by Lou Piniella
This was nuts! In all my years in baseball, I’d never seen such media negativity. At first I laughed at the silly questions, but then I realized they were serious. Hendry had casually warned me to expect periodic talk among the media and fans about curses surrounding the Cubs, but I had no idea how pervasive all this stuff was through the organization. I quickly came to realize this was going to be a challenge in itself, keeping the players insulated from the curse talk.
In welcoming me to the Cubs, John McDonough made a point of saying, “We brought you here to win and we’re going to make sure to give you everything you need starting out. We’re not into rebuilding. We’re into winning now.” That was what McDonough was all about. I told him, “This is the third straight time I’ve taken over a team with the most losses in the league the year before, and I have the same urgency you do. I don’t see myself managing in my seventies.”
After the press conference, Anita and I took a stroll around Wrigley Field. It was a cold, gray, dreary day and the ivy on the outfield wall, which is a beautiful lush green in the summertime, was all brown. We took some pictures and then walked around outside the stadium, where I couldn’t help noticing all the bars in the area. “From the way it’s being portrayed to me by the media,” I said to Anita, “these fans seem to do a lot of drinking here.”
Once again, I was able to put together a really nice coaching staff. Larry Rothschild, whom I’d had in Cincinnati and felt was second to none as a pitching coach, had already been in place with the Cubs since 2002, and I brought in Matty Sinatro, who’d been with me in Tampa and Seattle, as my first base coach, and Gerald Perry, whom I’d had in Seattle, as my hitting coach. Hendry asked that we promote from the organization Mike Quade to coach third base, and Lester Strode as my bullpen coach. We also had Ivan DeJesus, one of the best infield coaches I’ve ever been around. Now it came down to a bench coach. Jim and I discussed a bunch of names but the one that kept coming up was Alan Trammell, who’d managed the Tigers from 2003 to 2005 but had sat out the 2006 season. I didn’t know Trammell all that well other than as a respected opponent and a Hall of Fame–worthy shortstop when he played for the Tigers in the ’80s. I called him to ask if he would be interested in the job, and he said yes.
“Great,” I said. “I’ll have Jim Hendry call you about a contract.”
“Don’t I need to interview?” Trammell asked.
“Heck, no,” I said. “I know you’ll do a good job here.”
That was the truth. He did a great job for me. Though he was passed up for the Cubs manager job after I left, he deserves another chance and I hope he gets it.
Hendry was right about essentially having an open checkbook from the Tribune Co. to buy players. Right after the general managers’ meeting in late November, he signed outfielder Alfonso Soriano, one of the preeminent free agents that winter, to an eight-year, $136 million contract, and utility man Mark DeRosa for three years, $13 million. In December he added to his booty lefty Ted Lilly for four years, $40 million, and right-hander Jason Marquis for three years, $20 million to bolster our rotation behind the staff’s ace, Carlos Zambrano. In addition, Hendry signed our third baseman, Aramis Ramirez, to a five-year, $73 million extension. That was a total haul of $282 million in new contracts. The Lilly contract in particular showed Hendry’s doggedness. We were at the winter meetings in Orlando when, in the middle of his negotiations with Lilly’s agent, he suddenly started feeling dizzy and having chest pains. He kept putting it off, maintaining he was all right, just a little fatigued, until finally I insisted on taking him the hospital to have him checked out. I drove him right to the emergency room at the hospital in Orlando, whereupon they determined he was having a heart attack. I’m sure a lot of that had to do with the pressure Jim was under from the Tribune Co. While he was in the hospital, he was still trying to sign players, and on the day before he was discharged, I walked into his room and he was sitting up, completing the Lilly deal over the phone. I looked at him and said to myself, These guys really are committed!
We went to spring training in Mesa, Arizona, with the idea of playing Soriano in center field, DeRosa at second, and Cesar Izturis, who’d been a backup for the Dodgers and Cubs the year before, as our everyday shortstop. Our catcher, Michael Barrett, was a good hitter but subpar defensively. It didn’t take long, however, for us to realize that it might be asking too much of Soriano—who had just been converted from a second baseman to a left fielder by Washington the year before—to now move to center. I had always operated on the premise that to win, you need to be strong defensively up the middle, and even though we started out with that alignment—Barrett behind the plate, DeRosa at second, Izturis at short, and Soriano in center—I had reservations about all of it. I loved DeRosa a lot. He was a smart, versatile, hard-ass player who knew how to play the game, but he wasn’t a natural second baseman and I didn’t like the way he turned the double play. Where we were really strong was the infield corners, with Derrek Lee, a Gold Glove, 30-homer man at first base, and Ramirez, a .300, 100 RBI hitter at third.
At the end of the spring I told Hendry, “You did your job, Jim. Now I’ll do mine. Go out and relax and play some golf!”
By the quirk of the schedule we opened the 2007 season on April 2 in Cincinnati, and I’m sure Bob Castellini got a lot of enjoyment watching the Reds beat us on Opening Day and taking two of three in the opening series. On April 3, an off-day, it was announced that Sam Zell, a Chicago-based equity investor, had completed an $8.2 billion deal to purchase the Tribune Co., and all its newspapers and properties, including the Cubs and Wrigley Field. I had suspected the Tribune Co. was getting ready to sell the team, but happening this soon caught us all by surprise. What this meant for us going forward was uncertain. I only knew that Zell’s prime interest was in real estate and therefore it probably didn’t bode well for the Cubs. In any case, I couldn’t worry about it. I had enough problems with my team’s play on the field.
When we lost a fourth straight game on April 13 to start out 0–3 at Wrigley and 3–6 overall—a game in which Zambrano blew a 5–0 lead in the fifth inning, and the reliever I replaced him with, Will Ohman, threw only nine pitches, eight of them balls—I had my first temper flare-up as Cubs manager. What set me off was one of the writers asking me after the game what wasn’t working. “What the hell do you think isn’t working?” I said, adding, “I can start to see some of the ways this team has lost ball games.”
We continued to flounder most of April, and when we were 10–14 at the end of the month, Hendry came to me and said, “I thought you said I could play golf!”
“I always thought Lou was the most interesting manager I ever had,” said DeRosa. “Bobby Cox was like a father figure, same as Bruce Bochy. Buck Showalter was more like a military guy where everything had to be in place. But Lou was pure theater. He was the biggest star on the team, even though we had guys like Derrek Lee, Ramirez, and Soriano. I actually enjoyed the way he’d kick you in the rear. Lou figured out by May 1 what was wrong and what his players were made of. He’d manipulate you if he thought you were soft, and if you were, you wouldn’t be around long.
“He had me in the lineup on Opening Day against the Reds, versus Aaron Harang, and then the next day, with Bronson Arroyo pitching for them, he had me benched. I was really pissed. I was a guy who always wanted to play all 162. I went out to the dugout and called my father in New Jersey and told him I wasn’t in the lineup. I told him that I’d heard Lou was a guy who, if he got on you, he respected you if you pushed back. I asked my father if he thought this was too early in the season to test that. He said, ‘If you want to play, go get it!’ So I marched back into Lou’s office and said, ‘I want to play!’ He walked outside to the bulletin board, tore the lineup down and announced to the whole clubhouse, ‘I have to put a new lineup up because DeRosa here wants to play.’
“Another time, I was at the plate with a 3-1 count and a runner on first base. Lou sent the runner, who was thrown out when I swung
through the ball. After the inning I came into the dugout and Lou jumped me. ‘What the hell were you doing, not taking there?’ he screamed. I fired back at him, ‘Damn, Lou, it’s a 3-1 count, I got leverage there! I’m trying to go deep!’ He scowled at me and said, ‘Deep? You haven’t gone deep in two years!’ With Lou, you just had to laugh it off.”
When things only got worse in May, I knew I had to start making changes. We were in the throes of a five-game losing streak and 22–30 on June 1 when Zambrano had another fifth-inning meltdown. After allowing five runs on five hits, he engaged in fisticuffs with his batterymate, Barrett, in the dugout. Zambrano went to the locker room and Barrett followed him up there, which was a big mistake. Zambrano was a big dude with big fists who reminded me of Rob Dibble, and Barrett took the worst of the fight. Zambrano was irked with Barrett for committing a passed ball and a throwing error on the same play in that fifth inning. It may also have been a culmination of Zambrano’s frustrations the first two months. He was in the last year of his contract and upset that the Cubs’ front office was seemingly dragging its feet on an extension. His fastball had lost a few miles per hour, and he wasn’t pitching well. That June 1 loss, in which he gave up 13 hits and 7 runs in five innings, left him at 5–5 with a 5.62 ERA for his first 12 starts. He was pressing and made it clear he just didn’t want to pitch to Barrett.
From that point on, I matched up Zambrano with our backup catchers until June 20, when we traded Barrett to San Diego. Four days earlier we’d acquired Jason Kendall, a proven, veteran catcher who’d been a three-time All-Star with the Pirates. The fact was, the Zambrano-Barrett fight was embarrassing and left the impression with some of the media that things were spinning out of control. In my office afterward, one of the writers noted that I hadn’t been kicked out of a game yet, to which I replied, “It’ll happen. I just haven’t seen anything on the field that I thought was flagrant enough to go out there and really argue about.”
The next day it did happen. Before the game, John McDonough came into my office to talk about the team. He was an involved boss, and I liked that. He said to me, “You came here with a reputation as a firebrand, but you’ve been pretty calm and don’t argue. If there’s a close play, maybe you should go out there and light a fire under these guys!” Then, like Mr. Steinbrenner, he said, “Don’t worry, we’ll pay your fine.”
So, in the eighth inning of a 5–3 loss to the Braves that day, Angel Pagan, one of my reserve outfielders, was thrown out trying to steal third base on a ball that had bounced away from the catcher. I thought he’d beaten the throw, and stormed out to confront the third base umpire, Mark Wegner. In the aftermath of my dirt-kicking, cap-tossing tirade, it was reported I made contact with Wegner. I didn’t think so—even in my wildest rages I was always aware of getting physical in any way with umpires. Nevertheless, the imbroglio with Wegner earned me a four-game suspension and a $4,000 fine. Wegner is a really good ump—he lives near me in Brandon, Florida, a suburb of Tampa—and he got the call right. He just happened to be my foil that day. I later sent him a note of apology.
But as McDonough had reminded me, sometimes you have to get yourself ejected for the good of the team. I knew I had to change my thinking. The year away from managing had caused me to reflect on my wild ways while also devoting more time to my spirituality. When the 2007 season began I made a conscious effort to maintain a calmer disposition. But we were playing badly—too many errors and bonehead plays, which I just couldn’t tolerate. There was also an ESPN report—which Derrek Lee termed “completely false”—that my players were griping about my criticisms of their poor play. I knew if we were going to get untracked and start playing up to our ability, I had to shore up our up-the-middle defense (while also hoping Zambrano would get his head together).
I had started that process on May 1 when I moved Soriano to his more comfortable position in left field and replaced him in center with Jacque Jones, a fine defensive outfielder who’d hit 27 homers for the Cubs in ’06. Then, on June 1, I installed Ryan Theriot, who’d been playing all over the infield, as my everyday shortstop, and on June 9 turned second base over to our other utility infielder, the 5′9″, 165-pound “flyweight” Mike Fontenot. Theriot gave me some much-needed speed, and Ivan DeJesus did a great job getting him ready to play shortstop. Theriot and Fontenot had played together at LSU, so teaming them up was kind of a natural and they really stabilized the middle of the infield. Earlier, I’d moved DeRosa from second to third when Ramirez was on the disabled list for two weeks. After that I moved him all around while keeping him in the lineup for the most games he’d ever played—149. DeRosa had a terrific first season with the Cubs as my all-purpose man (.293, 10 HR, 72 RBI) and proved to be worth every penny of the contract we gave him.
By late June we had started playing much better, inching closer and closer to .500. We reached it on June 29 with a dramatic 6–5 win against the Brewers that was decided on Ramirez’s two-out, two-run homer in the ninth inning.
“That game was when we all came together,” said DeRosa. “Lou had made all his moves and it was like we all said, ‘Okay, let’s win the division now!’”
Once we got the defense and catching straightened out, everything began to turn around. We were 17–9 in July and 62–59 overall when we climbed into first place to stay when we beat the Cardinals, 2–1, on August 17. In addition, Zambrano, who finally got a five-year, $91.5 million extension on August 16, provided a huge boost to the pitching, going from 5–5 with a 5.62 ERA on June 1 to 18–13, 3.95, at season’s end.
Admittedly, the NL Central was the weakest division in baseball in 2007, which is why it took only 85 wins to finish first. While I was gratified to have been able to make a 96-loss, last-to-first turnaround, it was a long first season in Chicago. On the other hand, the postseason was all too short. We were swept by the Diamondbacks in the division series, managing a total of only six runs in the three games. I was criticized by the media for removing Zambrano in game 1 after six innings, with the score tied 1–1. But I had what I thought were good reasons. For one thing, the reliever I replaced him with, Carlos Marmol, had been unhittable all season (5–1, 1.43 ERA, 96 strikeouts in 69⅓ innings). My other reason was I wanted to preserve Zambrano as much as I could since he would be coming back on short rest for a game 4. Before I made my move on Zambrano I talked it over with Larry Rothschild and he agreed. But Marmol gave up a home run to Mark Reynolds, the first batter he faced in the seventh, and the Diamondbacks added another run off him in the inning to seal the deal on a 3–1 win.
In the second game, Arizona roughed up Ted Lilly for six runs in 3⅓ innings, which we were unable to overcome. Game 3 at Wrigley Field—in which we managed just one extra-base hit in a 5–1 loss—was a field day for all the billy-goat-curse theorists. For one thing, sometime overnight before the game, someone had actually hung the skinned carcass of a goat over the statue of the Cubs’ beloved, iconic broadcaster Harry Caray outside the ballpark.
When it was over, the media was still talking about my game 1 decision on Zambrano. The media are like the fans. They want results. But I would do the same thing today. No regrets. What I do regret is not having a meeting with my team before the series, to try to take the pressure off them by telling them we were the underdogs. That’s what Joe Torre always did with his Yankees teams. We had scored runs most of the season, and I should have taken it on my shoulders to tell them not to pay attention to all this billy goat superstition stuff and just have fun.
Years later, I told Alan Nero, who was also the agent for the future Cubs’ manager Joe Maddon, the same thing. When Maddon was the manager who finally broke through all the curses and jinx talk to get the Cubs to their first World Series since 1945 in 2016, I knew from past experience the billy goat stuff would still be hovering over the Wrigley fans and media with every Cubs misplay. I’m not sure if Alan ever transmitted that to Maddon, but I couldn’t help noticing after the Cubs fell behind 3–1 to the Indians in the World Series, he tol
d his players not to show up to the ballpark until 5:30 p.m., skipping batting practice, and to “just go play.” They didn’t lose another game.
A month after the 2007 season, a shock wave went through Wrigley Field when John McDonough announced his resignation as the Cubs’ president to take a similar position with the National Hockey League’s Chicago Blackhawks. Though it was spun by McDonough as an opportunity he just couldn’t pass up, Hendry and I both knew it was more a result of the uncertainty of what Sam Zell was going to do with the Cubs. In any case, this was troubling news because McDonough had been so supportive of Jim and me, giving us all the resources we’d asked for, and we didn’t figure to have the same relationship with his successor, Crane Kenney, a high-level Tribune Co. exec whose main concentration had been on the business side of the operation.
When Hendry and I regrouped after the ’07 NLCS to map out plans for the next year, we both agreed a major deficiency had been the predominance of right-handed hitters in our lineup. Our only two lefties, Cliff Floyd and Jacque Jones, were both free agents whom Hendry didn’t want to re-sign. Instead, like Gillick in Seattle, he looked to the Far East, and, for four years and $48 million, he signed Kosuke Fukodome, a Japanese left-handed-hitting outfielder who’d batted over .300 in four of his last six seasons with the Chunichi Dragons and never had fewer than 13 homers in a season. I obviously knew nothing about Fukodome, but Bobby Valentine and Trey Hillman, who had seen a lot of him when they managed in Japan, both said he could handle major-league pitching and would potentially be a big asset for us.
