Ryno was the legend we didn't have to share

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For the tortured fanbase of a perpetually tortured franchise, no matter how old you are, for all of the bad baseball you've endured, the Cubs have provided just one thing consistently. The occasional great player.

And for an entire generation of Cubs fans, the generation that most of us happen to belong to (I've seen the demographics of you newsletter subscribers), Ryne Sandberg was our great Cub.

There were others in that general era, like Andre Dawson and Greg Maddux and Brian Dayett, but we had to share those guys with Expos fans, or Barves fans or whatever Japanese team Dayett went to play for.

But Cubs fans didn't have to share Ryne Sandberg with anybody.

Sure, he played 13 games for the 1981 Phillies, but that was weird strike season split into halves and I'm not sure it even counted. Besides, his Phillies manager, Dallas Green only found six at bats for him. It's basically like it didn't happen.

A few months later, Dallas had a new job, and soon Sandberg had a new team. The myth that he was the "throw in" in a trade of veteran shortstops (Ivan DeJesus and Larry Bowa) is bullshit. Dallas knew what he was getting in the soft spoken shortstop prospect. Bowa was the throw in, because Dallas liked his shortstops to look like angry elves.

Sandberg spent 1982 at third base for the Cubs, and things didn't start off so hot. He didn't get a hit until his 24th at bat. And after ten games the Cubs were 3-7 and Sandberg was hitting and slugging .033.

But once he figured it out, everything went pretty well. He hit .283 over his final 147 games and hit 33 doubles. He also was a really good third baseman, so we figured we had that spot nailed down for a decade or so.

Instead, in the offseason the Cubs traded for Dodgers third baseman Ron Cey, and Sandberg moved to second base.

And the move to second worked out pretty well. Ryne immediately impressed and won the Gold Glove. He was the first player to win a Gold Glove in his first season at a new position.

Is that true?

It has to be. Harry Caray used to remind us of it at least once a year. So, if it's not true, I really don't care.

Other than one inning at shortstop in 1983 (Bowa probably got locked in a bathroom stall), Sandberg played nothing but second for the next 14 seasons. (He did DH once in his final year, but that's not a real position.)

And, he did pretty well at second base. He won nine Gold Gloves, eight Silver Sluggers, he was the NL MVP in 1984, and finished fourth in MVP voting in both 1989 and 1990. He was the first National League second baseman to ever hit 40 homers in a season when he did it in 1990, and he was an All-Star ten times.

His 1984 season was so well-rounded it bordered on the absurd. He led the NL in WAR (8.5 but nobody knew it at the time), runs (114) and triples (19!). He was a homer and a triple shy of being just the third player to ever have 20 homers, 20 doubles, 20 triples and 20 stolen bases. The other members of that tiny club?

Well, the first to do it was also a Cub. It was Remember This Crap favorite Frank "Wildfire" Schulte in 1911. Nobody did it again until Willie Mays in 1957. It's only happened twice since and ironically it happened both times in the same year. In 2007, Chicago's very own Curtis Granderson did it for the Tigers and Jimmy Rollins (a future former White Sox "star") did it for the Phillies.

Sandberg led the league in runs scored three times, homers once (when he hit the 40 in 1990), triples once, and total bases (1990).

He also won the worst Home Run Derby in history, with three!

The Cubs made the playoffs just twice in his time with them, and he was excellent in both series. In 1984 against the Padres he slashed .368/.455/.474, and in the 1989 NLCS against the Giants he slashed .400/.458/.800.

He was a dynamic offensive player with 282 homers and 344 stolen bases.

But for all of that offensive excellence, he wasn't just a great defensive second baseman. He was the best of all time. I know Roberto Alomar was great, and he's the only other guy in the conversation, but Ryno was better. Can I prove that?

I don't have to. I'm a Cubs fan. I know things.

Harry used to pay him the ultimate compliment. In a tough spot when the Cubs needed an out, if the ball was hit anywhere near Ryne Sandberg, Harry's call would just be, "Don't worry!" And we never did.

From June 21, 1989 to May 18, 1990 he successfully handled 584 chances without an error. It was 123 consecutive errorless games, easily destroying the previous record at second base-Joe Morgan's 91.

Sandberg also broke Joe's record for homers by a second baseman, and finished with 277, a record that stood until Jeff Kent broke it. Jeff Kent? Whatever.

Morgan was pretty bitter about Sandberg breaking his records and he used to whine and bitch about it when the Cubs were on Sunday Night Baseball. Tough shit, Joe.

Ryne was not the most gregarious of players. His interviews were mostly boring and his forays into the media in his post playing days (Remember when he used to be on the WGN Radio postgame? Yikes.) were pretty dull. But we didn't care. He played almost every one of his games on WGN-TV with Harry acting as a one-man PR campaign manager for him, and deservedly so. He let his play, and Harry, do the talking for him.

There were some pretty dumb criticisms of him. One was that he "never dove" for balls. Just go back and watch the highlight video at the top of this post and you'll see that wasn't true. But the insult was actually a compliment. He just got to balls that nobody else did, and he could do it most of the time without having to leave his feet.

His teammates tell stories of what a prankster he was. His favorite gag was the old baseball staple, the hot foot! If you don't know what a hot foot is, it's when one player distracts another on the bench while a third player sets the distracted player's shoe on fire. It's dumb as hell. And you would think that when the guy getting the hot foot finally put out the fire he'd go beat the hell out of the guy who did it to him, but...that's baseball, I guess.

He will, of course, be remembered forever for being the guy who hit game tying homers off of Bruce Sutter in the ninth and tenth innings of the Dave Owen Game. You remember that one, right?

The Cubs were down 7-1 in the bottom of the second and Harry was doing the game on the radio with Vince Lloyd, Lou Boudreau and Milo Hamilton, and Harry started drinking heavily, only for the Cubs to come back and trail the Cardinals 9-8 going into the ninth. Sandberg hit a couple of homers, blah blah blah, Willie McGee hit for the cycle, blah blah blah, and then Owen singled in Leon Durham to win it in the 11th. The Dave Owen Game. Isn't that what we all call it?

You've heard the Bob Costas calls of the homers a million times. They're both excellent. But Harry's were the shit.

When I think of Ryne, I think of two things. The hop he did over the runner when he was turning the double play (and he NEVER threw the ball away on those, and the runner never hit him, it was like he vanished somehow) and that moment from this immortal game in 1984, with Harry laughing and yelling, "HE DID IT AGAIN! HE DID IT AGAIN!"

Not a bad way to be remembered.

Like most Cubs, the end of Ryne's career was weird. Not, leave a game while it's still going on and have Kerry Wood destroy your boombox weird, but still weird.

After signing a then record four-year, $28.4 million contract in the spring of 1992 (part of the reason they lost Greg Maddux after the season is the Tribune didn't want to pay Greg more than Ryne...oh, for fuck's sake, Ryno wouldn't have given a shit, it was just an excuse for the Tribune to be cheap), Ryne was only 57 games into the second year of the deal when he shockingly retired from baseball after a 2-1 loss at Wrigley to the Dodgers on June 10, 1994. Maybe it was the team's 22-36 record. Maybe it was having to watch Steve Trachsel, Dave Otto and Chuck Crim pitch. Maybe it was that he was hitting .238 at the time. He'd been hit by a Mike Jackson fastball in the spring before and broke his wrist and missed the start of that season. As wrist injuries often do, it sapped his power and he hit just nine homers in '93 after hitting 26 in both 1991 and 1992. So maybe he felt like he was destined for a second-straight subpar (for him) season. Or maybe it was because his then-wife Cindy wanted an excuse to wear her best corn cob dress to a press conference.

We'll never know for sure what happened.

Wink. Wink.

Sandberg quit and told the Tribune to keep their money. Which they happily did.

The next year, the spunky 1995 Cubs couldn't take a hint, and while on the verge of elimination from the new fangled Wild Card race, they refused to lose. They won eight straight games down the stretch and a walk off win over the Astros with just two games remaining pulled them to within two games of the Wild Card leading Rockies.

The Cubs had rallied from a 3-0 ninth inning deficit off Astros starter Mike Hampton. Shawon Dunston singled in Mark Grace. Sammy Sosa scored on a Scott Servais ground out. And Dunston scored when Scott Bullett walked with the bases loaded. The Cubs won it in the tenth on a Luis Gonzalez bases loaded single with one out.

Sandberg had been in attendance at that game, and several of the games during the final home stand and was so charged up by the atmosphere around and in Wrigley that he started to ponder a comeback. He said later that it was that walkoff win that convinced him to give it another try.

The Cubs lost to the Astros 9-8 the next day on an eighth inning single by former White Sox dwarf John Cangelosi off of Mike Perez that scored future Cubs shortstop Ricky Gutierrez. The Cubs were eliminated. But Ryno was ready to join this spunky band of players.

And he did. And they won 76 games in 1996 and 68 in 1997. Including the first 14 of 1997. And he retired again, this time for good.

He was pretty good in 1996, especially for a 36 year old middle infielder who had sat out a season and a half. He hit 25 homers, drove in 92 runs and still played a good second base. But his 1997 wasn't as good, and it was time to go. He never embarrassed himself. He was still a solid player at the end, but he wasn't the Ryne Sandberg we look back on so fondly.

He had a great career. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2005 (on the third fucking try, for some reason, get your shit together, writers) and had his number retired that same year.

Last year, the Cubs unveiled a very cool statue of him. He is fittingly in his fielding position, and he is wearing his iconic flip down shades.

Sandberg had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer in 2023, and after he finished his treatments just more than a year ago he was declared cancer free. But that didn't last.

And over the last few weeks the Cubs, and Ryne himself, had been getting us ready for some really bad news. He put out an Instagram post that felt like a goodbye. Kerry Wood threw out the first pitch at a game with a Sandberg batting practice jersey on. His old teammate and Daily Double partner Bob Dernier did the same last Wednesday. And then on Sunday as part of the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, Jane Forbes Clark the chair of the Hall's board of directors took time out to talk about Ryne, his legacy and how much the Hall meant to him.

So we knew it was coming. And then, because it's the Cubs, we learned of his death as his beloved team was pissing a 3-0 lead in Milwaukee (and the division lead) down their legs. So it was oddly fitting, I suppose.

The Cubs let Ryne Sandberg down one last time.

Something he almost never did to us.

This would make a cool shirt, right?

And you know what? There might even be others.

Buy some crap