Ryno gets his day in the sun

The Cubs got his statue almost right

Ryno gets his day in the sun
From left: Cubs Utility Tunnel of Famer, Real Hall of Famer with a statue, Real Hall of Famer with a statue, Real Hall of Famer with a statue, Real Hall of Famer who will embalm you for a fee, Cubs Utility Tunnel of Famer and Larry Bowa.

Get more from Andy Dolan in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

Forty years to the day after he burst on to the national scene with five hits, seven RBI and homers off of Hall of Fame closer Bruce Sutter to tie the game in the ninth and again in the tenth, the Cubs dedicated a statue to Ryne Sandberg.

Ryno spoiled the big surprise of the pose of the statue in his remarks, and you wonder if he thought they were going to unveil the statue before he spoke, which would have actually made more sense. But hey, if you get your own statue you are allowed to spoil what it looks like.

My hope for the statue over the past 18 months since it was announced it was coming, was for it to show Sandberg playing defense (check), showcase his trademark flip down sunglasses (check), and to show him leaving the ground as he turned the pivot at second base, especially since the most incredible feat he ever pulled off wasn’t his then-record 123 game errorless streak at second, it was that he once went 140 games in a row without a throwing error. His ability to make that turn at second and get off a good throw every time no matter who was bearing down on him trying to break up the play was incredible.

Plus, it would make for a really cool statue.

I get it, you have to actually anchor the statue to the ground because of gravity, but there’s a way to do something like this with just one of his feet on the bag. The Ron Santo statue only has one leg on the ground, and it hasn’t fallen over yet.

Anyway, the actual statue that was unveiled yesterday (and then obscured by a good five minutes of smoke and confetti) depicts Ryne in this pose.

In fact, I think it’s literally based on this photo (except for the switch to the home pullover uniform, and the huge guns the statue maker put on him, which will require the statue to get random PED tested six times a year).

It’s fine.

But it’s just a little boring.

Then again, so is Ryne.

So, it’s perfect.

For those of you too young to have seen him in his prime, or at all, rest assured that Ryne Sandberg was a great baseball player. He didn’t make the Hall of Fame by mistake, he earned every bit of it. He was a shortstop in the Phillies organization who played just 18 games at second base for them (minors and majors combined) when he was traded with Larry Bowa to the Cubs for their shortstop, Ivan DeJesus. He was the Cubs primary third baseman in 1982 as a rookie and moved full-time to second base in 1983 to make room for Ron Cey who the Cubs traded for that January from the Dodgers. All Ryne did in his first season as a second baseman was win the Gold Glove, and then he did it again the next eight seasons.

He was an amazing all-around offensive player. He stole at least 30 bases (including 54 in 1985) four years in a row and stole at least 20 nine times. He hit 30 homers in 1989 which seemed amazing until he hit 40 the next season. At the time he was only the third second baseman ever to hit 40 homers, the others were Rogers Hornsby in 1922 and Davey Johnson in 1973. Since then, Brian Dozier (really) and Marcus Semien have joined the ranks.

His MVP season in 1984 is all the proof you’ll ever need that he could do everything on offense. He was one triple and one homer shy of being the only player in baseball history to have 20 or more doubles, triples, homers and stolen bases in one season. He struck out 101 times that season, which seems quaint by today’s standards, but it so bothered him that he never again struck out that many times again, even as he began to regularly hit for more power.

He led the NL in runs scored three times, homers once, triples once and total bases once. He batted second for the vast majority of his career (which made little sense once Mark Grace started playing next to him, but whatever), but after he sac bunted 14 times in 1982 and 1983 combined, he only did it 16 times total in his final 12 seasons, and that’s good, because bunting sucks. You know what’s better than plinking the ball down the line and advancing a runner? Driving that fucker in with one over fence.

Because he was a Cub he only played in two postseason series in his entire career. How’d he do? Well, he slashed .385/.457/.641 in them and he’s the only player in Major League history to play in 10 or more playoff games and get at least one hit in every one of them. Is that good? That seems good.

As good as he was as a hitter he was somehow much better on defense. The list of greatest defensive second baseman in baseball history is two deep and is Ryne and Roberto Alomar and you can put them in either order and not be wrong.

Sandberg got a lot of weird shit for not diving for balls very often, and his reasoning was pretty simple. He just got to them. None of this Ian Happ fake try hard shit from Ryno. He was so dependable in the field that in big, tense moments if the ball was hit to second, Harry Caray’s call would simply be, “DON’T WORRY!” And, we didn’t.

That didn’t work when a sure double play grounder in game five in San Diego hit a fucking rock and bounced way over Ryne’s head, but it wasn’t his fault.

So how could a great defensive player and dynamic offensive player be boring? Well, I don’t really know. He just kind of was. He was the good kind of boring. He just did his job, and did it really well, without any real flash.

When Shawon Dunston said in his remarks at the statue dedication that Sandberg “didn’t talk,” he wasn’t really exaggerating.

Ryne got away with it because Harry did all the talking for him he ever needed. Harry recognized early on that the kid stolen in the trade from the Phillies was a really good player and when Harry Caray was on your side you were set. He was going to talk you up far better than you’d ever be able to do yourself.

And so, Sandberg was that rare thing in the modern era of baseball. He was a lot of young Cubs’ fans favorite player and they barely had any idea what his personality was, or if he had one at all.

He made Kris Bryant seem like Shōta Imanaga.

In Sunday’s dedication ceremony Tom Ricketts said that if the Ryne Sandberg statue came to life it would come down off the pedestal to sign autographs and shake hands with every fan it could. And, it also wouldn’t say more than five words.

Ricketts also mentioned how all those home day games in the early part of Sandberg’s career made him a national star on WGN. Fans cheered WGN and then Tom awkwardly gave them permission to continue doing so. I was hoping he was going to mention Marquee so they could boo.

Ricketts also had a nice quote about Ryne Sandberg and the rest of the 1984 Cubs. “Few players have meant more to their team and few teams have meant more to their fans.” He then said it would have been an honor to own the team back then and trade all of them away for nothing. Or something. I don’t know. I may have been projecting.

Larry Bowa was invited by Sandberg to speak and Larry reflected on their deep, special friendship by referring to him as “Ryan” about 12 times. Larry also said “Ryan” was a great teammate who encouraged all of the other players even if they were in an 0-for-20 slump, which Larry usually was.

Dunston’s remarks were all off the cuff, and twice he made it sound like he thought he was somehow also going to be part of the statue, but the best was the way he just used shorthand references like, “Ryne doesn’t talk,” and “He lights everybody’s shoes on fire.”

He meant both of those things literally.

Bob Costas was there for…reasons, I guess? Well, I’m sure it was because he and Tony Kubek were on the call of that game 40 years ago, but they couldn’t find somebody with Cubs connections who called games during Ryne’s career, like Dewayne Staats or hey, how about tHom Brenneman? We know tHom’s free.

Anyway, Bob is good at this stuff and he put the importance of the old NBC Game of the Week on Saturdays in perspective. You could watch The Baseball Bunch, then This Week in Baseball, and then it rolled right into the only national game you could see all week. So it really was a big deal. You either got Vin Scully and Joe Garagiola or Costas and Kubek, but it always felt huge. So having Bob there to make predictable jokes about how short he is and mention the Cardinals so Cubs fans could boo was fine.

On either the 20th or 25th anniversary, WGN radio rebroadcast the entire Sandberg Game with Harry, Vince Lloyd, Lou Boudreau and Milo Hamilton on the call. I tuned in figuring I’d listen to the beginning and then maybe remember to go back for the end, but damnit if I didn’t listen to the whole thing.

It’s how I had lived it as a kid, riding in our car on vacation as we crossed Indiana and Ohio, after stopping at Wrigley about a half hour before first pitch and deciding against getting standing room only tickets for the game. In hindsight, it’s fine that we didn’t, because I am positive we’d have left after the Cardinals got ahead 7-1 or 9-3 and then it really would have sucked to have been there and left before all the historic shit happened.

The highlight of the radio broadcast is how great Harry was. For the first time in his three years with the Cubs he was calling games for a good team and they were better than the Cardinals who he was still pissed at for firing him 15 years earlier. On the recording, he gets so pissed early on when the Cardinals get a big lead, and then you can hear him get more and more excited as the Cubs claw back into it. If you only remember the awful, insulting, Ryan Dempster caricature of Harry, this is him in his prime, and it’s great.

Indulge yourself with this video which is the WGN audio laid over the NBC video from the top of the seventh to the end of the game.

Vince and Lou are really good, too, and Milo’s basically done for the day by the time this starts. Which is fine, because Milo was a prick.

Sandberg did get off the best joke of the ceremony. When he detailed the trade that brought him from the Phillies to the Cubs, he indicated that it was because Larry Bowa wasn’t happy with what his role with the Phillies was going to be in his age 36 season with the Phillies in 1982. “Larry, thank you for always being disgruntled.”

He also had a good line for Shawon, albeit one that might have been a shot at Cubs’ broadcaster Jim Deshaies. “Shawon, thank you for teaching me how to feel a twinge in your hamstring the day before Nolan Ryan was scheduled to start, only to have it be just fine a day later to face the soft-tossing lefty for the Astros.”

And then Marquee’s very own Cole Wright, who was billed as the emcee of the event came back out to get everybody lined up for the unveiling, and he said the immortal line, “OK, Ryno’s grandkids, come on up here. We’ve got a plunger and you know what to do with it.”

“We’ve got a plunger and you know what to do with it.” — Cole Wright, 6/23/24

In case you were wondering, the plunger was not of the sink or toilet variety, it was instead a big button for the grandkids to hit to trigger the release of the draping around the statue.

And then, to wrap things up, Cole announced there would be a “Ryno pop-up exhibit” set up later that day. I would think if you want somebody to demonstrate pop-ups you could just watch Dansby Swanson bat.

Regardless, it was great to see Ryne looking happy and feeling good. He clearly enjoyed his day in the sun, and honestly, would it have killed the Cubs to have put up something to create a little shade for Ryne and the rest of the guys on the daius?