My Summer as a Cub

© 2011 R. Rathbone Leonard. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 9/20/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-9411-8 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-9412-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-9413-2 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011915087

Printed in the United States of America

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contact the author at rrathbone@live.com

Contents

Introduction

Foreword

Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Actual Games, Player Names Changed

Idea of Wild Card in Playoffs

May Have Come From Author

About The Author

About The Illustrator

Acknowledgments

Your Purchase Has Aided the Ron Santo Walk to Cure Diabetes

My first job in the field of journalism came when I left Indiana University to do a bit of everything at the weekly Galveston (Ind.) Leader on the G. I. Bill of Rights. That was when I was 20 years of age in 1948 and it was followed by ownership of a Wabash County (Ind.) weekly, the LaFontaine Herald; sports editor of the Frankfort (Ind.) Times; reporter/editor at The Indianapolis Star and sidelines such as Indiana sports correspondent for the Chicago Herald-American.

Among sports figures I interviewed were Ron Santo, Ernie Banks, Ryne Sandberg, Andre Dawson, Roger Maris, Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano, Bob Knight and Dick the Bruiser. Others included Jayne Mansfield, Liberace and Bob Conrad.

A little over a year ago I started My Summer as a Cub. . When writing a chapter 2 bit about Santo and thinking of the afternoon spent with him some 20 years ago at Spring Training, the idea of contributing to JDRF immediately became a reality. My brief afternoon with Ron was all too short but was long enough to know that there never was anyone who meant more to his sport or activity than Ron Santo.

So a portion of proceeds from My Summer as a Cub will go to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in Memory of Ron Santo, who led the Walk for 32 years raising $60 million to battle the disease. Long live the Memory of Ron Santo.

—Russell Rathbone Leonard, Author of My Summer as a Cub

What does JDRF stand for?

How ‘bout Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation?

And

Just Donate to Ron’s Fund!

Prologue

April 7, 2011

One would think that after beginning a book about Spring Training and ending with the final proofing thirteen months later, and the writing and rewriting at midnight or 2 a. m. or 4 a. m., the author would take a respite.

But then, perhaps he, make that I, isn’t/aren’t sane. After all, I am a Cubber since 1938; 1 even saw them play several games in 1945, their last World Series year.

So I’m typing once again, pretty much the same format as CUBBING, my 256-page tome which included a journal of the disappointing 2009 season. But this one is a satisfying season.

As of this writing, the 2011 Spring Training begins in a week, still at Mesa. Maybe this story will somewhat satisfy those who are dying for a World Series championship and make an excellent 2011 Christmas gift for those loyal Cubs fans around the globe.

My Summer as a Cub refutes the saying that CUBS is an acronym for Completely Useless By September. For Cubbers who didn’t read CUBBING and are unfamiliar with the term, here’s the definition:

If you are reading this, you are Cubbing

If you go to a Cubs game, you are Cubbing

If you talk about the Cubs, you are Cubbing

If you dream about the Cubs, you are Cubbing

If you so much as think about the Cubs, you are a Cubber.

A retired sportswriter with time on my hands, I attended half a dozen Cubs Conventions and as many Spring Trainings. I had planned each year to write a book about the Cubs making the World Series after more than a hundred Wait ’Til Next Years. But I wanted fact, not fiction.

It was about Valentine’s Day of 2011 that I became glued to my computer, addicted to the Spring Training reports, all positive, which were all over the internet. I found Cubs’ articles on their own site, and at the Daily Herald, the Sun-Times, the Tribune and a few blog sites. The thought of doing a book again emerged from my mind; I guess it had lingered there, somewhere there, for some time.

After 65 years of writing fact as a reporter, here’s some fiction— a lot of fiction. About 50 per cent of the game accounts are fiction. Of course, the Playoffs and World Series accounts are where most of the fiction comes in but as long-suffering Cubs fans, we deserve a positive post-season.

I have over fifty books about the Chicago Cubs. They fill three shelves of a 15-shelf bookcase. A half dozen or so are about the Cubs in World Series play but none since the year of 1945 and none about the Cubs winning a Series since 1908.

It’s time for a change. So right off the bat this book is about the Cubs 2011 season in which they come from almost nowhere, make the Playoffs and win the World Series.

If they can’t do it in fact, then by God they’ll do it in fiction!

This story is about me— Lenny Puddock— leading the Cubs to the World Series championship after the absence of 103 years, maybe 104 but what’s it matter— a long, long time.

In this book I’m a 32-year-old physical therapist and one heck of a good softball player. I once got two hits off Eddie Feigner Jr. in a game with the King and His Court. I played Little League, high school and college baseball and did well in all levels. I’ve been a Cubs fan since I was nine when my dad took me to Wrigley Field.

My girl friend Joyce, a divorcee with an 11-year old son, has put up with me being glued to WGN telecasts of Cubs games and has accepted I’m a die-hard. What she does about it for a Christmas gift launches this story which then leads to Randy Hundley’s Fantasy Camp to Spring Training to the Minor Leagues to the Cubs and to the World Series.

Okay, that’s fiction which is a large portion of My Summer as a Cub including quotes. The fact is that much of My Summer as a Cub is fiction, but much of the fiction is based on fact. The fact is that from Chapter One to the end there is a little fact mixed with a lot of fiction. But, once again, much of the fiction is based on fact. And that’s a fact such as reference to Marlon Byrd signaling the other outfielders where to play the batters.

Confused. Don’t be, just enjoy the fantasy as it may be the only Cubs championship this decade—make that century. Some will say it’s a stupid story and it may well be, but it was fun doing it. Have fun reading it.

And cheer on Lenny Puddock, who gains the nickname Casey (blame Ernest Thayer) as he leads the Cubs to their promised land as his girl friend blazes a trail in the music world.

Don’t peek if you want to enjoy the conclusion.

balls.ai balls.ai balls.ai

At any rate, penning this novel has been enjoyable. I hope you, the reader, get the same enjoyment. And if the saga of Lenny Puddock’s rookie year and the Cubs proves popular, maybe he’ll return for that cursed sophomore year.

—Russ Leonard

Introduction

In the nearly six decades I have been a certified Chicago Cubs fan, in keeping with family tradition, I have endured all of the snide witticisms, both cruel and condescending, applied to my chosen team, and the lengths they have gone to spare their fans the ravages and mental anguish that are the symptoms of Pennant and World Series Fever…..The Curse of the Billy Goat……Anyone Can Have a Bad Century…..The Cubs Killed My Father; Now They’re After Me.

There are now an ever dwindling few Cubs fans who can make the claim the Cubs won a pennant in their lifetime. I can count myself in that group, but that pennant occurred during my rookie year on the planet, and my bassinette didn’t have cable in 1945, and whatever I could glean from AM Radio never penetrated my memory bank. Russ Leonard had the good fortune to not only enter our earthly premises a few timely years prior, achieving what he calls Cubber fan status in 1938, the Cubs second-to-last pennant season, completing a cycle that saw the team capturing the National League championship every three years from 1929, only to be neatly disposed of by the American League champion each time. In 1938, that would have been the ever annoying New York Yankees, the Joe DiMaggio edition, in the midst of a then unprecedented four year championship run and romp from 1936 to 1939.

Thus, in his formative years, Russ was able to witness and wallow in the Cubs last race to National League greatness in 1945, within the vined rapture of Wrigley Field. Fortunately, the Cubs’ ultimate and seventh consecutive World Series demise at the hands of the Detroit Tigers did not traumatize young Russ, but infused him with great hope for the Cubs future and that of his homeland, as the Cubs tenth pennant achievement coincided with America’s victory in World War II. All this perhaps inspired him to become a sportswriter, skillfully chronicling stirring athletic achievements and failures on Hoosier sporting fields and beyond, while patiently awaiting the next Cub seasonal conquest.

What followed for the second half of the Twentieth Century and increasingly deep into the 21st was a tsunami of mediocrity, occasionally punctuated with playoff cameos, and an occasional if searingly memorable stake or two driven thru the heart, brain, and psyche. In 2009, following a particularly promising season that ended with all-too-familiar ingloriousness in the playoffs, Russ wrote a game-by-game journal of the Cub’s season, called Cubbing, incisively and entertainingly detailing still another year that begins with genuine hope and high expectations and ends with sharp disappointment and renewed despair.

Russ has a reportorial writing style that cries out for sequels, but he is aware of a reader’s potential impatience with the chronically predictable that any scholarship on the Cubs can reliably entail. So in My Summer as a Cub, he has turned to fiction, based on fact, to get the Chicago Cubs back on track from their post-1908 derailment, through the heretofore hidden diamond talents of a physical therapist and once gifted softball player named Lenny Puddock, who after a magical mystery tour launched at the annual Cubs Convention in January, to the Randy Hundley Cubs Fantasy Camp in Arizona, and productive pit stops through the Cub Minor League farm system, finds himself in the Majors, ready to lead the Cubs to the promised land, aided by the late season leadership of a Cub stud of yore.

Now even the savviest of booksellers would be tempted to put a novel bearing this plot in the science fiction section or among the fantasy fiction with Alice in Wonderland and Harry Potter. But in addition to being blessedly entertained, readers will find My Summer as a Cub to be a work of inspiration, with Cub fans among them going so far to see Russ Leonard’s literary vision as a blueprint for the Chicago Cubs’ future, propelling them to where they have long meant and deserved to be, and capturing what is rightfully theirs and ours.

—Reid Duffy, Tormented Cubs Fan

Foreword

All Cubs fans dream of that year, that one magical year when all the stars align themselves, and all baseball legends are tested. Even Casey at the bat isn’t safe. In My Summer as a Cub we follow Lenny Puddock’s unbelievable journey from unknown to toast of Chicago! No goats or Bartmans allowed.

For a while it reminded me of 1984 when the Cubs suddenly blossomed, getting into the playoffs for the first time since 1945! But, like the1983 White Sox, they got off to a great start in the NL playoffs, winning the first two games. The Cubs then lost three in a row to the San Diego Padres and that was that.

I was fortunate to be a part of that wonderful 1983 baseball season in Chicago. I was the radio voice of the White Sox, as well as the Bears that magical year.

The Sox got off to a mediocre start. Just once was this team over the five hundred mark (6-5), dropping to 8 under by the end of May. They finally got it going and a five game winning streak put them one game over (34-33) on June 23rd. They won 22 of the last 25 to finish with 99 wins and the AL West championship, the first divisional title on any kind in the Windy City since the Sox won the ‘59’ pennant.

It was a solid team led by a group of veterans like Carlton Fisk, Greg Luzinski, Tom Paciorek, and Jerry Koosman. Youngsters like Harold Baines, Ron Kittle, Greg Walker, Scott Fletcher, and Rudy Law all played major roles.

The pitching in the second half of the season was phenomenal!

Lamar Hoyt won 22 of 26 ( the last 13 in a row) after a 2-6 start, winning the Cy Young Award, finishing with a 24-10 record. He had 11 complete games and worked 260 innings. Richard Dotson won 10 straight (and 16 of the last 18) to finish with a 22-7 mark, with 8 complete games and 240 innings pitched.

Lefty Floyd Bannister was 3-9 on July 4th. He went on to win 13 of his last 14 decisions to finish at 16-10! Another lefty, young Brit Burns only had a 10-11 mark overall, but tossed 4 shutouts and had 8 complete games!

If a fifth starter was needed, the veteran Koosman, and Dennis Lamp would draw an occasional start. The bullpen was by committee…with Koosman, Lamp, and Salome Barojas all sharing the role of stopper’! It was truly a dream season" dulled only by a playoff loss to the eventual world champion Baltimore Orioles.

Even with the unbelievable pitching, the Sox had plenty of pop at the plate, too! Four players hit 26 or more homeruns, with rookie of the year Ron Kittle leading the way with 35. Kittle and Luzinski thrilled the record crowds that filled Comiskey Park with several roof shots! And with speedy Rudy Law leading off (95 runs and 77 stolen bases), the Sox had it all, at least over a four month stretch. They wound up going 83-39 over that span, and won their division by 20 games!

Unfortunately, after a great opening win at Baltimore (Hoyt), the O’s won the next three, including the clincher in Chicago on a Sunday afternoon when a little known outfielder, Tito Landrum hit a 10th inning homer off Burns for the games only run. A sidenote: I worked the Chicago Bears home game at Soldiers Field (just a couple miles away from Comiskey) and then did the baseball game later that afternoon. An unusual broadcasting doubleheader, a feat that I accomplished twice.

Alas, the magic didn’t carry over into the next season. The Sox got off to a better start, but faded during the hot summer months and were not in contention at the end. It was the same as befell the Cubs. After their Division winning 1984 season, they were leading it at midpoint of 1985 when four starting pitchers went on the disabled list. And that was that!

But for you long-suffering Cubs fans, here at least is a tonic. Travel this fictional 2011 journey as the Cubs come from way back midway in the season, become the National League’s Wild Card team and go on to win the World Series.

My Summer as a Cub is quite a trip!

—Joe McConnell, Baseball Voice of the White Sox and Twins and various NFL and NBA teams.

Preface

I have always been a fan of the Chicago Cubs, and the New York Yankees.

I can remember listening to radio broadcasts of Yankee games when Mel Allen was at the microphone, and cheered as Joe DiMaggio set the record of hitting safely in 56 consecutive games. But my heart has always been with the Cubs, win or lose. And lose has been the greater part of the Cubs identity for these many years.

I grew up following the likes of Gabby Hartnett, who probably was the best catcher in the National League before Johnny Bench. And I was but a teenager just out of high school when Warren Hacker began his nine-year pitching career with the Windy City Northsiders. I remember Stan Hack at third base and Harry Chiti behind the plate, and Dom Dallessandro in the outfield. Lots of games and players in the mid and late forties.

In the early fifties, I began my broadcasting career in radio, and one of the highlights to a day at work was to ride the Network and listen to Bert Wilson and the Chicago Cubs.

Bert was the Cubs’ broadcast hero of that time, long before Brickhouse or Caray or today’s Hughes, Kasper and Brenly. He was always optimistic. I don’t care who wins as long as it’s the Cubs was his trademark phrase, and he opened each game with … It’s a beautiful day in Chicago. It could be raining buckets, or an early spring snow, but Bert always opened: It’s a beautiful day.

Bert worked in broadcasting in Indianapolis before moving to Chicago in 1944, and most who listened to him never realized that he suffered with a hair lip. Bert was so professional, he found ways to disguise his handicap, and went on to become a Hall of Fame announcer. He passed away in 1955.

I listened to all Chicago Cubs games back then,. heard all the greats who have come and gone: Hank Sauer; Chuck Connors who later became a television /movie star, Gene Mauch; Dee Fondy; Ralph Kiner (yes, Kiner played with the Cubs in 1953-54) in the outfield; and, of course, the let’s play two kid, Ernie Banks.

He came later in my career (after I left radio and went into TV), but another star on and off the field was Ron Santo who went on to broadcast Cubs games after his playing career ended. Ron was the epitome of what a Chicago Cub should be both on and off the field, and will always be remembered by fans around the world.

Wrigley Field is the greatest venue in the National League. The ivy walls in left and right fields, the unpredictable winds off Lake Michigan where pop flies become home runs, and towering drives to the fences become easy outs … the rooftop fans across Waveland Avenue in left field … and the Cub fan himself. Oh, boy … win or lose, he’s in his seat with a hot dog and cup of beer, and ready to let the opposing team know it’s going to be a rough day for the visitors.

One hundred three years have passed since the Cubs’ last World Series win. My Summer as a Cub, although fictional, is about a Cubs journey to that coveted position in Major League baseball. It’s where each of us hopes to find our heroes in real-life before too much longer.

I think you’ll find My Summer as a Cub interesting reading.

—Chuck Marlowe (retired), co-host of television’s The Bob Knight Show, TV announcer of Indiana University basketball, Member of Indiana Broadcasters Assn. Hall of Fame.

My Summer as a

CUB

Chapter 1—2011 Cubs Convention

Chapter One

Friday, January 14, 2011

This is Heaven on earth was my thought as the taxi entered the Loop and my long ride, most recently from O’Hare to the Hilton and the site of the annual Chicago Cubs Convention, had transformed this windy, icy cold January day into a hazy, lazy summer paradise. That was in my mind’s eye as I figuratively pinched myself to see if my dream were coming true, or is my dream just that— a little dream of a gangly youngster just twenty years removed from the roster of a Martin’s Hardware Little League team.

For the third straight year for Christmas my girl friend, Joyce Lambert, presented me with a ticket for the annual mid-winter convention that attracts thousands of fans to the hotel just a relay throw from Lake Michigan. Next week I’ll be in Arizona fulfilling my little dream as a member of the Randy Hundley Cubs Fantasy Camp. Who knows, for eight days and seven nights I can be Roy Hobbs, The Natural brought to actual life.

For just under $4,000 I’ll become a make-believe Cub, no longer a 32-year-old physical workout specialist for the National Institute of Fitness and Health in Indianapolis. It’ll be bats and balls, not Nu-Steps, Treadmills and bar-bells for a week.

I’ve pinched myself a dozen, nay a hundred times until I’m convinced this no longer is a dream. It’s the real thing, I’ll be in Cub shoes and in the blue and white. Put yourself in that spot, in those spikes and in the blue and white. And your first major league At Bat. With your teammates breathlessly waiting for you to bring in that runner from second base. You’re no longer on that high school sandlot.

Before physical fitness beckoned in my direction, I had set a goal of being a high school basketball and baseball coach, and had three years of college preparing me for that. Maybe it’s not too late. With my physical fitness background and what I learn at Hundley’s camp, coaching should be a distinct possibility, especially if I complete college.

When I arrived at the Hilton I was greeted by Wally Hayward, a Cubs executive vice-president who wears many hats and it wouldn’t surprise me that someday he’ll become president of the organization.

I had known Hayward briefly when he was senior advisor for the Chicago 2016 Olympics bid. Our company, NIFH, had been involved in physical therapy plans for the Olympic Village. Hayward advised me to just soak up the Cubs atmosphere, to relax and enjoy myself and get my mind set on the upcoming experience of Hundley’s Fantasy Camp. Knowing of my year of journalism at Ball State University, he convinced me to journalize the current experience and those baseball-related ones that follow with the idea of publishing a book. That’s a long shot but, one never knows.

So for three days I’ll just mingle and get acclimated with Cub players. There, make that acquainted instead of acclimated, I don’t want to have my Little League readers giving up in frustration because they don’t understand what I’m saying. When I discussed writing as a vocation with Professor McReady, that was a point he stressed.

Whereas Convention talk a year ago centered around the return of Greg Maddux, this year fans faced the sobering fact that Ryne Sandberg no longer would wear Cubs threads and that Ron Santo no longer would be among them.

Maddux, a four-time Cy Young recipient who