Cook - Ten innings: the wildest ballgame ever, with baseball on the brink

Starting Lineups

Reserves

Pitchers

It was hotter than usual for spring in the Midwest. Temperatures pushed ninety degrees in May. Utility bills jumped, just as President Jimmy Carter had predicted when he warned Americans about a looming energy crisis. In Chicago, motorists lined up at filling stations as gas prices hit seventy-five cents a gallon.

Along Addison Street and Waveland Avenue, lake breezes carried disco tunes from cars and open windows. Donna Summers Hot Stuff. Gloria Gaynors I Will Survive. Rod Stewarts Da Ya Think Im Sexy? Closer to Wrigley Field, organ music drowned out the disco. The Star-Spangled Banner a little after one p.m. on game days. Take Me Out to the Ballgame six and a half innings later.

Fans came to the ballpark from all directions. Some walked from the El stop at Addison; some paid a few dollars to leave their cars in somebodys driveway. One home owner held a hand-lettered sign: CUB FANS $5 OTHERS $25 .

However they arrived, the fans had no trouble getting tickets. You could walk up while the anthem was playing and pay six dollars for a grandstand seat, a buck fifty for the bleachers. Every game was a day game and every day game was a party. Sure, there were suit-and-tie guys in the front rows, treating clients to an afternoon ballgame, but the usual crowd was neighborhood types, night-shift workers, nurses, waiters and waitresses, retirees, part-timers, and college students, dressed in shorts and jeans and T-shirts, baseball caps, painters caps, sandals and sneakers.

The Chicago Cubs were one of the surprises of the first six weeks of the season. Thanks largely to cleanup hitter Dave Kong Kingman, whose towering homers sometimes crashed through windows across the street from the ballpark, the Cubs were over .500 at 16-15.

Kingman was king of Chicago that year, recalled Ed Hartig, a Nielsen Company data scientist who moonlighted as the Cubs official historian. Hartig considered the 1979 team one of the more interesting in a franchise history dating back to 1876. Kong was king, but he didnt have much help. They werent a rich, big-market club yet. The offense was basically Kingman and Bill Buckner. But they put on a pretty good show. Buckner, more of a pure hitter than Kong, a singles and doubles man whose batting average was often fifty points higher, batted third in the lineup, but that was about as close and he and Kingman got. The Cubs two best hitters couldnt stand each other.

Rick Reuschel, the Cubs roly-poly pitching ace, threw sinkers that hitters bounced into the high grass in front of the plate, grass the groundskeepers grew high to slow down those grounders. Despite a physique one teammate compared to a pile of laundry, Reuschel was cat-quick, often pouncing on ground balls before his infielders could get them. All-Star reliever Bruce Sutter closed games with a trick pitch, the split-finger fastball, which would in time be known as the Pitch of the Eighties. Behind Sutter the bullpen featured a pair of promising young pitchers, Willie Hernandez and Donnie Moore, but the rest of the pitching staff was average at best. And aside from Kingman and Buckner the lineup was a rotating cast of supporting players whose lack of power matched their lack of speed.

Thats what Cub manager Herman Franks had to work with. A balding baseball lifer, Franks had spat, cussed, and chain-smoked his way through half a century in the game and knew a fourth-place club when he managed one. The man invented grumpiness, recalled John Schulian, a Sun-Times sports columnist. Herman Franks would sit in his office with his feet on his desk, eating chocolate donuts and smoking a cigar, ignoring questions.

In Hermans defense, he had an impossible job, said Hartig. If they had a popularity contest in that clubhouse, nobody would win. But he was keeping them close to first place.

He kept them close for a month, Schulian said, but they hadnt played most of the best teams. What was going to happen when the Phillies came in?

The 1979 Phillies, winners of three straight National League Eastern Division titles, were making their first trip of the season to Wrigley Field that May, and they had a slugger of their own in the cleanup slot. Third baseman Mike Schmidt was the only National League hitter with more home runs than Kingman, and his supporting cast was better. Flashbulbs popped when Schmidt and the Phillies filed off the team bus in front of their Michigan Avenue hotel. There was Pete Rose, the hard-charging former batting champ whod left Cincinnati for a free-agent contract that made him the best-paid player in the game at $800,000 a year. And Garry Maddox, who played center field so smoothly the fans called him the Secretary of Defense. And screwballing reliever Tug McGraw, who stuck out his tongue at fans who booed. And ace starter Steve Carlton, who stayed in shape with kung fu and refused to speak with reporters. With a league-leading $4.9 million payroll that nearly doubled the Cubs, Philadelphia was favored to win the division again. That added to the pressure on manager Danny Ozark, a tall, genial fellow with a gift for malaprop. Recalling an ovation on Opening Day, Ozark said, It sent a twinkle up my spine. His mandate from the front office that year sent more of a chill: win or else.