There is no joy in Wrigleyville. Mighty Ernie has checked out. At 83. Cub fans aren't the only ones in baseball's world who think that, for Ernie Banks, it's still too young to go. Posted on 01/27/2015 12:35:36 PM PST by BluesDuke
There is no joy in Wrigleyville. Mighty Ernie has checked out. At 83. Cub fans aren't the only ones in baseball's world who think that, for Ernie Banks, it's still too young to go.
Winning with class is easy compared to losing with grace, good humor, and the inner peace of knowing you did the best you could with what you had. But then there was Banks. The prototype of the power-hitting shortstop whose knees turned him into a first baseman who could still hit but had to prove himself every spring, anyway, his sunny nature couldn't be killed by the most calamitous of Cub collapses.
Sometimes you could be overwhelmed enough by Banks's personality that you could forget he was a genuinely great player. The first shortstop to hit 250+ home runs while playing that position is also the only man who ever had multiple-homer games against Warren Spahn and Sandy Koufax.
The first black player to start for the Cubs is also the first man in National League history to win back to back Most Valuable Player awards (1958, 1959). And he did it playing for teams that finished a combined 64 games out of first place over the two seasons. Not to mention that Banks is the first man to hit five grand slams in a single season.
The man who figured out almost by accident that a whip-handled, light bat was no detriment to hitting the long ball had four consecutive seasons hitting 40 or more home runs in each. Neither fellow wrists-first hitter Hank Aaron nor Willie Mays ever did that in three consecutive seasons. You might care to note as well that Banks is only one of three shortstops to cross the 40-bomb seasonal plateau even once. One was the seemingly tainted Alex Rodriguez, then a Texas Ranger. The other was Rico Petrocelli with the 1969 Red Sox.
Lest you think Banks was just another swatter aided and abetted by the park he first dubbed the Friendly Confines, be advised that he hit a mere 68 more home runs at home than on the road during his major league career. He also defied the traditional platoon splits: he retired with 2,584 hits, and two thirds of those came at the expense of right-handed pitchers, including about two thirds of his home runs.
Very impressive for a native Texan who didn't look terribly athletic or play baseball at all until he was a teenager and then in church leagues — because his high school didn't have a baseball team. He was tall for a shortstop, slender, almost delicately handsome, and his uniform looked about three sizes beyond him in the beginning.
Banks got his first taste of major league level baseball playing for the Kansas City Monarchs, the Negro Leagues team that also yielded forth Jackie Robinson a few years earlier. He was so happy just to play the game that it took his teammates' prodding to convince him to leave for the Cubs in 1953. It took an unexpected injury to the Cubs' other black player at the time, Glen Baker, to make Banks the first black man to wear a Cub uniform in a starting lineup.
Banks' talent was obvious enough to move Baker to second base, and the slightly older player simply accepted it and taught the eager kid everything he knew about playing shortstop. Their execution of double plays in hand with first baseman Steve Bilko impressed broadcaster Bert Wilson enough to dub the trio as Bingo to Bango to Bilko, which beats the living hell out of Tinker to Evers to Chance. Lyrical alliteration.
"Banks could have been a Cardinal," wrote lifelong Cub afflicted George F. Will in A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred last year.
In the spring of 1953, one of that team's scouts saw him playing shortstop for the ... Monarchs ... and sent a favourable report to St. Louis. The Cardinals sent out another scout for a second opinion, which was: "I don't think he is a major league prospect. He can't hit, he can't run, he has a pretty good arm but it's a scatter arm. I don't like him." In the annals of misjudgments, that ranks with the report on the screen test of a young Fred Astaire: "Can't act. Slightly bald. Can dance a little."
Banks' only known actual problem, other than having been a so-so baserunner, was a knee injury incurred during his early 1950s military service that finally flared up in earnest in 1961. It compelled his move to first base, where he played the rest of his career. It didn't do a thing to kill his genuine love for the game.
Teammates who loved Banks otherwise sometimes didn't know what to make of him. The late Jim Brosnan, whose pitching career began with the 1950s Cubs, thought it was "almost impossible" to get to know Banks. All Cub fans and anyone else knew was that, whatever else was going on in Banks's off-field life, in the clubhouse and on the field was where he felt most at home.
"Some people," he would say in his memoir Mr. Cub, "feel that because you are black you will never be treated fairly, and that you should voice your opinions, be militant about them. I don't feel this way. You can't convince a fool against his will."
Banks eventually had to work to convince Leo Durocher, just about every spring the Lip managed the Cubs, that he still had what it took despite assorted Durocher assertions otherwise. Until his knees, long since gone arthritic, finally told him to call it a career after 1971.
Entire books have been written about why the 1969 Cubs blew a National League East they once looked to run away with, including the theory (not implausible) that Durocher mishandled his bullpens, rode his regulars too hard leaving them exhausted by the depth of the stretch, and even fostered a culture of greed on a team so unaccustomed to winning they could barely come to terms with their unexpected celebrity.
Banks didn't need an entire book to know why. According to sports psychologist David Claerbaut, whose Durocher's Cubs: The Greatest Team That Didn't Win should be considered the definitive book about the 1969 Cubs, Banks saw the team's collapse coming long before anyone else did.
Claerbaut cited a conversation between Banks and pitcher Ken Holtzman over drinks in Pittsburgh. "Kenny," the veteran told the younger man, "we have a nine game lead and we're not going to win it because we have a manager and three or four players who are out there waiting to get beat."
He would also admit, decades later, that the incident in which Ron Santo tore apart rookie outfielder Don Young in the press over a pair of fielding miscues probably did as much as Durocher's capriciousness and strategic inability to manage his pitching staff to deflate the '69 Cubs.
Banks' criticisms came dressed in a marshmallow overcoat. He could never bear to rip a teammate or manager, preferring to criticize kindly. He couldn't even bear to confess his disappointment at never getting to play in a postseason in abrasive or even overtly painful words. He once told Tim Kurkjian, the ESPN writer, that it "has always left me with an empty feeling inside. I loved the game so much. To not ever play in the World Series, let alone win it, still hurts. It's the ultimate achievement for a player. I really thought we were going to get there in 1969."
When the Cubs crashed in September, losing 11 of 12 to go from five games ahead to four-and-a-half behind, it all happened so fast that it seemed more grotesque than dramatic and, by the end, darkly comic. Banks slumped, too. But after seven straight loses, he made a personal stand. Against the Phils he drove in a run in the first inning, then homered in the eighth to give the Cubs a 2-1 lead; they blew it, of course. The next day, in the only Cub win of the whole smashup, Banks drove in four of their five runs. That was the old man's statement; not nearly enough, but something.He was perhaps the least pretentious baseball superstar. Sometimes he couldn't seem to find a set place in the Cubs' organizational culture after his playing and subsequent coaching days ended. (The organization sometimes seemed to treat him like as one writer described, the crazy uncle with whom nobody in the family knows quite what to do.) Banks made his post baseball way in and out of a few businesses (smart investing made him wealthy during a playing career in a time when ballplayers were chattel) and never out of Cub Country's embrace.On the final day of the season, when ... Durocher, the grouch who said, "Nice guys finish last," was disengaged from his team and stuck with the disgrace of his defeat, Banks was still showing up — just to play baseball. On the season's last day, Banks, the oldest man in the lineup, played his 155th game of the year and had a triple, homer and drove in three runs to finish the season with 106 RBI, a total he hadn't topped since his 20s.
—Thomas Boswell, while introducing Phil Rogers's Ernie Banks: Mr. Cub and the Summer of '69.
"Banks is one nice guy who finished first," Durocher eventually said, setting aside his former testiness that he couldn't rid himself of the aging Banks because it would have meant his hanging in Chicago, "but he had the talent to go with it." Except, alas, in marriage, where it took him three tries before his fourth marriage, apparently, proved that practice makes perfect.
"We got the setting. We got the sunshine. We got the team behind us," Banks said to begin his induction speech at the Hall of Fame, where he was 1977′s only inductee voted in by the Baseball Writers Association of America, and where a small coterie of Hall of Famers sat on the same stage. "So let's play two."
Banks always wanted to play two. He also always believed the Cubs would snap out of it and get to the Promised Land in his two lifetimes, one on the field, and the second as the Cubs' unquestioned spirit.
"Without Banks," said Jimmy Dykes, then manager of the crosstown White Sox, in 1958, "the Cubs would finish in Albuquerque." With Banks now in direct position to urge the God of his fathers, this year's Cubs might finish some place other than Albuquerque. The Promised Land is not an indistinct possibility. Yet.
* One fine day in the Polo Grounds, Marvelous Marv Throneberry ripped one to the back of the outfield and gunned it for all he was worth, pulling into third with a stand-up triple. Or so he thought. Banks called for the ball and told the first base ump, "Didn't touch first, you know." Banks took the ball and stepped on the pad. The ump jerked his thumb for the out sign. Mets manager Casey Stengel barreled out of the dugout intent on murder until first base coach Cookie Lavagetto stopped him. "Forget it, Case," Lavagetto said. "He didn't touch second, either."
The next Met batter, Charley Neal, hit one off the facade above the upper deck in left center field for a homer. Neal wasn't three steps running up the line when Stengel stopped him dead. Then, Stengel pointed to first base and stomped his foot. He did it with every stop until Neal crossed the plate without incident or mishap. The joint went nuts.
* In the same series, young Cub outfielder Lou Brock was jittery before a game. Banks remembered it to Sports Illustrated's Rich Cohen last year:
I roomed with Lou. We were in New York, and he asked, “Ernie, what does it take to play major league baseball?” I said, “Lou, all you need is one thing: You gotta relax.” He said, “I can’t relax! I don’t want to go back to Louisiana, picking no cotton.” That night he hit the longest home run he ever hit, in the Polo Grounds. You can look it up.The home run in question actually cleared the Polo Grounds' center field fence, on the right side of the old clubhouse and office structure that bisected the bleachers, and the fence was 468 feet from home plate. (Now do you understand what was so stupefying about Willie Mays's famous catch in the 1954 World Series?)
The thing of it was, when Brock hit the ball and gunned it out of the batter's box, he rounded first, headed for second full speed, and---still inexperienced as he was---took the second base umpire's home run sign to mean he had a shot at an inside the park job. Brock had no idea what he'd actually done until he crossed the plate, plunged into a mob of cheering teammates near the dugout, then heard Ron Santo hollering into his face, "Did you see where that ball went? Man, I needed binoculars!"
Brock became only the second major league player since the Polo Grounds was reconstructed in 1923 to hit one that distance in the big park. The Braves' Joe Adcock did it in 1953. (Luke Easter, in a Negro Leagues game, did it, too, in 1948.)
The day after Brock's shot, the Braves came in to play the Mets and Hank Aaron hit one to almost the same spot as Brock's!
Bkmrk
When baseball was a game. Sigh ...
A genuinely good man, a stellar representative of the game... and one hell of a great ballplayer.
Somehow I can’t help thinking Jack Brickhouse should have been in that cartoon; Harry Caray wasn’t with the Cubs broadcasters during Banks’s or Santo’s careers. ;)
Not a bad list to join. There were a some players who had more skill, but few who had more class.
Ernie Banks was so beloved and respected that even fans of the Cubs’ biggest rival, the St. Louis Cardinals, respect the class and work ethic Banks represented.
Great tribute to one of the classiest players to ever play the game. The number of players who had the same great combination of both class and skill can be counted on one hand: Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, Lou Gehrig and Ernie Banks.Actually, you can add Christy Mathewson, Yogi Berra, Roy Campanella, Roberto Clemente, three Robinsons (Jackie, Frank, and Brooks), Sandy Koufax, Andre Thornton, Mike Schmidt, Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, Dale Murphy, Ryne Sandberg, and Tom Glavine to that group.
Ernie Banks
I’m sure Ernie would move over and make room for them, but it is still a pretty small list.
Ernie Banks was so beloved and respected that even fans of the Cubs’ biggest rival, the St. Louis Cardinals, respect the class and work ethic Banks represented.You have to love when a player earns that kind of respect. Stan Musial had the same reputation among the Cardinals' opponents (I should have included Musial in the aforesaid list of players with skill and class!); Sandy Koufax had the same rep among the Dodgers' opponents; Hank Aaron among Braves' opponents.
A story about Koufax I still love: Thirty-five years after Koufax beat the Cubs' Bob Hendley in a perfect game that might have featured Hendley with a no-hitter on its backside (the only Dodger run of the game scored without a hit; the only Dodger hit was stranded on base), Hendley was surprised to receive a small package: a 1965 National League baseball inscribed "What a game!!" with a note attached: We had a night, a moment, a career. I hope life has been good to you. Sandy.
It happened after one of Hendley's sons saw a newspaper clipping commemorating the game and sent it to Koufax, only to have Koufax return it autographed with a note: "Say hello to your father for me."
Hendley to this day will tell anyone who asks how it felt to lose that game, "It's no disgrace to be beaten by class."
‘Let’s play two’............RIP Mr Banks. The diamond won’t see class like you for a good long time.
and add to your list my boyhood hero Warren Spahn.
Harmon Killebrew perhaps?
Yep...thinking the same thing. I can still hear Jack introducing them...."all right...let's check the lineup; Santo, Kessinger, Beckert, and Banks, the infield from 3rd to 1st....."
"It's a great day for a ball game"
Ernie Banks
Ernie's wrists go all the way up to his armpits.
---Unidentified Cubs teammate.
He swings his bat as if it were a buggy whip, striking at the ball with the reflexive swiftness of a serpent's tongue.
---William Furlong, sportswriter.
There were mornings when I'd come dragging into the clubhouse, hung over, still half asleep. Ernie would be sitting there and he'd burst into a loud announcer's voice, "Here comes Pepi! What's happening, man? Oh, look at those eyes! Open those eyes, Pepi, and see what a beautiful day it is to play baseball in beautiful, ivy-covered Wrigley Field. It's a great day to win two, Pepi! And we're gonna win two with you, Pepi! Two for the Cubs! We're gonna win two because we love baseball, don't we, Pepi? Now isn't this a great day to win two for the Cubs, Pepi?"
"Ernie," I'd say, it's a great day for two more hours f@cking sleep!"
"Oh, Pepi's got his eyes open. He is ready!"
---Joe Pepitone, a Banks teammate on the 1970-71 Cubs, in his memoir Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud.
People ask me a lot about the values I got from playing for the Cubs for so many years. The value I got out of it was patience. A lot of people these days are not very patient.
---Ernie Banks, after his playing days ended.
Spahn, Killebrew, Aaron, Musial, Gil Hodges, Roy White (the classiest Yankee during their fallow 1965-74 period), Tom Seaver, Lyman Bostock (before his tragic murder), the list could go ever onward and upward, as Billy Strayhorn liked to say . . .
Your original additions were quite good, but I just had to add Warren Spahn to the list. My parents took me to a game in 1957 in Milwaukee and Warren Spahn was pitching (he won the game). The most memorable sporting event I have ever attended.
A story about Koufax I still love
Two days later, he was loading up his car, cleaning the windshield, checking the oil, etc., to prepare for departure. The guy next door was doing pretty much the same thing. He looked over, and was taken aback. Finally, he couldn’t resist, and said “Hey Sandy, I really enjoyed watching you pitch”. Koufax was humbled by the remark, and they ended up chatting for a few minutes :)
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