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Posted

I don’t know the a situation but on a general note, at least follow the standard checks for cancer. And if you don’t like that a doctor is paying enough attention to something, get another doctor.

Posted
30 minutes ago, Fastbreak said:

Man. It sucks when your childhood heroes die.

I never liked the Cubs or cared either way about Sandburg.  It still sucked to see a co-worker's post last night about his childhood baseball hero's death. 
 

I know lots of folks say athletes aren't heroes; but they can be inspirational, just the same. Earl, Pudge, Dream... when they pass, it's still gonna suck for me. Sandburg was the same for many fans of the sport. 

Posted (edited)
27 minutes ago, Scraps said:

Watched him many afternoon summer days on WGN growing up.  

sucks....RIP 

We didn’t have cable, but on a moment’s notice, when a friend (who was a Grateful Dead & Drug Taking Enthusiast) needed me to ride along with him from Dallas to Chicago so that his dad would let him take a car (Diesel, NOT Turbo Diesel Mercedes station wagon that topped out at about 62 mph), I said “Sure, I’ll go.”

Arrived to Chicago on a Friday to check out the ticket scene a day before the show, then Saturday came and…

1) I saw Ryne Sandburg hit a home run in Wrigley Field followed by…

2) Harry Carey singing “Take Me Out To The Game” followed by…

3) …seeing The Grateful Dead.
 

All on the same day.

It was one hell of a Saturday in late July in 1990.

R.I.P. Ryne Sandberg

R.I.P. Harry Carey

R.I.P. Jerry Garcia

 

IMG_6263.jpeg

Edited by Napoleon
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Posted

RiP Ryne. Always respected his game but as an Astro fan was definitely more of a Biggio guy. 

BTW while comparing their careers I saw that both were not elected to the Hall until their 3rd year of eligibility.  Baseball writers are the fucking worst.   

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Posted

Cross posting. Should have put it here. Grew up where the only baseball I got to see was WGN or TBS. Depended on what the cable company wanted to show that day. Meant I never got to see my team, but I did not mine. Respected the Cubs. Stepmom was a diehard Cubbie. 

Anyways, thanks Ryan. You made afternoons fun. For those who have a bit of time today. 

 

Posted

JoePos:

Spoiler

The Man Who Changed the Cubs
Ryne Sandberg was as close to the perfect ballplayer as you'll ever find — and he made the Cubs matter again.

Jul 28, 2025

On August 9, 1959, a man named Sandy and his wife, Libby, were in their home in Spokane listening to a baseball game on the radio between the New York Yankees and Kansas City Athletics. The Yankees were playing poorly that season, their worst baseball since the war, and true to form, they fell behind 3-0 early. But they clawed back and tied the game in the bottom of the eighth.

In the ninth, the Yankees sent in their mercurial reliever Ryne Duren. Nobody threw harder than Duren — perhaps no one ever. But he could barely see, even when wearing thick glasses, and his career was a long series of walks, wild pitches, hit batters, and late nights. “I never really knew what it was like to pitch a sober inning,” he said years later after becoming an addiction counselor. He never could quite harness that magical fastball.

But he did on that August day. Duren came into the game in the ninth with the score tied and tossed six scoreless innings. He struck out six Athletics (including the young Roger Maris twice). The Yankees finally scored a run in the 15th to win it. 

In Spokane, Sandy and Libby listened in admiration.

“Ryne,” Sandy said. “That’s a good name.”

Exactly 40 days later, their second son was born. They named him Ryne Sandberg.

Quote

 

North Central High School’s sporting resurgence has been led by Ryne Sandberg, a first-team All-City basketballer, super All-City baseballer and All-American football quarterback. He completed 77 of 142 passes for 1,100 yards for 10-1 Indians, finished career with record 2,514 yards. He also led American Legion baseball hitters with .457 mark and was brilliant afield.

Spokane Chronicle, January 18, 1978

 


Ryne Sandberg was not the best baseball prospect on his own high school baseball team. North Central had a power-hitting catcher named Chris Henry, and scouts came from all over to see him, and when they saw Sandberg play, they thought, “Decent talent. What a shame.” Sandberg had already signed with Washington State to play quarterback. He was a Parade All-American football player.

But one scout knew better. Bill Harper was a longtime Oregon high school baseball coach and relatively new Philadelphia Phillies scout … and when he watched Sandberg play ball, he just knew — knew it in his soul — that the kid’s true love was baseball.

Bill Harper knew it even before Ryne Sandberg did.

“The only guy I ever talked to who knew Ryne would be a star was Bill Harper,” Sandberg’s North Central coach Ken Eilmes told the local paper. “Bill told me, ‘I’ve dreamed of signing a kid like this. He can do it all.’”

Harper shared his grand vision with the Sandberg family. He mostly drew resistance. Sandy and Libby may have named him Ryne, but they wanted him to go to college. The one member of the Sandberg family who seemed responsive was Ryne’s older brother Del, a high school coach and the man who taught Ryne Sandberg how to play baseball.

Del Sandberg, incidentally, was named for longtime Phillies star Del Ennis.

Harper was able to convince the Phillies to spend a 20th-round pick on Sandberg. And he was able to convince the Phillies’ West Coast supervisor, Moose Johnson, to give him 30 grand for the signing.

“This is high round money,” Harper told the family. Del and Ryne went outside to discuss the deal. Through the window, Harper watched the brothers shoot a few baskets on the backyard rim. He watched Ryne throw down a couple of dunks, displaying the exact sort of easy athleticism that had left him breathless in the first place. He whispered a small prayer.

The boys came in a few minutes later and accepted the deal.

“How much did you give him?” the Phillies director of scouting Dallas Green asked.

“Thirty thousand,” Harper said meekly.

“All I can say,” Green barked, “is he better be able to play.”

They went different ways, Ryne Sandberg and Dallas Green. Sandberg married his high school sweetheart, Cindy, and went to play shortstop in Spartanburg, South Carolina. And in Philadelphia, Phillies owner Ruly Carpenter had soured on nice-guy manager Danny Ozark. The team was listless, lifeless, and Carpenter told general manager Paul Owens that it was time to shake things up.

Owens promptly hired the exact opposite of Ozark — the ferocious Dallas Green.

“I express my thoughts,” Green said by way of introduction. “I’m a screamer, a yeller, a cusser. I never hold back.”

Green was only hired as an interim manager, but he immediately tore into his players for squandering their great talent. “I say what I think,” Green said. “We all need a jarring sometime or other.” And the Phillies responded, won 19 of their last 30, and Green was brought back on a one-year deal in 1980.

And … what a year. The team had been around since 1883, when they were still called the Quakers. That first year, they were far and away the worst team in professional baseball. Their flagbearer was an indomitable 20-year-old pitcher named John Coleman, who lost a never-to-be broken record of 48. 

It was mostly like that for the Phillies for most of the next 100 or so years. They never won a title. They lost 100-plus games 14 times. But Dallas Green wasn’t having it, and in 1980 the Phillies squeaked out a division title over the ascending Montreal Expos, beat the Astros on Garry Maddox’s run-scoring double in Game 5, and took out Kansas City in a six-game World Series.

Then, in a move as shocking as his hiring in the first place, Dallas Green left the Phillies to run the Chicago Cubs.

“I’m no savior,” he growled, but the way he said it convinced Cubs faithful that he absolutely was the savior.

And a few weeks after taking the job, Green traded shortstop Ivan de Jesus to the Phillies in order to get fiery shortstop Larry Bowa. Green and Bowa were cut from the same cloth.

And Green figured, what the heck, if he was going to make a deal for an old ballplayer like Bowa, he might as well get a little more, and he demanded that the Phillies give him that Ryne Sandberg kid that Bill Harper had given all that damn money to.

Baseball was very different in the early 1980s. There were no Top 100 prospect lists, or at least none that baseball fans paid any attention to. If it had been a quarter century later, Ryne Sandberg would have been hyped and on the top of every  prospect list and, almost certainly, the Phillies wouldn’t have traded him. Sandberg had hit .293 and flashed speed and power as one of the youngest players in Class AAA baseball. That’s a can’t-miss prospect. Keith Law would have been gushing like Steamboat Geyser in Yellowstone.

But, it was different then, and it took a little while for everybody to understand just what Ryne Sandberg was about.

In fact, it took until June 23, 1984. Cubs fans of a certain age can still name the date. 

There were more than 38,000 fans at Wrigley Field on that Saturday afternoon. This was in those days when such crowds were pretty rare at Wrigley — but the Cubs were playing their best baseball in years, and the game was against the much-despised Cardinals. It was the NBC game of the week backup — Bob Costas and Tony Kubek were in the booth.

The Cardinals scored first. The Cubs tied it up on a Sandberg single.

The Cardinals scored six runs for a 7-1 lead. The Cubs chipped away on a Sandberg RBI.

The Cardinals scored two more runs to make the score 9-3. The Cubs scored five runs, the last two on a Sandberg single. And the score stayed 9-8 until the bottom of the ninth.

That’s when Sandberg hit a home run off Bruce Sutter to tie it up.

The Cardinals scored two runs in the 10th to seemingly put the game on ice. Sandberg hit another homer off Sutter in the bottom of the tenth to tie it up again.

And then the Cubs won it in the 11th.

“Do you believe it?” Bob Costas called out.

“I’m in a state of shock,” Sandberg told reporters afterward. “I don’t even know what day it is.”

“Sandberg is the best player I have ever seen,” Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog yelped.

“That’s entertainment!” the Chicago Tribune headline blared the next morning, 

The Sandberg Game changed the whole Cubs season — and really the entire trajectory of the franchise. 

And it launched Ryne Sandberg. For the rest of the season, nobody could get him out, and nobody could beat the Cubbies. The team went 59-31 the rest of the way, and ran away from the equally surprising New York Mets. Sandberg did everything — he led the league in triples (19) and runs (114), knocked 200 hits, stole 32 bases, won the Gold Glove, and took home the most valuable player award. 

But he did something much more than any of that — he made the Chicago Cubs matter again in a way they had not in decades. People think the story of the Chicago Cubs before their triumph in 2016 was of heartbreak, but it mostly wasn’t. Heartbreak requires hope, and the Cubs were rarely good enough to inspire hope.

The Cubs inspired despair.

And then, suddenly, here was this All-American kid, 6-foot-1, quiet, unassuming, perfect. He was a daily miracle. He hit for power. He stole bases. He played great defense. He hit for average. And he did it all with near flawless equanimity, as if he always knew there was a parent and child in the Wrigley bleachers watching. Doug Glanville tells a wonderful story about how when Sandberg was in the minor leagues, his Spartanburg manager Bill Dancy raged at him for what he perceived a lackadaisical attitude.

“You gotta break a helmet once in a while,” Dancy said.

So Sandberg tried that — after a rough at-bat, he smashed his helmet.

“I thought to myself, ‘Now what?’” Sandberg told Glanville. “‘I don’t have a helmet anymore.’ … What did that prove? Well, it proved I could break a helmet.”

No, that was not Ryne Sandberg. He was named for Ryne Duren, yes, but he was in pretty much every way Duren’s opposite, sturdy as opposed to volatile, constant as opposed to unpredictable, reliable as opposed to reckless. In 1989, he led the league in runs again and carried the Cubs back to the playoffs. The next year, he became the first second baseman since Rogers Hornsby to lead the league in home runs. In 1994, he walked away from the game, believing that he had nothing left to offer. In 1996, he came back and hit 25 home runs.

All the while, he made the Chicago Cubs matter. Ernie Banks is and always will be Mr. Cub, but Sandberg is the player who changed the very meaning of Cubs baseball.

Ryne Sandberg died Monday at the age of 65 after a battle with prostate cancer. I was not sure whether or not this was a good day to tell my favorite Sandberg story, but I think it fits the day. I have a friend, a Cardinals fan, who hated Sandberg more than any other player. It always struck me as quite funny because Sandberg seemed to me like the least hateable player of my lifetime. I mean — Dale Murphy, Tony Gwynn, Ryne Sandberg, Ichiro, Robin Yount, Ozzie Smith, who could possibly hate these players?

But it was no joke: My friend truly and unapologetically despised Sandberg. It was such a deeply ingrained enmity that he would find his day ruined whenever Sandberg had a good day. I used to ask him all the time, “So what gives, why do you hate Ryne Sandberg so much?”

And he would say: “Why do you hate John Elway so much?”

And I’d say: “Well, that’s different. John Elway personally destroyed my life over and over by beating my Cleveland Browns in championship games. But Ryne Sandberg didn’t really do that to your Cardinals. The Cubs never even made the World Series while he was with the team. I don’t get it.”

My friend shrugged. I clearly didn’t get it. And I’ve thought a lot about it through the years, and I’ve come up with a theory. My friend’s true hatred is of the Chicago Cubs. This is a natural thing for a Cardinals fan to feel, but over time, he took it to a whole other level — the Cubs represented to him everything unholy about baseball. They represented sloppy play, and dumb decisions, and bad baserunning, and terrible defense, and inept managers, and drunken fans who think every fly ball is a home run. To him, the Cubs were the ANTI-CARDINALS — or at least what my friend and so many other St. Louis fans have always associated with the Cardinals — and in all those years when they lost daily, and never played in the World Series, and did ridiculous things, the world felt at peace.

Then Ryne Sandberg came along. And he was so anti-Cubs. He was so sound, so good, so steady, so dependable. He made the Cubs a real baseball team. 

He was a Cardinal in Cubs clothing.

And I think that’s what made my friend hate him so much.

 

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