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Chicago Cubs
The Chicago Cubs are an American professional baseball franchise located on the north side of Chicago, Illinois. They are members of the Central Division of Major League Baseball's National League.
The club played its first games in 1870 as the Chicago White Stockings, before officially becoming the Chicago Cubs for the 1907 season. The Cubs are the oldest currently active U.S. professional sports club, continuously existing in the same city for their entire history. They are one of the two remaining charter members of the National League (the other being the Atlanta Braves). Since Chicago did not have a fully operating White Stockings team for two seasons due to the Great Chicago Fire, differences continue to be voiced when considering the elder status of this ball club: Although the Braves have played for more consecutive seasons, the Cubs hold the distinction of having been founded a full season earlier (Cubs in 1870 and Braves in 1871).
The Cubs are also one of two active major league clubs based in Chicago, the other being the Chicago White Sox of the American League. The team is currently owned by Thomas S. Ricketts, son of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts.
In 1906, the franchise recorded a Major League Baseball record 116 wins (tied by the 2001 Seattle Mariners) and posted a modern-era record winning percentage of .763, still held today. They appeared in their first World Series the same year, falling to their crosstown rivals, the White Sox, four games to two. The Cubs won back-to-back World Series championships in 1907 and 1908, becoming the first Major League club to play in three consecutive Fall Classics, and the first to win it twice. The club has appeared in seven World Series following their 1908 title, most recently in 1945. The Cubs have not won the World Series in 111 years, the longest championship drought of any major North American professional sports team,[1][2] and are often referred to as the "Lovable Losers" because of this distinction. They are also known as "The North Siders" because Wrigley Field, their home park since 1916, is located in Chicago's north side Lake View community at 1060 West Addison Street.
- 1 Team history
- 1.1 Early club history
- 1.2 The Wrigley years (1921–1981)
- 1.3 Tribune Company years (1981–2008)
- 1.4 The Ricketts era (2009–present)
- 2 Current roster
- 3 Memorable events and records
- 3.1 Merkle's Boner
- 3.2 Babe Ruth's called shot
- 3.3 Riot at Wrigley
- 3.4 RBI record
- 3.5 The Homer in the Gloamin'
- 3.6 Rick Monday and the U.S. flag
- 3.7 The Sandberg game
- 3.8 Most home-runs in a month
- 3.9 10,000th win
- 3.10 Wood's 20K game
- 3.11 Championship drought
- 3.12 Tape-measure home runs
- 3.13 Other records
- 4 Individual awards
- 5 Minor league affiliations
- 6 Spring training history
- 7 Media
- 8 Ownership
- 9 Other information
- 10 See also
- 11 References and notes
- 12 Further reading
- 13 External links
Team history
Early club history
1870–1875: The beginning
Although 1876 is generally recognized as the birth-year of the Cubs franchise, the Chicago club was initially founded in 1870 as the Chicago White Stockings and played a single season in a pro-am league called the National Association of Base Ball Players. The White Stockings won that league's championship and followed that effort playing the next five seasons (with the exception of 1872 and 1873, when the club temporarily ceased operations following the Great Chicago Fire) in the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players along with the Boston Red Stockings (now the Atlanta Braves). Both of these early leagues were hampered by a variety of ethical issues, such as the "throwing" of games and the league's inability (or unwillingness) to enforce rules and player contracts. Because of these challenges, William Hulbert, the president of the Chicago club, spearheaded the development of the National League, whose inaugural season was 1876.
1876–1902: A National LeagueAlbert Spalding and infielders Ross Barnes, Deacon White, and Adrian "Cap" Anson, to join the team prior to the N.L.'s first season. The White Stockings played their home games at West Side Grounds, and quickly established themselves as one of the new league's top teams. Spalding won forty-seven games and Barnes led the league in hitting at .429 as Chicago won the first ever National League pennant, which at the time was the game's top prize.
After back-to-back pennants in 1880 and 1881, Hulbert died, and Spalding, who had retired to start Spalding sporting goods, assumed ownership of the club. The White Stockings, with Anson acting as player/manager, captured their third consecutive pennant in 1882, and Anson established himself as the game's first true superstar. In 1885 and '86, after winning N.L. pennants, the White Stockings met the short-lived American Association champion in that era's version of a World Series. Both seasons resulted in match ups with the St. Louis Brown Stockings, with the clubs tying in 1885 and with St. Louis winning in 1886. This was the genesis of what would eventually become one of the greatest rivalries in sports. In all, the Anson-led Chicago Base Ball Club won six National League pennants between 1876 and 1886. As a result, Chicago's club nickname transitioned, and by 1890 they had become known as the Chicago Colts,[3] or sometimes "Anson's Colts," referring to Cap's influence within the club. Anson was the first player in history credited with collecting 3,000 career hits. After a disappointing record of 59-73 and a 9th-place finish in 1897, Anson was released by the Cubs as both a player and manager.[4] Due to Anson's absence from the club after twenty two years, local newspaper reporters started to refer to the Cubs as the "Orphans".[4]
After the 1900 season, the American Base-Ball League formed as a rival professional league, and incidentally the club's old White Stockings nickname would be adopted by a new American League neighbor to the south.[5]
1902–1920: A Cub dynastyJim Hart. The franchise was nicknamed the Cubs by the Chicago Daily News in 1902, although not officially becoming the Chicago Cubs until the 1907 season.[6] During this period, which has become known as baseball's dead-ball era, Cub infielders Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance were made famous as a double-play combination by Franklin P. Adams' poem Baseball's Sad Lexicon. The poem first appeared in the July 18, 1910 edition of the New York Evening Mail. Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown, Jack Taylor, Ed Reulbach, Jack Pfiester, and Orval Overall were several key pitchers for the Cubs during this time period. With Chance acting as player-manager from 1905 to 1912, the Cubs won four pennants and two World Series titles over a five-year span. Although they fell to the "Hitless Wonders" White Sox in the 1906 World Series, the Cubs recorded a record 116 victories and the best winning percentage (.763) in Major League history. With mostly the same roster, Chicago won back-to-back World Series championships in 1907 and 1908, becoming the first Major League club to play three times in the Fall Classic and the first to win it twice. However, the Cubs have not won a World Series since; this remains the longest championship drought in North American professional sports.
The next season, veteran catcher Johnny Kling left the team to become a professional pocket billiards player. Some historians think Kling's absence was significant enough to prevent the Cubs from also winning a third straight title in 1909, as they finished 6 games out of first place.[7] When Kling returned the next year, the Cubs won the pennant again, but lost to the Philadelphia Athletics in the 1910 World Series.
In 1914, advertising executive Albert Lasker obtained a large block of the club's shares and before the 1916 season assumed majority ownership of the franchise. Lasker brought in a wealthy partner, Charles Weeghman, the proprietor of a popular chain of lunch counters who had previously owned the Chicago Whales of the short-lived Federal League. As principal owners, the pair moved the club from the West Side Grounds to the much newer Weeghman Park, which had been constructed for the Whales only two years earlier. The Cubs responded by winning a pennant in the war-shortened season of 1918, where they played a part in another team's curse: the Boston Red Sox defeated Grover Cleveland Alexander's Cubs four games to two in the 1918 World Series, Boston's last Series championship until 2004.
Beginning in 1916, Bill Wrigley of chewing-gum fame acquired an increasing quantity of stock in the Cubs. By 1921 he was the majority owner, maintaining that status into the 1930s.
Meanwhile, the year 1919 saw the start of the tenure of Bill Veeck, Sr. as team president. Veeck would hold that post throughout the 1920s and into the 30s. The management team of Wrigley and Veeck came to be known as the "double-Bills."
The Wrigley years (1921–1981)
1929–1938: Every three yearsFall Classic, as they fell to their AL rivals each time. The '32 series against the Yankees featured Babe Ruth's "called shot" at Wrigley Field in Game 3. There were some historic moments for the Cubs as well; In 1930, Hack Wilson, one of the top home run hitters in the game, had one of the most impressive seasons in MLB history, hitting 56 home runs and establishing the current runs-batted-in record of 191. That 1930 club, which boasted six eventual Hall of Famers (Wilson, Gabby Hartnett, Rogers Hornsby, George "High Pockets" Kelly, Kiki Cuyler and manager Joe McCarthy) established the current team batting average record of .309. In 1935 the Cubs claimed the pennant in thrilling fashion, winning a record 21 games in a row in September. The '38 club saw Dizzy Dean lead the team's pitching staff and provided a historic moment when they won a crucial late-season game at Wrigley Field over the Pittsburgh Pirates with a walk-off home run by Gabby Hartnett, which became known in baseball lore as "The Homer in the Gloamin'".[9]
After the "double-Bills" (Wrigley and Veeck) died in 1932 and 1933 respectively, P.K. Wrigley, son of Bill Wrigley, took over as majority owner. He was unable to extend his father's baseball success beyond 1938, and the Cubs slipped into years of mediocrity, although the Wrigley family would retain control of the team until 1981.
1945: The Curse
The Cubs enjoyed one more pennant at the close of World War II, finishing 98–56. Due to the wartime travel restrictions, the first three games of the 1945 World Series were played in Detroit, where the Cubs won two games, including a one-hitter by Claude Passeau, and the final four were played at Wrigley. In Game 4 of the Series, the Curse of the Billy Goat was allegedly laid upon the Cubs when P.K. Wrigley ejected Billy Sianis, who had come to Game 4 with two box seat tickets, one for him and one for his goat. They paraded around for a few innings, but Wrigley demanded the goat leave the park due to its unpleasant odor. Upon his ejection, Mr. Sianis uttered, "The Cubs, they ain't gonna win no more." The Cubs lost Game 4, lost the Series, and have not been back since. It has also been said by many that Sianis put a "curse" on the Cubs, apparently preventing the team from playing in the World Series. After losing the 1945 World Series to the Detroit Tigers, the Cubs finished with winning seasons the next two years, but those teams did not enter post-season play.
In the following two decades after Sianis' ill will, the Cubs played mostly forgettable baseball, finishing among the worst teams in the National League on an almost annual basis. Longtime infielder/manager Phil Cavarretta, who had been a key player during the '45 season, was fired during spring training in 1954 after admitting the team was unlikely to finish above fifth place. Although shortstop Ernie Banks would become one of the star players in the league during the next decade, finding help for him proved a difficult task, as quality players such as Hank Sauer were few and far between. This, combined with poor ownership decisions such as the College of Coaches, and the ill-fated trade of future Hall of Famer Lou Brock to the Cardinals for pitcher Ernie Broglio (who won only 7 games over the next three seasons), hampered on-field performance.
1969: The Fall of '69
The late-1960s brought hope of a renaissance, with third baseman Ron Santo, pitcher Ferguson Jenkins, and outfielder Billy Williams joining Banks. After losing a dismal 103 games in 1966, the Cubs brought home consecutive winning records in '67 and '68, marking the first time a Cub team had accomplished that feat in over two decades.
In 1969 the Cubs, managed by Leo Durocher, built a substantial lead in the newly created National League Eastern Division by mid-August. Ken Holtzman pitched a no-hitter on August 19, and the division lead grew to 8 1⁄2 games over the St. Louis Cardinals and by 9 1⁄2 games over the New York Mets. After the game of September 2, the Cubs record was 84-52 with the Mets in second place at 77-55. But then a losing streak began just as a Mets winning streak was beginning. The Cubs lost the final game of a series at Cincinnati, then came home to play the resurgent Pittsburgh Pirates (who would finish in third place). After losing the first two games by scores of 9-2 and 13-4, the Cubs led going into the ninth inning. A win would be a positive springboard since the Cubs were to play a crucial series with the Mets the very next day. But Willie Stargell drilled a 2-out, 2-strike pitch from the Cubs' ace reliever, Phil Regan, onto Sheffield Avenue to tie the score in the top of the ninth. The Cubs would lose 7-5 in extra innings.[6] Burdened by a four-game losing streak, the Cubs traveled to Shea Stadium for a short two-game set. The Mets won both games, and the Cubs left New York with a record of 84-58 just 1⁄2 game in front. Disaster followed in Philadelphia, as a 99 loss Phillies team nonetheless defeated the Cubs twice, to extend Chicago's losing streak to eight games. In a key play in the second game, on September 11, Cubs starter Dick Selma threw a surprise pickoff attempt to third baseman Ron Santo, who was nowhere near the bag or the ball. Selma's throwing error opened the gates to a Phillies rally. After that second Philly loss, the Cubs were 84-60 and the Mets had pulled ahead at 85-57. The Mets would not look back. The Cubs' eight-game losing streak finally ended the next day in St. Louis, but the Mets were in the midst of a ten-game winning streak, and the Cubs, wilting from team fatigue, generally deteriorated in all phases of the game.[1] The Mets (who had lost a record 120 games 7 years earlier), would go on to win the World Series. The Cubs, despite a respectable 92-70 record, would be remembered for having lost a remarkable 17 1⁄2 games in the standings to the Mets in the last quarter of the season.
1977–1979: The June Swoon
Following the '69 season, the club posted winning records for the next few seasons, but no playoff action. After the core players of those teams started to move on, the 70s got worse for the team, and they became known as "The Loveable Losers." In 1977, the team found some life, but ultimately experienced one of its biggest collapses. The Cubs hit a high-water mark on June 28 at 47–22, boasting an 8 1⁄2 game NL East lead, as they were led by Bobby Murcer (27 Hr/89 RBI), and Rick Reuschel (20–10). However, the Philadelphia Phillies cut the lead to two by the All-star break, as the Cubs sat 19 games over .500, but they swooned late in the season, going 20–40 after July 31. The Cubs finished in 4th place at 81–81, while Philadelphia surged, finishing with 101 wins. The following two seasons also saw the Cubs get off to a fast start, as the team rallied to over 10 games above .500 well into both seasons, only to again wear down and play poorly later on, and ultimately settling back to mediocrity. This trait became known as the "June Swoon." Again, the Cubs' unusually high number of day games is often pointed to as one reason for the team's inconsistent late season play.
P.K. Wrigley died in 1977. The Wrigley family sold the team to the Chicago Tribune in 1981, ending a 65-year family relationship with the Cubs.
Tribune Company years (1981–2008)
1984: Heartbreak
Green shored[10] up the 1984 roster with a series of transactions. In December, 1983 Scott Sanderson was acquired from Montreal in a three-team deal with San Diego for Carmelo Martinez. Pinch hitter Richie Hebner (.333 BA in 1984) was signed as a free-agent. In spring training, moves continued: LF Gary Matthews and CF Bobby Dernier came from Philadelphia on March 26, for Bill Campbell and a minor leaguer. Reliever Tim Stoddard (10–6 3.82, 7 saves) was acquired the same day for a minor leaguer; veteran pitcher Ferguson Jenkins was released.
The team's commitment to contend was complete when Green made a midseason deal on June 15 to shore up the starting rotation due to injuries to Rick Reuschel (5–5) and Sanderson. The deal brought 1979 NL Rookie of the Year pitcher Rick Sutcliffe from the Cleveland Indians. Iowa Cub Joe Carter and CF Mel Hall were sent to Cleveland for Sutcliffe and back-up C Ron Hassey (.333 with Cubs in 1984). Sutcliffe (5–5 with the Indians) immediately joined Sanderson (8–5 3.14), Eckersley (10–8 3.03), Steve Trout (13–7 3.41) and Dick Ruthven (6–10 5.04) in the starting rotation. Sutcliffe proceeded to go 16–1 for Cubs and capture the Cy Young Award.[10]
The Cubs 1984 starting lineup was very strong.[10] It consisted of LF Matthews (.291 14–82 101 runs 17 SB), C Jody Davis (.256 19–94), RF Keith Moreland (.279 16–80), SS Larry Bowa (.223 10 SB), 1B Leon "Bull" Durham (.279 23–96 16SB), CF Dernier (.278 45 SB), 3B Ron Cey (.240 25–97), Closer Lee Smith(9–7 3.65 33 saves) and 1984 NL MVP Ryne Sandberg (.314 19–84 114 runs, 19 triples,32 SB).[10]
Reserve players Hebner, Thad Bosley, Henry Cotto, Hassey and Dave Owen produced exciting moments. The bullpen depth of Rich Bordi, George Frazier, Warren Brusstar and Dickie Noles did their job in getting the game to Smith or Stoddard.
At the top of the order, Dernier and Sandberg were exciting, aptly coined "the Daily Double" by Harry Caray. With strong defense – Dernier CF and Sandberg 2B, won the NL Gold Glove- solid pitching and clutch hitting, the Cubs were a well balanced team. Following the "Daily Double," Matthews, Durham, Cey, Moreland and Davis gave the Cubs an order with no gaps to pitch around. Sutcliffe anchored a strong top to bottom rotation and Smith was one of the top closers in the game.
The shift in the Cubs' fortunes was characterized June 23 on the "NBC Saturday Game of the Week" contest against the St. Louis Cardinals. it has since been dubbed simply "The Sandberg Game." With the nation watching and Wrigley Field packed, Sandberg emerged as a superstar with not one, but two game-tying home runs against Cardinals closer Bruce Sutter. With his shots in the 9th and 10th innings Wrigley Field erupted and Sandberg set the stage for a comeback win that cemented the Cubs as the team to beat in the East. No one would catch them, except the Padres in the playoffs.
In early August the Cubs swept the Mets in a 4-game home series that further distanced them from the pack. An infamous Keith Moreland-Ed Lynch fight erupted after Lynch hit Moreland with a pitch, perhaps forgetting Moreland was once a linebacker at the University of Texas. It was the second game of a double header and the Cubs had won the first game in part due to a three run home run by Moreland. After the bench-clearing fight the Cubs won the second game, and the sweep put the Cubs at 68–45.
In 1984, the two leagues, American and National, each had two divisions, East and West. The divisional winners met in a best-of-5 series to advance to the World Series, in a "2–3" format, first two games were played at the home of the team who did not have home field advantage. Then the last three games were played at the home of the team, with home field advantage. Thus the first two games were played at Wrigley Field and the next three at the home of their opponents, San Diego. A common and unfounded myth is that since Wrigley Field did not have lights at that time the National League decided to give the home field advantage to the winner of the NL West. In fact, home field advantage had rotated between the winners of the East and West since 1969 when the league expanded. In even numbered years, the NL West had home field advantage. In odd numbered years, the NL East had home field advantage. Since the NL East winners had had home field advantage in 1983, the NL West winners were entitled to it.
The confusion may stem from the fact that Major League Baseball did decide that, should the Cubs make it to the World Series, the American League winner would have home field advantage unless the Cubs hosted home games at an alternate site since the Cubs home field of Wrigley Field did not yet have lights. Rumor was the Cubs could hold home games across town at Comiskey Park, home of the American League's Chicago White Sox. Rather than hold any games in the cross town rival Sox Park, the Cubs made arrangements with the August A. Busch, owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, to use Busch Stadium in St. Louis as the Cubs "home field" for the World Series. This was approved by Major League Baseball and would have enabled the Cubs to host games 1 and 2, along with games 6 and 7 if necessary. At the time home field advantage was rotated between each league. Odd numbered years the AL had home field advantage. Even numbered years the NL had home field advantage. In the 1982 World Series the St. Louis Cardinals of the NL had home field advantage. In the 1983 World Series the Baltimore Orioles of the AL had home field advantage.
In the NLCS, the Cubs easily won the first two games at Wrigley Field against the San Diego Padres. The Padres were the winners of the Western Division with Steve Garvey, Tony Gwynn, Eric Show, Goose Gossage and Alan Wiggins. With wins of 13–0 and 4–2, the Cubs needed to win only one game of the next three in San Diego to make it to the World Series. After being beaten in Game 3 7–1, the Cubs lost Game 4 when Smith, with the game tied 5–5, allowed a game-winning home run to Garvey in the bottom of the ninth inning. In Game 5 the Cubs took a 3–0 lead into the 6th inning, and a 3–2 lead into the seventh with Sutcliffe (who won the Cy Young Award that year) still on the mound. Then, Leon Durham had a sharp grounder go under his glove. This critical error helped the Padres win the game 6–3, with a 4-run 7th inning and keep Chicago out of the 1984 World Series against the Detroit Tigers. The loss ended a spectacular season for the Cubs, one that brought alive a slumbering franchise and made the Cubs relevant for a whole new generation of Cubs fans.
The Padres would be defeated in 5 games by Sparky Anderson's Tigers in the World Series. Baseball experts felt the Cubs would have better represented the National League and would have won at least two World Series games.
1989: NL East champions
In 1989, the first full season with night baseball at Wrigley Field, Don Zimmer's Cubs were led by a core group of veterans in Ryne Sandberg, Rick Sutcliffe and Andre Dawson, who were boosted by a crop of youngsters such as Mark Grace, Shawon Dunston, Greg Maddux, Rookie of the Year Jerome Walton, and Rookie of the Year Runner-Up Dwight Smith. The Cubs won the NL East once again that season winning 93 games. This time the Cubs met the San Francisco Giants in the NLCS. After splitting the first two games at home, the Cubs headed to the Bay Area, where despite holding a lead at some point in each of the next three games, bullpen meltdowns and managerial blunders ultimately led to three straight losses. The Cubs couldn't overcome the efforts of Will Clark, whose home run off Maddux, just after a managerial visit to the mound, led Maddux to think Clark knew what pitch was coming. Afterward, Maddux would speak into his glove during any mound conversation, beginning what is a norm today. Mark Grace was 11–17 in the series with 8 RBI. Eventually, the Giants lost to the "Bash Brothers" and the Oakland A's in the famous "Earthquake Series."
1998: Wild card race and home run chase
The '98 season would begin on a somber note with the death of legendary broadcaster Harry Caray. After the retirement of Sandberg and the trade of Dunston, the Cubs had holes to fill and the signing of Henry Rodriguez, known affectionately as "H-Rod" to bat cleanup provided protection for Sammy Sosa in the lineup, as Rodriguez slugged 31 round-trippers in his first season in Chicago. Kevin Tapani led the club with a career high 19 wins, Rod Beck anchored a strong bullpen and Mark Grace turned in one of his best seasons. The Cubs were swamped by media attention in 1998, and the team's two biggest headliners were Sosa and rookie flamethrower Kerry Wood. Wood's signature performance was one-hitting the Houston Astros, a game in which he tied the major league record of 20 strikeouts in nine innings. His torrid strikeout numbers earned Wood the nickname "Kid K," and ultimately earned him the 1998 NL Rookie of the Year award. Sosa caught fire in June, hitting a major league record 20 home runs in the month, and his home run race with Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire transformed the pair into international superstars in a matter of weeks. McGwire finished the season with a new major league record of 70 home runs, but Sosa's .308 average and 66 homers earned him the National League MVP Award. After a down-to-the-wire Wild Card chase with the San Francisco Giants, Chicago and San Francisco ended the regular season tied, and thus squared off in a one-game playoff at Wrigley Field in which third baseman Gary Gaetti hit the eventual game winning homer. The win propelled the Cubs into the postseason once again with a 90–73 regular season tally. Unfortunately, the bats went cold in October, as manager Jim Riggleman's club batted .183 and scored only four runs en route to being swept by Atlanta. On a positive note, the home run chase between Sosa, McGwire and Ken Griffey, Jr. helped professional baseball to bring in a new crop of fans as well as bringing back some fans who had been disillusioned by the 1994 strike.[11] The Cubs retained many players who experienced career years in '98, and after a fast start in 1999, they collapsed again (starting with being swept at the hands of the cross-town White Sox in mid-June) and finished in the bottom of the division for the next two seasons.
2001: Playoff push
Despite losing fan favorite Grace to free agency, and the lack of production from newcomer Todd Hundley, skipper Don Baylor's Cubs put together a good season in 2001. The season started with Mack Newton being brought in to preach "positive thinking." One of the biggest stories of the season transpired as the club made a midseason deal for Fred McGriff, which was drawn out for nearly a month as McGriff debated waiving his no-trade clause,[12] as the Cubs led the wild card race by 2.5 games in early September. That run died when Preston Wilson hit a three run walk off homer off of closer Tom "Flash" Gordon, which halted the team's momentum. The team was unable to make another serious charge, and finished at 88–74, five games behind both Houston and St. Louis, who tied for first. Sosa had perhaps his finest season and Jon Lieber led the staff with a 20 win season.[13]
2003: Five more outs
The Cubs had high expectations in 2002, but the squad played poorly. On July 5, 2002 the Cubs promoted assistant general manager and player personnel director Jim Hendry to the General Manager position. The club responded by hiring Dusty Baker and by making some major moves in '03. Most notably, they traded with the Pittsburgh Pirates for outfielder Kenny Lofton and third baseman Aramis Ramirez, and rode dominant pitching, led by Kerry Wood and Mark Prior, as the Cubs led the division down the stretch.
Chicago halted St. Louis' run to the playoffs by taking 4 of 5 games from the Cardinals at Wrigley Field in early September, after which the hapless Cubs finally won their first division title in 14 years. They then went on to defeat the Atlanta Braves in a dramatic five-game Division Series, the franchise's first postseason series win since beating the Detroit Tigers in the 1908 World Series.
After losing an extra-inning game in Game 1, the Cubs rallied and took a 3 games to 1 lead over the Wild Card Florida Marlins in the NLCS. Florida shut the Cubs out in Game 5, but young pitcher Mark Prior led the Cubs in Game 6 as they took a 3–0 lead into the 8th inning and it was at this point when a now-infamous incident took place. Several spectators attempted to catch a foul ball off the bat of Luis Castillo. A Chicago Cubs fan by the name of Steve Bartman, of Northbrook, IL, reached for the ball and deflected it away from the glove of Moisés Alou for the second out of the 8th inning. Alou reacted angrily toward the stands, and after the game stated that he would have caught the ball.[14] Alou at one point recanted, saying he would not have been able to make the play, but later said this was just an attempt to make Bartman feel better and believing the whole incident should be forgotten.[14] Interference was not called on the play, as the ball was ruled to be on the spectator side of the wall. Castillo was eventually walked by Prior. Two batters later, and to the chagrin of the packed stadium, Cubs shortstop Alex Gonzalez misplayed an inning ending double play, loading the bases and leading to eight Florida runs and a Marlin victory. Despite sending Kerry Wood to the mound and holding a lead twice, the Cubs ultimately dropped Game 7, and failed to reach the World Series.
In 2004, the Cubs were a consensus pick by most media outlets to win the World Series. The offseason acquisition of Derek Lee (who was acquired in a trade with Florida for Hee-seop Choi) and the return of Greg Maddux only bolstered these expectation. Despite a mid-season deal for Nomar Garciaparra, misfortune struck the Cubs again. They led the Wild Card by 1.5 games over San Francisco and Houston on September 25, and both of those teams lost that day, giving the Cubs a chance at increasing the lead to a commanding 2.5 games with only eight games remaining in the season, but reliever LaTroy Hawkins blew a save to the Mets, and the Cubs lost the game in extra innings, a defeat that seemingly deflated the team, as they proceeded to drop 6 of their last 8 games as the Astros won the Wild Card.
Despite the fact that the Cubs had won 89 games, this fallout was decidedly unlovable, as the Cubs traded superstar Sammy Sosa after he had left the season's final game early and then lied about it publicly. Already a controversial figure in the clubhouse after his corked-bat incident,[15] Sammy's actions alienated much of his once strong fan base as well as the few teammates still on good terms with him, (many teammates grew tired of Sosa playing loud salsa music in the locker room) and possibly tarnished his place in Cubs' lore for years to come.[16] The disappointing season also saw fans start to become frustrated with the constant injuries to ace pitchers Mark Prior and Kerry Wood. Additionally, the '04 season led to the departure of popular commentator Steve Stone, who had become increasingly critical of management during broadcasts and was verbally attacked by reliever Kent Mercker.[17] Things were no better in 2005, despite a career year from first baseman Derrek Lee and the emergence of closer Ryan Dempster. The club struggled and suffered more key injuries, only managing to win 79 games after being picked by many to be a serious contender for the N.L. pennant. In 2006, bottom fell out as the Cubs finished 66–96, last in the NL Central.
2007–2008: Back to back division titles
After finishing last in the NL Central with 66 wins in 2006, the Cubs re-tooled and went from "worst to first" in 2007. In the offseason they signed Alfonso Soriano to a contract at 8 years for $136 million,[18] and replaced manager Dusty Baker with fiery veteran manager Lou Piniella.[19] After a rough start, which included a brawl between Michael Barrett and Carlos Zambrano, the Cubs overcame the Milwaukee Brewers, who had led the division for most of the season, with winning streaks in June and July, coupled with a pair of dramatic, late-inning wins against the Reds, and ultimately clinched the NL Central with a record of 85–77. The Cubs traded Barrett to the Padres, and later acquired Jason Kendall from Oakland. Kendall was highly successful with his management of the pitching rotation and helped at the plate as well. By September, Geovany Soto became the full-time starter behind the plate, replacing the veteran Kendall. They met Arizona in the NLDS, but controversy followed as Piniella, in a move that has since come under scrutiny,[20] pulled Carlos Zambrano after the sixth inning of a pitcher's duel with D-Backs ace Brandon Webb, to "....save Zambrano for (a potential) Game 4." The Cubs, however, were unable to come through, losing the first game and eventually stranding over 30 baserunners in a 3-game Arizona sweep.[21]
The Cubs successfully defended their National League Central title in 2008, going to the postseason in consecutive years for the first time since 1906–08. The offseason was dominated by three months of unsuccessful trade talks with the Orioles involving 2B Brian Roberts, as well as the signing of Chunichi Dragons star Kosuke Fukudome.[22] The team recorded their 10,000th win in April, while establishing an early division lead. Reed Johnson and Jim Edmonds were added early on and Rich Harden was acquired from the Oakland Athletics in early July.[23] The Cubs headed into the All-Star break with the N.L.'s best record, and tied the league record with eight representatives to the All-Star game, including catcher Geovany Soto, who was named Rookie of the Year. The Cubs took control of the division by sweeping a four-game series in Milwaukee. On September 14, in a game moved to Miller Park due to Hurricane Ike, Zambrano pitched a no-hitter against the Astros, and six days later the team clinched by beating St. Louis at Wrigley. The club ended the season with a 97–64 record[24] and met Los Angeles in the NLDS. The heavily favored Cubs took an early lead in Game 1, but James Loney's grand slam off Ryan Dempster changed the series' momentum. Chicago committed numerous critical errors and were outscored 20–6 in a Dodger sweep, which provided yet another sudden ending.[25]
The Ricketts era (2009–present)
The Ricketts family acquired a majority interest in the Cubs in 2009, ending the Tribune years. Apparently handcuffed by the Tribune's bankruptcy and the sale of the club to the Ricketts family, the Cubs' quest for a NL Central 3-peat started with notice that there would be less invested into contracts than in previous years. Chicago engaged St. Louis in a see-saw battle for first place into August 2009, but the Cardinals played to a torrid 20–6 pace that month, designating their rivals to battle in the Wild Card race, from which they were eliminated in the season's final week. The Cubs were plagued by injuries in 2009, and were only able to field their Opening Day starting lineup three times the entire season. Third baseman Aramis Ramírez injured his throwing shoulder in an early May game against the Milwaukee Brewers, sidelining him until early July and forcing journeyman players like Mike Fontenot and Aaron Miles into more prominent roles. Additionally, key players like Derrek Lee (who still managed to hit .306 with 35 HR and 111 RBI that season), Alfonso Soriano and Geovany Soto also nursed nagging injuries. The Cubs posted a winning record (83–78) for the third consecutive season, the first time the club had done so since 1972, and a new era of ownership under the Ricketts' family was approved by MLB owners in early October.
The decline and rebuildStarlin Castro debuted in early May as the starting shortstop. However, the club played poorly in the early season, finding themselves 10 games under .500 at the end of June. In addition, long-time ace Carlos Zambrano was pulled from a game against the White Sox on June 25 after a tirade and shoving match with Derrek Lee, and was suspended indefinitely by Jim Hendry, who called the conduct "unacceptable." On August 22, Lou Piniella, who had already announced his retirement at the end of the season, announced that he would leave the Cubs prematurely to take care of his sick mother. Mike Quade took over as the interim manager for the final 37 games of the year. Despite being well out of playoff contention the Cubs went 24–13 under Quade, the best record in baseball during that 37 game stretch, earning Quade to have the interim tag removed on October 19.
On December 3, Cubs broadcaster and former third baseman, Ron Santo, died due to complications from bladder cancer and diabetes. He spent 13 seasons as a player with the Cubs, and at the time of his death was regarded as one of the greatest players not in the Hall of Fame.[26] He has since been elected to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.
Despite trading for pitcher Matt Garza and signing free-agent slugger Carlos Pena, the Cubs finished the 2011 season 20 games under .500 with a record of 71-91. Weeks after the season came to an end, the club was rejuvenated in the form of a new philosophy, as owner Tom Ricketts signed Theo Epstein away from the Boston Red Sox,[27] naming him club President and giving him a five-year contract worth over $18M, and subsequently discharged the GM Jim Hendry manager Mike Quade. Epstein, a proponent of sabremetrics and one of the architects of two world series titles in Boston brought along Jed Hoyer to fill the role of GM and hired Dale Sveum as manager. Although the team had a dismal 2012 season, losing 101 games (the worst record since 1966) it was largely expected. The youth movement ushered in by Epstein and Hoyer began as longtime fan favorite Kerry Wood retired in May, followed by Ryan Dempster and Geovany Soto being traded to Texas at the All-Star break for a group of minor league prospects headlined by Christian Villanueva. The development of Castro, Anthony Rizzo, Darwin Barney, Brett Jackson and pitcher Jeff Samardzija as well as the replenishing of the minor-league system with prospects such as Javier Baez, Albert Almora, and Jorge Soler became the primary focus of the season, a philosophy which the new management said would carry over at least through the 2013 season.
The 2013 season resulted in much as the same the year before. Shortly before the trade deadline, the Cubs traded Matt Garza to the Texas Rangers for Mike Olt, C. J. Edwards, Neil Ramirez, and Justin Grimm.[28] Three days later, the Cubs sent Alfonso Soriano to the New York Yankees for minor leaguer Corey Black.[29] The mid season fire sale led to another last place finish in the NL Central, finishing with a record of 66-96. Although there was a five-game improvement in the record from the year before, Anthony Rizzo and Starlin Castro seemed to take steps backward in their development. On September 30, 2013, Theo Epstein made the decision to fire manager Dale Sveum after just two seasons at the helm of the Cubs. The regression of several young players was thought to be the main focus point, as the front office said Dale would not be judged based on wins and losses. In two seasons as skipper, Sveum finished with a record of 127-197.[30]
On November 7, 2013, the Cubs hired San Diego Padres bench coach Rick Renteria to be the 53rd manager in team history.[31] The Cubs relieved Renteria of his managerial duties on October 31, 2014. Epstein announced the Cubs are negotiating a deal with Joe Maddon.[32] On November 2, 2014, the Cubs officially announced that Maddon had signed a five-year contract to be the 54th manager in team history.[33] On December 10, 2014, newly hired manager Joe Maddon announced that the team had signed free agent Jon Lester to a 6-year, $155 million contract. As well, Rising stars such as Kris Bryant, Addison Russell, and Javier Baez show that the Cubs will be a great team in the future. Kris Bryant was called up to the Cubs MLB team on April 17 and Addison Russell played his first Major League game for the Cubs on April 22 making him the youngest player in the National League.
Current roster
Chicago Cubs roster
|Active roster
|Inactive roster
60-day disabled list
25 active, 14 inactive
10px 7- or 15-day disabled list
Memorable events and records
Merkle's Boner
Babe Ruth's called shot
On October 1, 1932, in game three of the World Series between the Cubs and the New York Yankees, Babe Ruth allegedly stepped to the plate, pointed his finger to Wrigley Field's center field bleachers and hit a long home run to center. There is speculation as to whether the "facts" surrounding the story are true or not, but nevertheless Ruth did help the Yankees secure a World Series win that year and the home run accounted for his 15th and last home run in the post season before he retired in 1935.[35]
Riot at Wrigley
Slugger Hack Wilson had a combative streak and frequently initiated fights with opposing players and fans. On June 22, 1928, a riot broke out in the ninth inning at Wrigley Field against the St. Louis Cardinals when Wilson jumped into the box seats to attack a heckling fan. An estimated 5,000 spectators swarmed the field before police could separate the combatants and restore order. The fan sued Wilson for $20,000, but a jury ruled in Wilson's favor.[36]
RBI record
Hack Wilson set a record of 56 home-runs and 190 runs-batted-in in 1930, breaking Lou Gehrig's MLB record of 176 RBI. (In 1999, a long-lost extra RBI mistakenly credited to Charlie Grimm had been found by Cooperstown researcher Cliff Kachline and verified by historian Jerome Holtzman, increasing the record number to 191.) As of 2013 the record still stands, with no serious threats coming since Gehrig (184) and Hank Greenberg (183) in the same era. The closest anyone has come to the mark in the last 75 years was Manny Ramirez's 165 RBI in 1999.[37] In addition to the RBI record, Wilson 56 home-runs stood as the National League record until 1998, when Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire hit 66 and 70, respectively. Wilson was named "Most Useful" player that year by the Baseball Writers Association of America, as the official N.L. Most Valuable Player Award was not awarded until the next season.[38]
The Homer in the Gloamin'
On September 28, 1938, with the Cubs and Pirates tied at 5, Gabby Hartnett stepped to the plate in a lightless Wrigley Field that was gradually being overcome by darkness and visibility was becoming difficult. With two outs in the bottom of the ninth and the umpires ready to end the game, Hartnett launched Pirate hurler Mace Brown's offering into the gloom and haze. This would be remembered as his "Homer in the Gloamin." It was ranked by ESPN as the 47th greatest home run of all time.[39]
Rick Monday and the U.S. flagU.S. flag. When Cubs outfielder Rick Monday noticed the flag on the ground and the man and boy fumbling with matches and lighter fluid, he dashed over and snatched the flag to thunderous applause. When he came up to bat in the next half-inning, he got a standing ovation from the crowd and the stadium titantron flashed the message, "RICK MONDAY... YOU MADE A GREAT PLAY..." Monday later said, "If you're going to burn the flag, don't do it around me. I've been to too many veterans' hospitals and seen too many broken bodies of guys who tried to protect it."[40]
The Sandberg game
On June 23, 1984, Chicago trailed St. Louis 9–8 in the bottom of the ninth on NBC's Game of the Week when Ryne Sandberg, known mostly for his glove, slugged a game-tying home run off ace closer Bruce Sutter. Despite this, the Cardinals scored two runs in the top of the tenth. Sandberg came up again facing Sutter with one man on base, and hit yet another game tying home run, and Ryno became a household name. The Cubs won what has become known as "The Sandberg Game" in the 11th inning.
Most home-runs in a month
In June, 1998 Sammy Sosa exploded into the pursuit of Roger Maris' home run record. Sosa had 13 home runs entering the month, representing less than half of Mark McGwire's total. Sosa had his first of four multi-home run games that month on June 1, and went on to break Rudy York's record with 20 home runs in the month, a record that still stands. By the end of his historic month, the outfielder's 33 home runs tied him with Ken Griffey, Jr. and left him only four behind McGwire's 37. Sosa finished with 66 and won the NL MVP Award.
10,000th winColorado Rockies, the Cubs recorded the 10,000th regular-season win in their franchise's history[41] dating back to the beginning of the National League in 1876. The Cubs reached the milestone with an overall National League record of 10,000 wins and 9,465 losses. Chicago was only the second club in Major League Baseball history to attain this milestone, the first having been the San Francisco Giants in mid-season 2005. The Cubs, however, hold the mark for victories for a team in a single city. The Chicago club's 77–77 record in the National Association (1871, 1874–1875) is not included in MLB record keeping. Post-season series are also not included in the totals. To honor the milestone, the Cubs flew an extra white flag displaying "10,000" in blue, along with the customary "W" flag.
Wood's 20K game
In only his third career start, Kerry Wood struck out 20 batters against Houston on May 6, 1998. This is the franchise record and tied for the Major League record. The game is often considered the most dominant pitching performance of all time. Wood hit one batter, Craig Biggio, and allowed one hit, a scratch single by Ricky Gutiérrez off third baseman Kevin Orie's glove. The play was nearly scored an error, which would have given Wood a no-hitter.[42]
Championship drought
The Chicago Cubs have not won a World Series championship since 1908, and have not appeared in the Fall Classic since 1945, although between their postseason appearance in 1984 and their most recent in 2008, they have made the postseason six times. It is the longest championship drought in all four of the major North American professional sports leagues, which includes the NFL, NBA, NHL, as well as Major League Baseball. In fact, the Cubs' last World Series title occurred before those other three leagues even existed, and even the Cubs' last World Series appearance predates the founding of the NBA. The much publicized drought was concurrent to championship droughts by the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago White Sox, who both had over 80 years between championships. It is this unfortunate distinction that has led to the club often being known as "The Lovable Losers." The team was one win away from breaking what is often called "The Curse of the Billy Goat" in 1984 and 2003, but was unable get the victory that would send it to the World Series.
Tape-measure home runsGlenallen Hill, facing Brewers starter Steve Woodard, became the first, and thus far only player, to hit a pitched ball onto the roof of a five-story residential building across Waveland Ave, beyond Wrigley Field's left field wall. The shot was estimated at well over Script error: No such module "convert"., but the Cubs fell to Milwaukee 12–8.[43] No batted ball has ever hit the center field scoreboard, although the original "Slammin' Sammy", golfer Sam Snead, hit it with a golf ball in an exhibition in the 1950s. In 1948, Bill Nicholson barely missed the scoreboard when he launched a home run ball onto Sheffield Avenue and in 1959, Roberto Clemente came even closer with a[44] home run ball hit onto Waveland Avenue. In 2001, a Sammy Sosa shot landed across Waveland and bounced a block down Kenmore Avenue. Dave Kingman hit a shot in 1979 that hit the third porch roof on the east side of Kenmore, estimated at Script error: No such module "convert"., and is regarded as the longest home run in Wrigley Field history.
Other records
- As of 2015, the Cubs hold the major league record for the most consecutive seasons without being no-hit, with 49 (the last pitcher to do so was Sandy Koufax, who threw a perfect game against the Cubs in 1965).
- The all time Cubs single-season saves record was set by Randy Myers in 1993.
- Mordecai Brown threw 48 shutouts during his Cub career (1904-1912, 1916), which is 13 more than any other hurler in franchise history.
- Shortstop Joe Tinker stole home twice on June 28, 1910 against Cincinnati; a club record, and Frank Schulte holds the all-time franchise records for stealing home, with 22.
- In 1885, John Clarkson won a still franchise record 53 games as a starting pitcher.[45]
Individual awards
Rookie of the Year
- 1961 - Billy Williams
- 1962 - Ken Hubbs
- 1989 - Jerome Walton
- 1998 - Kerry Wood
- 2008 - Geovany Soto
Most Valuable Player
- 1935 - Gabby Hartnett
- 1945 - Phil Cavarretta
- 1952 - Hank Sauer
- 1958 - Ernie Banks
- 1959 - Ernie Banks
- 1984 - Ryne Sandberg
- 1987 - Andre Dawson
- 1998 - Sammy Sosa
Cy Young Award
- 1971 - Ferguson Jenkins
- 1979 - Bruce Sutter
- 1984 - Rick Sutcliffe
- 1992 - Greg Maddux
Baseball Hall of Famers
|Chicago Cubs Hall of Famers
|Affiliation according to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
Retired numbers
The Chicago Cubs retired numbers are commemorated on pinstriped flags flying from the foul poles at Wrigley Field, with the exception of Jackie Robinson, the Brooklyn Dodgers player whose number 42 was retired for all clubs. The first retired number flag, Ernie Banks' number 14, was raised on the left field pole, and they have alternated since then. 14, 10 and 31 (Jenkins) fly on the left field pole; and 26, 23 and 31 (Maddux) fly on the right field pole.
Retired September 28, 2003
Retired August 22, 1982
Retired August 28, 2005
Retired August 13, 1987
Retired May 3, 2009
Retired May 3, 2009
Retired by MLB
Retired April 15, 1997
- There is also a movement to retire numbers for other players, most notably the uniform shirt of Gabby Hartnett. The Cubs first wore numbers on their shirts in 1932, and Hartnett wore #7 initially but switched to #9 for the next four seasons. From 1937–40 he wore #2, which is the number considered for retirement. Petitions have been sent in to the team for Cap Anson (shirt), Hack Wilson (shirt), Phil Cavarretta (3), Andre Dawson (8) and, as well as more recent departures Kerry Wood (34), Sammy Sosa (21), and Mark Grace (17).
Team captains
- Cap Anson 1879-1897
- Ron Santo 1969-1973
- Larry Bowa 1982-1985
- Sammy Sosa 2000-2004
- Kevin Tapani 2000-2001
- Mark Grace 2000
- Rick Aguilera 2000
- Joe Girardi 2001-2002
Minor league affiliations
|Iowa Cubs
|Pacific Coast League
|Des Moines, IA
|Tennessee Smokies
|Southern League
|Sevierville, TN
|Advanced A
|Myrtle Beach Pelicans
|Carolina League
|Myrtle Beach, SC
|South Bend Cubs
|Midwest League
|South Bend, IN
|Short Season A
|Eugene Emeralds
|Northwest League
|Eugene, OR
|AZL Cubs
|Arizona League
|Mesa, AZ
|DSL Cubs
|Dominican Summer League
|Boca Chica, Dominican Republic
|VSL Cubs
|Venezuelan Summer League
Before signing a developmental agreement with the Kane County Cougars in 2012, the Cubs had a Class A minor league affiliation on two occasions with the Peoria Chiefs (1985-1995 and 2004-2012). Ryne Sandberg managed the Chiefs from 2006-2010. In the period between those associations with the Chiefs the club had affiliations with the Dayton Dragons and Lansing Lugnuts. The Lugnuts were often affectionately referred to by Chip Caray as "Steve Stone's favorite team." The 2007 developmental contract with the Tennessee Smokies was preceded by Double A affiliations with the Orlando Cubs and West Tenn Diamond Jaxx. On September 16, 2014 the Cubs announced a move of their top Class A affiliate from Daytona in the Florida State League to Myrtle Beach in the Carolina League for the 2015 season.[46] Two days later, on the 18th, the Cubs signed a 4-year player development contract with the South Bend Silver Hawks of the Midwest League, ending their brief relationship with the Kane County Cougars and shortly thereafter renaming the Silver Hawks the South Bend Cubs.[47]
Spring training history
The Cubs spring training facility is located in Mesa, Arizona, where they play in the Cactus League. The club plays its games at Sloan Park The park seats 15,000, making it Major League Baseball's largest spring training ballpark by capacity, and the Cubs annually sell out most of their games both at home and on the road. Before Sloan Park opened in 2014, the team played games at HoHoKam Park (1979–2013), Dwight Patterson Field. "HoHoKam" is literally translated from Native American as "those who vanished." The Northsiders have called Mesa their spring home for most seasons since 1952.
In addition to Mesa, the club has held spring training in New Orleans (1870, 1907, 1911–1912); Champaign, Illinois (1901–02, 1906); Los Angeles (1903–04, 1948–1949), Santa Monica, California (1905); French Lick, Indiana (1908, 1943-1945); Hot Springs, Arkansas (1909–1910); Tampa, Florida (1913–1916); Pasadena, California (1917–1921); Santa Catalina Island, California (1922–1942, 1946–1947, 1950–1951); Rendezvous Park in Mesa (1952–1965); Blair Field in Long Beach, California (1966); and Scottsdale, Arizona (1967–1978).
The curious location on Catalina Island stemmed from Cubs owner William Wrigley Jr.'s then-majority interest in the island in 1919. Wrigley constructed a ballpark on the island to house the Cubs in spring training: it was built to the same dimensions as Wrigley Field. (The ballpark is long gone, but a clubhouse built by Wrigley to house the Cubs exists as the Catalina County Club.) However by 1951 the team chose to leave Catalina Island and spring training was shifted to Mesa, Arizona.[48] The Cubs' 30-year association with Catalina is chronicled in the book, The Cubs on Catalina, by Jim Vitti . . . which was named International 'Book of the Year' by The Sporting News.
The former location in Mesa is actually the second HoHoKam Park; the first was built in 1976 as the spring-training home of the Oakland Athletics who left the park in 1979. Apart from HoHoKam Park and Sloan Park the Cubs also have another Mesa training facility called Fitch Park, this complex provides Script error: No such module "convert". of team facilities, including major league clubhouse, four practice fields, one practice infield, enclosed batting tunnels, batting cages, a maintenance facility, and administrative offices for the Cubs.
The Cubs' flagship radio station is WBBM (AM) 780. The Chicago Cubs Radio Network consists of 45 stations and covers at least eleven states.[49] The Cubs signed a deal with CBS Radio WBBM 780 in Chicago on June 4, 2014, ending a 90-year partnership with WGN (AM) 720. The Chicago Bears also make their radio home on WBBM 780. If both teams should be playing at conflicting times, the Cubs will be heard on WCFS (FM) 105.9, which is usually a simulcast of WBBM 780.[50] Pat Hughes has been the Cubs' radio play-by-play voice since 1996. Former Cubs third baseman and fan favorite Ron Santo was Hughes' partner in the booth until his death in 2010. Keith Moreland replaced Hall of Fame inductee Santo for three seasons, followed by Ron Coomer in 2014.[51]
The club also produces its own print media; the Cubs' official magazine Vineline, which has 12 annual issues, is in its third decade, and spotlights players and events involving the club. The club also publishes a traditional media guide.
As of the 2015 season, Cubs games will air locally on the following outlets:
- Comcast SportsNet Chicago, a cable network owned in part by NBCUniversal and the Ricketts family. It broadcasts all Cubs games not broadcast over-the-air, or nationally by Major League Baseball's television partners.[52]
- WGN-TV (channel 9.1), a Tribune Media-owned over-the-air station that has aired Cubs telecasts since its inception in 1948; WGN-TV's Cubs telecasts are produced by the station's sports department, WGN Sports. In November 2013, the team exercised an option to terminate its existing deal with WGN after the 2014 season, requesting a higher-valued contract lasting through the 2019 season (which would be aligned with the end of its contract with CSN Chicago). WGN announced on January 7, 2015 that it would maintain broadcast rights to 45 Cubs games through the 2019 season within the Chicago market only.[52][53] Cubs games will no longer be available nationally, as Tribune dropped Chicago sports programming from WGN America as part of its re-positioning as a general entertainment cable channel.[54]
- WLS-TV (channel 7.1), an ABC owned-and-operated station. It was announced on December 12, 2014 that the station would acquire rights to 25 games per season through 2019.[55] These games will be syndicated to other stations in the region.[56]
- WPWR-TV (channel 50.1), a MyNetworkTV owned-and-operated station; in February 2015, it was announced that several WGN-produced Cubs games would be aired on WPWR beginning in the 2015 season. Occasional WGN-produced Cubs and White Sox games had been broadcast by WCIU-TV in previous seasons.[57]
All of the team's current television contracts end in 2019. The Chicago Tribune reported that following the end of these contracts, the team may consider launching its own regional sports network.[52]
Len Kasper has been the Cubs' television play-by-play announcer since 2005 and was joined by Jim Deshaies in 2013. Bob Brenly (analyst, 2005–12), Chip Caray (play-by-play, 1998-2004), Steve Stone (analyst, 1983-2000, 2003–04), Joe Carter (analyst for WGN-TV games, 2001–02) and Dave Otto (analyst for FSN Chicago games, 2001–02) also have spent time broadcasting from the Cubs booth since the death of Harry Caray in 1998.[58]
Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray
Jack Brickhouse manned the Cubs radio and especially the TV booth for parts of five decades, the 34-season span from 1948 to 1981. He covered the games with a level of enthusiasm that often seemed unjustified by the team's poor performance on the field for many of those years. His trademark call "Hey Hey!" always followed a home run. That expression is spelled out in large letters vertically on both foul pole screens at Wrigley Field. "Whoo-boy!" and "Wheeee!" and "Oh, brother!" were among his other pet expressions. When he approached retirement age, he personally recommended his successor.
Harry Caray's stamp on the team is perhaps even deeper than that of Brickhouse, although his 17-year tenure, from 1982 to 1997, was half as long. First, Caray had already become a well-known Chicago figure by broadcasting White Sox games for a decade, after having been a St Louis Cardinals icon for 25 years. Caray also had the benefit of being in the booth during the NL East title run in 1984, which was widely seen due to WGN's status as a cable-TV superstation. His trademark call of "Holy Cow!" and his enthusiastic singing of "Take me out to the ballgame" during the 7th inning stretch (as he had done with the White Sox) made Caray a fan favorite both locally and nationally.
Caray had lively discussions with commentator Steve Stone, who was hand-picked by Harry himself, and producer Arne Harris. Caray often playfully quarreled with Stone over Stone's cigar and why Stone was single, while Stone would counter with poking fun at Harry being "under the influence." Stone disclosed in his book "Where's Harry" that most of this "arguing" was staged, and usually a ploy developed by Harry himself to add flavor to the broadcast. The Cubs still have a "guest conductor," usually a celebrity, lead the crowd in singing "Take me out to the ballgame" during the 7th inning stretch to honor Caray's memory.
List of owners
- 1876: William Hulbert
- 1882: Albert Spalding (owner of Spalding Sporting Goods)
- 1902: James Hart
- 1905: Charles Murphy
- 1914: Charles Taft
- 1916: Charles Weeghman/Albert Lasker (heads of an investment group with seven others including William Wrigley Jr.)
- 1921: Wrigley Company (Wrigley family owned Wrigley Chewing Gum)
- 1981: Tribune Company
- 2007: Sam Zell
- 2009: Family trust of Joe Ricketts; chairman Tom Ricketts (the elder Ricketts is the founder of TD Ameritrade)
Ownership history
Al Spalding, who also owned Spalding sporting goods, played for the team for two seasons under club founder William Hulbert. After Hulbert's death Spalding owned the club for twenty one years, after which the Cubs were purchased by Albert Lasker and Charles Weeghman. That pair were followed by the Wrigley family, owners of Wrigley's chewing gum. In 1981, after 6 decades under the Wrigley family, the Cubs were purchased by Tribune Company for $20,500,000. Tribune, which also owned the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, WGN Television, WGN Radio and many other media outlets, controlled the club until December 2007, when Sam Zell completed his purchase of the entire Tribune organization and announced his intention to sell the baseball team.[59] After a nearly two-year process which involved potential buyers such as Mark Cuban and a group led by Hank Aaron, a family trust of TD Ameritrade Joe Ricketts won the bidding process as the 2009 season came to a close. Ultimately, the sale was unanimously approved by MLB owners and the Ricketts family took control on October 27, 2009.
Other information
Tinker to Evers to Chance"Baseball's Sad Lexicon," also known as "Tinker to Evers to Chance" after its refrain, is a 1910 baseball poem by Franklin Pierce Adams. The poem is presented as a single, rueful stanza from the point of view of a New York Giants fan seeing the talented Chicago Cubs infield of shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance complete a double play. The trio began playing together with the Cubs in 1902, and formed a double play combination that lasted through April 1912. The Cubs won the pennant four times between 1906 and 1910, often defeating the Giants en route to the World Series.
- These are the saddest of possible words:
- "Tinker to Evers to Chance."
- Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
- Tinker and Evers and Chance.
- Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
- Making a Giant hit into a double –
- Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
- "Tinker to Evers to Chance."
The poem was first published in the New York Evening Mail on July 12, 1912. Popular among sportswriters, numerous additional verses were written. The poem gave Tinker, Evers, and Chance increased popularity and has been credited with their elections to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.
"White flag time at Wrigley!"
The term "White flag time at Wrigley!", coined by former play-by-play broadcaster Chip Caray, means the Cubs have won.
Beginning in the days of P.K. Wrigley and the 1937 bleacher/scoreboard reconstruction, and prior to modern media saturation, a flag with either a "W" or an "L" has flown from atop the scoreboard masthead, indicating the day's result(s) when baseball was played at Wrigley. In case of a doubleheader that results in a split, both the "win" and "loss" flags are flown.
Past Cubs media guides show that originally the flags were blue with a white "W" and white with a blue "L". In 1978, consistent with the dominant colors of the flags, blue and white lights were mounted atop the scoreboard, denoting "win" and "loss" respectively for the benefit of nighttime passers-by.
The flags were replaced by 1990, the first year in which the Cubs media guide reports the switch to the now familiar colors of the flags: White with blue "W" and blue with white "L". In addition to needing to replace the worn-out flags, by then the retired numbers of Banks and Williams were flying on the foul poles, as white with blue numbers; so the "good" flag was switched to match that scheme.
This long-established tradition has evolved to fans carrying the white-with-blue-W flags to both home and away games, and displaying them after a Cub win. The flags have become more and more popular each season since 1998, and are now even sold as T-shirts with the same layout. In 2009, the tradition spilled over to the NHL as Chicago Blackhawks fans adopted a red and black "W" flag of their own.
The official Cub mascot is a young bear cub, named Clark, described by the team's press release as a young and friendly Cub. Clark made his debut at Advocate Health Care on January 13, 2014, the same day as the press release announcing his installation as the club's first ever official physical mascot.[60] The bear cub itself was used in the clubs since the early 1900s and was the inspiration of the Chicago Staleys changing their team's name to the Chicago Bears, due to the Cubs allowing the football team to play at Wrigley Field in the 1930s.
The Cubs had no official physical mascot prior to Clark, though a man in a 'polar bear' looking outfit, called "The Bear-man" (or Beeman), which was mildly popular with the fans, paraded the stands briefly in the early 1990s. There is no record of whether or not he was just a fan in a costume or employed by the club. Through the 2013 season, there were "Cubbie-bear" mascots outside of Wrigley on game day, but none are employed by the team. They pose for pictures with fans for tips. The most notable of these was "Billy Cub" who worked outside of the stadium until for over 6 years until July 2013, when the club asked him to stop. Billy Cub, who is played by fan John Paul Weier, had unsuccessfully petitioned the team to become the official mascot.[61]
Another unofficial but much more well-known mascot is Ronnie "Woo Woo" Wickers[62] who is a longtime fan and local celebrity in the Chicago area. He is known to Wrigley Field visitors for his idiosyncratic cheers at baseball games, generally punctuated with an exclamatory "Woo!" (e.g., "Cubs, woo! Cubs, woo! Big-Z, woo! Zambrano, woo! Cubs, woo!") Longtime Cubs announcer Harry Caray dubbed Wickers "Leather Lungs" for his ability to shout for hours at a time.[63] He is not employed by the team, although the club has on two separate occasions allowed him into the broadcast booth and allow him some degree of freedom once he purchases or is given a ticket by fans to get into the games. He is largely allowed to roam the park and interact with fans by Wrigley Field security, although there have been numerous minor occurrences where Wickers has had confrontations with fans who do not approve of his antics, one in which Wickers was assaulted with a hula hoop by a fan named Greg Hoden, known as "The Stinger." Hoden was the belligerent sidekick popular heckler "Derek the Five Dollar Kid" in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Wrigley Field and Wrigleyville
The Cubs have played their home games at Wrigley Field, also known as "The Friendly Confines" since 1916. It was built in 1914 as Weeghman Park for the Chicago Whales, a Federal League baseball team. The Cubs also shared the park with the Chicago Bears of the NFL for 50 years. The ballpark includes a manual scoreboard, ivy-covered brick walls, and relatively small dimensions.
Located in Chicago's Lake View neighborhood, Wrigley Field sits on an irregular block bounded by Clark and Addison Streets and Waveland and Sheffield Avenues. The area surrounding the ballpark is typically referred to as Wrigleyville. There is a dense collection of sports bars and restaurants in the area, most with baseball inspired themes, including Sluggers, Murphy's Bleachers and The Cubby Bear. Many of the apartment buildings surrounding Wrigley Field on Waveland and Sheffield Avenues have built bleachers on their rooftops for fans to view games and other sell space for advertisement. One building on Sheffield Avenue has a sign atop its roof which says "Eamus Catuli!" which is Latin for "Let's Go Cubs!" and another chronicles the time since the last Division title, pennant, and World Series championship, as shown in the picture to the left. The 02 denotes two years since the 2008 NL Central title, 65 years since the 1945 pennant and 102 years since the 1908 World Series championship. On game days, many residents rent out their yards and driveways to people looking for parking spots. The uniqueness of the neighborhood itself has ingrained itself into the culture of the Chicago Cubs as well as the Wrigleyville neighborhood, and has led to being used for concerts and other sporting events, such as the 2010 NHL Winter Classic between the Chicago Blackhawks and Detroit Red Wings, as well as a 2010 NCAA men's football game between the Northwestern Wildcats and Illinois Fighting Illini.
In 2013, Tom Ricketts and team president Crane Kenney unveiled plans for a $300M renovation to Wrigley Field to Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. The proposed plans include a 6000 square foot jumbotron in left center field, and a return of some of the parks features from the 1930s, including recreating the green terra-cotta canopies and wrought-iron fencing that were part of Wrigley in that era. Previously, mostly all efforts to conduct large-scale renovations the field to former mayor Richard M. Daley (a staunch White Sox fan) had been opposed by the city and rooftop owners.[64]
Bleacher Bums
The "Bleacher Bums" is a name given to fans, many of whom spend much of the day heckling, who sit in the bleacher section at Wrigley Field. Initially, the group was called "bums" because it referred to a group of fans who were at most games, and since those games were all day games, it was assumed they did not work. Many of those fans were, and are still, students at Chicago area colleges, such as DePaul University, Loyola, Northwestern University, and Illinois-Chicago. A Broadway play,[65] starring Joe Mantegna, Dennis Farina, Dennis Franz, and James Belushi ran for years and was based on a group of Cub fans who frequented the club's games. The group was started in 1967 by dedicated fans Ron Grousl, Tom Nall and "mad bugler" Mike Murphy, who was a sports radio host during mid days on Chicago-based WSCR AM 670 "The Score". Murphy alleges that Grousl started the Wrigley tradition of throwing back opposing teams' home run balls.[66][67] The current group is headed by Derek Schaul (Derek the Five Dollar Kid). Prior to the 2006 season, they were updated, with new shops and private bar (The Batter's Eye) being added, and Bud Light bought naming rights to the bleacher section, dubbing them the Bud Light Bleachers. Bleachers at Wrigley are general admission, except during the playoffs. The bleachers have been referred to as the "World's Largest Beer Garden." A popular T-shirt (sold inside the park and licensed by the club) which says "Wrigley Bleachers" on the front and the phrase "Shut Up and Drink Your Beer" on the reverse fuels this stereotype.
Emil Verban Society
In 1975, a group of Chicago Cubs fans based in Washington, D.C. formed the Emil Verban Society. The society is a select club of high profile Cub fans, currently headed by Illinois Senator Dick Durbin which is named for Emil Verban, who in three seasons with the Cubs in the 1940s batted .280 with 39 runs batted in and one home run. Verban was picked as the epitome of a Cub player, explains columnist George Will, because "He exemplified mediocrity under pressure, he was competent but obscure and typifying of the work ethics." Verban initially believed he was being ridiculed, but his ill feeling disappeared several years later when he was flown to Washington to meet President Ronald Reagan, also a society member, at the White House. Hillary Clinton, Jim Belushi, Joe Mantegna, Rahm Emanuel, Dick Cheney and many others have been included among its membership.[68]
During the summer of 1969, a Chicago studio group produced a single record called "Hey Hey! Holy Mackerel! (The Cubs Song)" whose title and lyrics incorporated the catch-phrases of the respective TV and radio announcers for the Cubs, Jack Brickhouse and Vince Lloyd. Several members of the Cubs recorded an album called Cub Power which contained a cover of the song. The song received a good deal of local airplay that summer, associating it very strongly with that bittersweet season. It was played much less frequently thereafter, although it remained an unofficial Cubs theme song for some years after.
For many years, Cubs radio broadcasts started with "It's a Beautiful Day for a Ball Game" by the Harry Simeone Chorale. In 1979, Roger Bain released a 45 rpm record of his song "Thanks Mr. Banks," to honor "Mr. Cub" Ernie Banks.[69]
The song "Go, Cubs, Go!" by Steve Goodman was recorded early in the 1984 season, and was heard frequently during that season. Goodman died in September of that year, four days before the Cubs clinched the National League Eastern Division title, their first title in 39 years. Since 1984, the song started being played from time to time at Wrigley Field; since 2007, the song has been played over the loudspeakers following each Cubs home victory.
The Mountain Goats recorded a song entitled "Cubs in Five" on its 1995 EP Nine Black Poppies which refers to the seeming impossibility of the Cubs winning a World Series in both its title and Chorus.
In 2007, Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder composed a song dedicated to the team called "All the Way". Vedder, a Chicago native, and lifelong Cubs fan, composed the song at the request of Ernie Banks. Pearl Jam has only played this song live one time, on August 2, 2007 at the Vic Theater in Chicago, IL.[70] Eddie Vedder has played this song live twice, at his solo shows at the Chicago Auditorium on August 21 and 22, 2008.
An album entitled Take Me Out to a Cubs Game was released in 2008. It is a collection of 17 songs and other recordings related to the team,[71] including Harry Caray's final performance of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" on September 21, 1997, the Steve Goodman song mentioned above, and a newly recorded rendition of "Talkin' Baseball" (subtitled "Baseball and the Cubs") by Terry Cashman. The album was produced in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Cubs' 1908 World Series victory and contains sounds and songs of the Cubs and Wrigley Field.[72][73]
- St. Louis Cardinals
- Crosstown Classic: Chicago White Sox
- Milwaukee Brewers
See also
- Chicago Cubs minor league players
- Chicago Cubs team records
- Chicago Tribune
- Curse of the Billy Goat
- Grant DePorter
- History of the Chicago Cubs
- Iowa Cubs
- Lee Elia
- List of Major League Baseball franchise postseason droughts
- Major League Baseball uniforms
- Major professional sports teams of the United States and Canada
- Old Style Beer
- The Bleacher Preacher
- Thomas S. Ricketts
- West Side Park
- WGN Radio 720 AM
- WGN TV Channel 9 / WGN America
References and notes
- ^ Helyar, John (April 2, 2007). "Lovable losers? Not at this sale price". ESPN.com. Retrieved 2009-08-24.
- ^ Nadel, John (2008-10-05). "Wait 'til next year, again: Cubs eliminated by LA". Yahoo! Sports. Associated Press. Retrieved 2008-10-05.
- ^ "1890 Chicago Colts". baseball-reference.com. Retrieved 2008-08-16.
- ^ a b 365 Oddball Days in Chicago Cubs History. Clerisys Press, 9 March 2010. 2010-03-01. ISBN 9781578603435. Retrieved 2012-04-05.
- ^ "1898 Chicago Orphans". baseball-reference.com. Retrieved 2008-08-16.
- ^ "1903 Chicago Cubs". baseball-reference.com. Retrieved 2008-08-16.
- ^ Thomson, Cindy; Brown, Scott. Three Finger. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 88–89. ISBN 0-8032-4448-7.
- ^ "Chicago Cubs Logos".
- ^ Zarefsky, Marc (2007-08-08). "'Homer in the Gloamin' most memorable". MLB.com. Retrieved 2008-06-11.
- ^ a b c d "1984 Chicago Cubs Batting, Pitching, & Fielding Statistics". Baseball-Reference.com. Retrieved 2010-08-12.
- ^ "Sosa discusses future, McGwire's Hall chances". ESPN. Associated Press. 2006-12-04. Retrieved 2008-06-11.
- ^ "Cubs still waiting for McGriff's OK". ESPN. Associated Press. 2001-07-14. Retrieved 2008-06-11.
- ^ "2001 Chicago Cubs Statistics and Roster", Baseball-Reference.com. Retrieved on June 11, 2008.
- ^ a b "Report: Alou initially said he would have caught the Bartman ball". ESPN. Associated Press. 2004. Retrieved 2008-06-11.
- ^ Stark, Jayson (2004-06-02). "Sosa's legacy could be broken beyond repair". ESPN. Retrieved 2008-06-11.
- ^ Muskat, Carrie (2004-10-04). "Cubs, Sosa at odds". MLB.com. Retrieved 2008-06-11.
- ^ "Cubs shocked by Stone's comments". ESPN. Associated Press. 2004-10-05. Retrieved 2008-06-11.
- ^ Muscat, Carrie, Cubs complete blockbuster with Soriano, MLB.com, Retrieved on July 18, 2007
- ^ "Lou Piniella Bio", MLB.com, Retrieved on July 18, 2007
- ^ Sheinin, David (2007-10-04). "Cleveland... And Lou Piniella's bold/idiotic move". Washington Post. Retrieved 2008-06-11.
- ^ "Arizona Diamondbacks Sweep Chicago Cubs in 3-Game Series". Fox News. Associated Press. 2007-10-06. Retrieved 2008-06-11.
- ^ Nicholson, Lucy (2007-12-12). "Cubs Sign Fukudome". chicagoist.com. Retrieved 2008-07-14.
- ^ "Cubs trade four players to A's for pitchers Harden, Gaudin". ESPN. July 9, 2008. Retrieved 2008-07-14.
- ^ Fitzpatrick, Mike (2008-09-22). "Marquis' slam leads Cubs over stumbling Mets". Yahoo! Sports. Associated Press. Retrieved 2008-09-23.
- ^ Muskat, Carrie (October 5, 2008). "Cubs' season ends with Game 3 in LA". MLB.com. Retrieved 2009-08-31.
- ^ "Sports.espn.go.com". Sports.espn.go.com. 2010-10-20. Retrieved 2014-08-01.
- ^ Sullivan, Paul. "Done deal: Cubs land Epstein from Red Sox". Chicago Tribune.
- ^ "Texas Rangers trade for Matt Garza of Chicago Cubs - ESPN Dallas". ESPN. 2013-07-23. Retrieved 2014-08-01.
- ^ Matt EhaltESPN New York contributorArchive (2013-07-26). "Alfonso Soriano traded to New York Yankees from Chicago Cubs - ESPN New York". ESPN. Retrieved 2014-08-01.
- ^ "Chicago Cubs fire manager Dale Sveum after two years - ESPN Chicago". ESPN. 2013-10-01. Retrieved 2014-08-01.
- ^ "Cubs name Rick Renteria manager | Cubs.com: News". Major League Baseball. 2013-11-07. Retrieved 2014-08-01.
- ^ "In pursuit of Maddon, Cubs dismiss Renteria". Chicago Cubs (MLB.com). 2014-10-31. Retrieved 2014-10-31.
- ^ "Cubs bring in Maddon, let Renteria go". Chicago Cubs (MLB.com). 2014-11-02. Retrieved 2014-11-02.
- ^ "Merkle Bonehead Play - BR Bullpen". Baseball-reference.com. Retrieved 2013-07-07.
- ^ "Sports Moment | American History Lives at American Heritage". Americanheritage.com. Retrieved 2013-04-22.
- ^ "Hack Wilson Was Great Baseball Player But Headache To Managers". The Portsmouth Times. Associated Press. 24 November 1948. p. 11. Retrieved 2 March 2011.
- ^ "Single-Season Leaders & Records for Home Runs". Baseball Reference. Retrieved 28 February 2011.
- ^ "Hack Wilson Is Picked as Most Useful Player". The Milwaukee Journal. Associated Press. 8 October 1930. p. 2. Retrieved 23 February 2011.
- ^ "ESPN.com - Page2 - 100 Greatest Home Runs of All Time". Espn.go.com. Retrieved 2013-07-07.
- ^ Platt, Ben (April 25, 2006). "Monday's act heroic after 30 years". cubs.com (mlb.com).
- ^ "Cubs get 10,000th win". USATODAY.com (USA Today). Associated Press. April 23, 2008.
- ^ Snyder, Matt. "Happy 15th anniversary: Kerry Wood's 20 strikeout game". CBSSports.com. Retrieved 2013-07-07.
- ^ "Glenallen Hill Rooftop Home Run at Wrigley Field, 2000". YouTube. 2000-05-11. Retrieved 2013-07-07.
- ^ "Baseball-almanac.com". Baseball-almanac.com. Retrieved 2014-08-01.
- ^ "Chicago Cubs Top 10 Pitching Leaders". Baseball-Reference.com. Retrieved 2013-07-07.
- ^ "Cubs moving Class A affiliate to Myrtle Beach". USA Today. Retrieved 17 September 2014.
- ^ Leventhal, Josh. "Tracking the Affiliation Shuffle". baseballamerica.com. Baseball America. Retrieved 19 September 2014.
- ^ '+relative_time(twitters[i].created_at)+'. "Spring Training Online History". Springtrainingonline.com. Retrieved 2014-08-01.
- ^ "The Chicago Cubs Radio Network". Archived from the original on 2009-05-19.
- ^ http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-06-04/business/chi-cubs-radio-wgn-wbbm-20140603_1_chicago-cubs-new-radio-home-pat-hughes
- ^ "Coomer scores Cubs radio job".
- ^ a b c "Cubs reach deal with WGN-TV for remaining 45 broadcasts". Chicago Business Journal. Retrieved 10 January 2015.
- ^ Channick, Robert (November 6, 2013). "Cubs exercise option to end WGN-TV contract after next season". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved September 1, 2014.
- ^ Marek, Lynne (May 30, 2014). "WGN America to drop Chicago sports". Crain's Chicago Business. Retrieved June 27, 2014.
- ^ Channick, Robert (December 12, 2014). "It's official: WLS-Ch. 7 to air 25 Cubs games". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved December 12, 2014.
- ^ "Cubs TV affiliates for 24 games on ABC7 in 2015". ABC7Chicago.com. Retrieved 8 April 2015.
- ^ "White Sox add WPWR-Ch. 50 to station rotation". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 21 February 2015.
- ^ "Broadcasters | cubs.com: Team". Chicago.cubs.mlb.com. Retrieved 2013-03-27.
- ^ "Prominent names mentioned as possible Cubs' buyers". ESPN.com. Associated Press. April 3, 2007. Retrieved April 2, 2007.
- ^ Snyder, Matt. "Cubs announce new mascot, Clark, a 'young, friendly cub'". CBSSports.com. Retrieved 2014-08-01.
- ^ "Chicago Cubs tell unofficial 'Billy Cub' mascot to stop | abc7chicago.com". Abclocal.go.com. 2013-07-22. Retrieved 2014-08-01.
- ^ Hageman, William (27 February 2004). "A Fan in Winter". Chicago Tribune.
- ^ Kelly, Maura (28 May 2001). "'Leather Lungs' a hit at Wrigley, wooing fans with schtick and song". Boston Globe.
- ^ "Photos Of Planned Wrigley Renovation Revealed " CBS Chicago". Chicago.cbslocal.com. 2013-05-01. Retrieved 2013-07-07.
- ^ "Jeff Santo". Archived from the original on 2010-01-09.
- ^ "Excerpt from ''Miracle Collapse: The 1969 Chicago Cubs'', Google Books". Chitownradio.com. Retrieved 2014-08-01.
- ^ "WSCR's Murphy and Cubs ball-throwing". Chitownradio.com. Retrieved 2014-08-01.
- ^ Austen, Ben (2010-04-15). "Cubs Fans Make a Pitch for Obama". Online.wsj.com. Retrieved 2013-03-27.
- ^ "RogerBaindemo.com". rogerbaindemo.com. Retrieved 2009-08-31.
- ^ "All The Way". Pearl Jam. Archived from the original on 2009-07-13. Retrieved 2009-08-31.
- ^ "Take Me Out to a Cubs Game Chicago cubs music CD". Takemeouttoacubsgame.com. Archived from the original on 2008-06-03. Retrieved 2008-11-06.
- ^ "'Take Me Out To A Cubs Game' Music CD". Amazon.com, Inc. 2008. Retrieved 2008-11-26.
- ^ "Take Me Out To A Cubs Game CD". CubHub.net. 2008. Retrieved 2008-11-26.
Further reading
- Murphy, Cait (2007). Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History. New York, NY: Smithsonian Books. ISBN 978-0-06-088937-1.
- Wright, Marshall (2000). The National Association of Base Ball Players, 1857–1870. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. ISBN 0-7864-0779-4.
- Lund, John (2008). 1908 A Look At The World Champion 1908 Chicago Cubs. Scotts Valley, CA. ISBN 1-4382-5018-5.
- Stone, Steve; Rozner, Barry (1999). Where's Harry?. Taylor Publishing. ISBN 0-87833-233-2.
- Stout, Glenn; Johnson, Richard (2007). The Cubs. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-618-59500-6.
- Vitti, Jim (2010). Chicago Cubs: Baseball on Catalina Island. Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 0-7385-7795-2.
External links
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to Chicago Cubs.


text:
Sonne Flash Decompiler v18.104.22.1686 | 5.6 MB
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subset: commoncrawl


text:
Gay, bisexual and transgender people need better representation in videogames - this has to happen. Basic decency dictates that everyone, regardless of race, gender and sexuality should be treated equally, and video games, by continually pushing against that, are starting to look out of touch and creatively stale.
For decades now they've been made by straight white men for straight white men, and if the plummeting sales figures from 2012's fourth-quarter tell us anything, it's that the heterosexual guy market is reaching saturation. If videogames are going to thrive, not just as a diverse, intelligent art form, but also as an entertainment industry, they need to get queer.
It's a sad day when you just can't be gay and be comfortable in your own shoes, but you got to ram it down everyones throat. If there is a large enough gay demographic of gamers, then go ahead and make a game. If not, don't make a game that doesn't sell and call gamers homophobes. It's a double edge sword when you try to break down a wall. Games today are geared for the straight male audience because that is the largest buyer of video games. I didn't make that up. That's why games aren't made for women, gays, and old people. The video game industry shouldn't be picked on because it evolved to point of where it is today. The industry didn't choose to be the way it is. The consumer did. Not every video game needs a gay person, a women, a black person, and a white person ,just to appease a few that are insecure. I have no problem with the industry making games for all minority types if the demand is there but don't do it just break down a wall to incite people.
The Gay Planet in SW:TOR is the Dumbest thing ever!
You gotta pay to stay and be basically Jailed on the Gay Planet if your character is Gay.
(setting up a possible Death Star attack by right wing Neo-Cons)
Let the Gay Gamers be FREE!
Oh let's not forget Pansexuals this new breed generated by todays hipsters..
It's no longer cool to be bisexual anymore, now it's all about pansexuality.. God the state of the world is fucking stupid.
Pansexual makes literally no fucking sense and is only yet another way for people to act as if they are above one another but at the same time acting as if they care more than the next person does...
Oh are you gay, bi or straight? No I am a pansexual, I love everything.. I mean seriously what the fuck?
So basically you are bisexual, there are only two genders and only one case where a person can have two sexual organs on one body.. Doesn't matter if they had surgery or not they are still genetically a male or female or possibly a hermaphrodite which classifies a person who likes all above a bisexual.
There is no such thing as pansexual and kids wonder why people look at them like complete idiots when they say that, it's idiotic.
It's like the smug version of bisexual, nope I am too good to be bisexual.. I am pansexual.. God that shit is stupid. It urks the fuck out of me that so many kids are claiming to be pansexual now..
What a statement, I swear the stuff this generation of kids has come up with has been the worst...
Here they come with the gay agenda. Who in their right mind would want to play homosexual games.
"this has to happen"
No, it doesn't. Homosexuality and the gay agenda (or LGBT) most definitely does not have to be force fed to anyone.
Videogames are fictional and don't have to represent reality, current culture, or be politically correct.
The creative industries are not bound to political correctness. I refuse to accept that anything at all has to be forced into the gaming industry unless a game developer feels it absolutely necessary to a game's story or design.


text:
Ohio Reports 30 Human Trafficking Cases
The Ohio Attorney General's Office says local law enforcement agencies reported 30 human-trafficking cases in the state in the past year.
The numbers were released Thursday as part of a new Ohio law requiring local agencies to collect data on human trafficking cases and report it to Attorney General Mike DeWine's office.
According to the report, authorities identified 38 sex-trafficking victims, most of them between the ages of 18 and 29. Of those, 21 were identified as having alcohol or drug dependency issues, and 12 were listed as being oppressed, marginalized or impoverished.
The 30 cases included investigation of 21 suspected traffickers, resulting in 15 arrests.
Also Thursday, the Ohio House approved a measure that increases penalties for human trafficking offenders and adds protections for victims.


text:
A year's worth of under-the-radar planning went into Rice's amazing light-and-sound show
Thorsten Bauer went straight for the heart, rather than the intellect, of Rice University. So when he saw the Spectacle writ large for the first time, even the German artist shed a tear.
"We wanted to make it an experience for the audience," he said. "It's not as much about teaching them as it is about touching them."
As creative director and co-founder of URBANSCREEN, Bauer led the artists and technicians from Bremen, Germany, who designed the light and sound show that brought Lovett, Sewall and Herzstein Halls, the cornerstones of the university's Academic Quadrangle, to stunning life for a series of performances during Rice's Centennial Celebration.
Thousands experienced the awe-inspiring performance over three perfect autumn evenings inside the quad – and outside. One viewer tweeted about seeing a few seconds of the Spectacle from the air: "Even from 15,000 ft. we can tell we missed something special."
The URBANSCREEN team flew to Rice, its first American client, charged with creating an event that would tell the story of the university's first century to the extended community of students, faculty, staff, alumni and visitors attending the extensive series of events the campus hosted during the Centennial Celebration.
The artists' strategy was to let Rice's distinctive architecture do the talking. "Our first question was, 'Who is telling this story?' We decided the architecture itself is the only living witness to the entire history," Bauer said. "The images come from the inside of the building to the outside for a few seconds, and then go back."
For the three-segment production, the team created a three-dimensional video keyed brick-by-brick to the buildings. "We think of a building as a diva, because it demands so many things," said Till Botterweck, an URBANSCREEN art director, at a lecture for Rice architecture students the day after the final performance. "This one (Lovett Hall) was even more of a diva."
With no white projection surfaces save for the covered Sallyport and several well-placed window screens, the ornate building presented many challenges. For one, Bauer said, the team's original production drawings were based on architectural plans that go back to Rice's beginnings. When they came to Rice for the show, they discovered Lovett Hall's construction crew didn't always adhere to the plan. "They were a few inches off here, a few inches there, but we were able to adjust," he said.
From the beginning of the process, the owl served as inspiration. Bauer's imitation of an owl as he described his ideas during his initial meeting at Rice convinced the Spectacle committee URBANSCREEN was right for the job, said Molly Hipp Hubbard, Rice's art director and committee co-chair. "We fell in love with them at that moment, because we knew they got it. We knew they would be able to get Rice completely, and engage and integrate all the stories."
At the start of the show, the sound of the owl's flapping wings – ultimately, created with a wet towel waved in front of a microphone – grew out of a prairie soundscape. The owl circled and dropped a feather at the Sallyport, where the Rice Institute took root. A fanciful opening revelation of the architectural details served as a segue to the main segment, in which the artists bent the architecture to their will as the buildings revealed the university's colorful history, with each decade in turn crackling to life.
"This is not like a PowerPoint presentation," Bauer said of the art form his company refers to as "lumentecture."
"There are often many things happening at the same time, bubbling up, falling to the surface and disappearing again," he said. "We created the visuals to reflect the design principles of the decades they represent." The surround soundscape enticed viewers to look this way and that, ensuring that one could not see everything in a single viewing, and probably not even multiple viewings.
Bauer and the URBANSCREEN team had been stealing in and out of Rice for a year to plan the nearly 20-minute show that not so much told the history of Rice to audience members as folded them inside it. The 270-degree projections were a first for the company that has wrapped a number of buildings in fanciful animations, most notably the Sydney Opera House earlier this year.
Because details of the performance were to remain a deep, dark secret until the premiere the night of the Centennial Gala, Bauer, Botterweck, art director Max Goergen and producer Manuel Engels often came to campus under aliases. Sometimes they posed as the German cousins of Rice School of Architecture Dean Sarah Whiting, co-chair of the Rice-side production committee, to conduct interviews for their "research project."
"More than once, people came up and said, 'Hey, I met your German cousins today!'" Whiting said, laughing.
The pressure to keep quiet was even greater on architecture senior Joshuah Howard, whom Whiting sent to intern with URBANSCREEN for a month last summer. "He couldn't tell anyone what he was doing, even what town in Germany he was in," Whiting said.
"We decided to play this game called 'Secret Agent,'" Hubbard recalled. "We knew that it was for the greater good, so we would come up with these aliases. Sometimes they were photographers from a European magazine; other times they were Sarah's cousins."
Whiting noted the considerable challenge of "getting everyone excited about something we couldn't talk about."
The committee that also included Centennial Director Kathleen Boyd, Senior Project Manager Kathy Jones and Associate Vice President for Development Kevin Foyle set a baseline of historic events that had to be part of the performance, based on Public Affairs' centennial banners that line the Inner Loop. Otherwise, Bauer said, "We collected tons of photos and tons of text, read all the books about the history of Rice and ended up with a huge amount of information that was far more than we could use."
In fact, Bauer used an astounding 30,000 photos during the five shows and one unplanned encore. Hubbard said that after the final unadvertised performance for the Rice Design Alliance gala on Oct. 14, hundreds of people were still pouring into the quad. "One student came up to Thorsten and asked, 'What time is the show?' and he said, 'I'm sorry, we're done. We just did the last show.' And he said she burst into tears," Hubbard said. "Ten minutes later they decided to run it one more time."
Editing the images to fit the buildings' facades took months, with tests viewed in the company's computers and on a small mockup of the quad. With a projection that measured, in technical terms, 10,000 pixels wide and 2,000 pixels high, there was plenty of room for Bauer to maneuver as he oversaw the flow of artwork in two- and three-dimensions, matching it to the electronic score that was also composed and produced by the company.
"It was the most challenging production for URBANSCREEN so far because of the amount of content, the number of effects, the ratio, the resolution and also because our partners here were very diverse," he said. "There was no one art director from Rice confronting us; there were many cooks – intellectual cooks.
"But I liked it, because everybody gave their input, they put things on the table and then they took their hands away. They really trusted us," he said.
The German crew traveled to Houston for centennial week with only data – 800 gigabytes' worth – as their cargo. The rest of the gear was leased from Houston-based LD Systems, a lighting-and-sound production company started and still operated by Rice alumnus Rob McKinley '81. The company built and installed the unique two-stage mask that occluded the Sallyport without blocking traffic, and also provided the 12 20,000-watt projectors and the immersive sound system.
Sound was most critical to what Bauer called the show's epilog, when history had caught up to the present day. "Our decision was to swap the narration line from the visual in the 100-years part to the auditory," he said of the segment that features the layered voices of dozens of Rice students coming from every direction. All the while, at first slowly and then in massive waves, bricks of light flow around and about the arches that support the three buildings.
Rather than a visual representation of buildings and plans, Bauer said the finale, representing the future, "is built out of the wishes, fears and hopes of the students of today." He conducted 12 hours' worth of interviews for the collage that concludes the show.
The segment was inspired by a comment President David Leebron made early in the process. "He said in one interview, 'You know, Rice is one of the last refuges of people whose ambition is to change the world,'" Bauer recalled. "As I worked more and more with Rice, I saw this more clearly. This changed me. This kind of inspiration is the fire in this community, and I found that in every interview I did."
The light may have faded, but the fire remains. "As I left the architecture lecture, I heard two students talking in the quad as the projection tower was coming down," Hubbard said. "One of them looked at it and said, 'I can't believe that it's gone. I'll never be able to look at Lovett Hall the same way again.'"
Were you there? Please share your experience in the comments section, below: