Cubs–unloaded on Jason Bere for seven runs in the third inning and coasted to a 10-3 victory. All right, fatalistic Cubs fans had to be thinking, April’s over and here come the May staggers to prepare us for the June swoon. Yet the next night, with de facto ace Jon Lieber working quickly through the San Diego lineup, the Cubs came back from a 2-0 deficit with a barrage of their own. Sammy Sosa timed a Kevin Jarvis split-fingered fastball perfectly, smacking it into the pine boughs in center field to get things started, then the Cubs got two-run homers from the unlikely bats of Gary Matthews Jr., Bill Mueller, and Eric Young and added another run in the eighth to make the final 8-3. KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Get Down Tonight,” that gonfalon song from 1998, played on the PA after the last out, but there wasn’t the same celebratory optimism in the air. The fans’ doubts were justified the following day; the weather suddenly cooled and the winds blew in, and Wood suffered the same tough luck that has afflicted him all year, losing the series finale 5-3. Yet the next day Kevin Tapani outdueled Chan Ho Park for his fourth victory as the Los Angeles Dodgers came to town.
The other pleasant surprise was the overhauled lineup. Most emblematic of the changes was the departure of third basemen Willie Greene and Shane Andrews–free-swinging, all-or-nothing sluggers in the classic Wrigley Field mold–for Mueller, a contact-hitting infielder best known for his defense. Mueller stepped into the number-two slot behind Young, and he did so well that Baylor had dropped him to third ahead of Sosa by the time the team returned home last week. Left fielder Rondell White, a midseason acquisition last year, and catcher Todd Hundley, a free-agent pickup over the winter, were both upgrades, but otherwise the main improvement came in the form of luck. The Cubs signed big, beefy veterans Matt Stairs and Ron Coomer during the off-season to play first base; they share belly-buster builds and uppercut swings more appropriate to 16-inch softball. In the process, the Cubs passed over Julio Zuleta, a proven minor-league slugger who for some reason had inspired no confidence in general manager Andy MacPhail. But when Coomer went down with an injury the first week of the season, Zuleta was recalled. He supplied much-needed power in some critical early victories and claimed a spot on the roster. The Cubs got lucky in being unlucky, an early earmark of a Cinderella season.
In the bottom of the eighth, with the Cubs nickel-and-diming Nunez right out of the league with walks and singles, seven runs already in, two out, and the bases loaded, Sosa came to the plate. The crowd got to its feet and shouted the Peter O’Toole battle cry from Lawrence of Arabia: “No prisoners!” Sosa responded by hitting a pitch onto Waveland on the wrong side of the foul pole–Oooooooh! the crowd groaned–before walking to score another run. Los Angeles reserve infielder Chris Donnels had to relieve Nunez to end the inning. In the ninth, with the score 20-1, the fans got to their feet anyway with two out, and Courtney Duncan got the last out to seal the win and cue “Get Down Tonight.”
