Have Some Fun Watching This Old Cubs-Dodgers Game With Us: Part 3 - The Real, Live Game

[Matthew Trueblood]

Deep into the holiday weekend, now, you should be sick to death of football. Watch an old baseball game with us.

Image courtesy of YouTube

Today, at long last, I want to talk about Mike Harkey. In the first two installments of this semi-unintentional trilogy, I focused on the quirks and quiddities of the Cubs' broadcasts back in the heyday of Harry Caray and Steve Stone, assisted by Arne Harris; and then on the Dodgers' nifty, doomed, fascinating little technological measure, captured in the game. Today, let's stick to ball, and specifically, mostly, to Mike Harkey.

If you don't remember Harkey, you're forgiven. He only pitched 656 innings in the big leagues, scattered across nine seasons. About 420 of those were for the Cubs. He was quite good in 1990 (more on that shortly), quite bad in 1993, and quite injured between around around those years. The game I tuned in and watched, and am exhorting you to watch with me in remote, time-shiifted fashion, is this one, from May 23, 1990.

Harkey, then 23, entered this game (he hoped) on the upswing. He'd been blasted over the first six starts he made that year, with a 6.23 ERA and .842 opponent OPS. Yet, he retained a rotation spot for the defending division champions, and not without reason. He had a big build and a lively arm, and when he was right, you could see how he might dominate even a good lineup. His previous time out, in Houston against the Astros, he had fired eight scoreless innings, scattering just 10 baserunners and bringing that ERA all the way down to 4.93.

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For more thoughts sparked by this game, see Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.

Even in that outing, he'd only struck out four, while facing a whopping 33 Houston batters and throwing 130 pitches. (Yes, 130. It really was 1990, you see, and even a 23-year-old was expected to pitch until the hitters started to tell the manager he was done.) (Gee, one wonders if that kind of thing is why Harkey was hurt so often.) For the season, the best of his career, Harkey would only end up striking out 12.9% of opposing hitters. Strikeouts were less common then, of course, but not so much less common that this was typical. The league fanned at a 15.1% clip in 1990. Harkey was a big, fairly hard-throwing pitch-to-contact guy, which is part of why he never did ascend beyond the heights he reached in that first full season in the majors.

Nonetheless, Harkey looked good on this day. Steve Stone noted that he had demonstrated the ability to throw both his changeup and his curveball (from a low-three-quarters slot and with good velocity on it, I would say what he then dubbed a curve would go by the name of sweeper, now) for strikes against the Astros. He was doing the same thing early against the Dodgers, and when the Cubs gave him a thin lead (thanks to Dave Clark, who really could hit a righty, baby) in the third, he seized upon it. No Dodgers batter reached base in the third, fourth, or fifth innings.

In the top of the sixth, there was some danger. Harkey got the leadoff man, opposing pitcher Tim Belcher (batting for himself in a 1-0 game in the sixth inning! It was not at all noteworthy then, but would be unthinkable by the final few years of DH-less baseball, 30 years later), but then gave up a double and a walk to the top two hitters in the lineup. This was his third time through, already. In some modern games, it would have been time to turn to the bullpen. Back then, though, no one even got warm. Harkey recovered gorgeously, including delivering a couple of nasty changeups to fan Kal Daniels and get out of the inning. It was the second time Harkey's change had retired Daniels on a whiff, and he'd grounded out to Mark Grace in between. Harkey seemed to have the Dodgers slugger in the rocking chair.

The Cubs nearly blew it open in the sixth, with two runs generated partially by sloppy Dodgers defense. Harkey mowed down the Dodgers in the seventh and got the leadoff man again in the eighth, cruising, up 3-0. But up 3-0 with one out in the eighth never seems to be that kind to the Cubs, does it?

A clean single by pinch-hitter Mickey Hatcher started the trouble. Then, Lenny Harris hit a dribbler down the third-base line. Luis Salazar overran it, going into foul territory, and he failed to even consider that as he reached back for the ball, he was reaching into fair territory again. He was, though, and while he might have had a play on Harris if he'd been in better position or been more aware of the call, he had none by the time all was said and done. Next, a slicing line drive fell just shy of a sliding Doug Dascenzo, putting the Dodgers on the board. It was a well-struck ball, as Hatcher's had been. In all likelihood, this was the hitters telling Don Zimmer they were catching up to Harkey. Still, it could have been caught, if Dascenzo were slightly better-positioned or a hair faster off the block.

Harris's and Stan Javier's singles felt unfair, given the great day Harkey was having. He'd earned better. He recovered to get pinch-hitter Eddie Murray to tap back to the mound, though, and although the tying run was now in scoring position, the Cubs were also just one out from escaping the jam.

Zimmer had, in my opinion, a difficult dilemma on his hands. He'd allowed Harkey to face Murray, even as Stone remarked on TV that it was time to go to warming southpaw Paul Assenmacher. Murray was a better left-handed hitter than a right-handed one, at that stage of his career, and Assenmacher would have a better chance of getting a double play from him. Harkey had won that battle, though. Should Zimmer let him try to win the war and get Daniels out a fourth time?

He went to Assenmacher, and any modern manager would do the same. On regular rest, after throwing 130 pitches in Houston, Harkey was at 101. Daniels, though not much remembered now, was a formidable lefty slugger at the time. Gaining the platoon advantage and going to a fresh arm was a no-brainer. I can't shake the feeling, though, that Harkey had Daniels's number. He overwhelmed him through three at-bats. He just needed one more good changeup to get through the eighth.

Surely, though, that's hindsight talking. Assenmacher gave up an opposite-field, three-run homer, to ruin the day. That's baseball, sometimes. Harkey had pitched brilliantly, but it was no easy call to leave him in even to face Murray. There was every risk that Daniels would have done the same thing to him, had Zimmer left him in.

The game was defined by some sloppiness, between the Cubs' sixth-inning rally and the Dodgers' to come back. It ended that way, too. A walk and a single to lead off the bottom of the ninth gave the Cubs lots of hope. Those came against Dodgers pitcher—I swear, this is true—Mike Hartley, who gave way to (best we can do on a match) Don Aase, but Aase for Hartley worked out better, sadly, than had Assenmacher for Harkey. Joe Girardi botched a sacrifice bunt, allowing the Dodgers to get the lead runner, so instead of having the tying run a sac fly away and the winning run on second, the runners were still at first and second. A pinch-hitter named Curt Wilkerson struck out, and leadoff man Marvell Wynne recorded the final out. Ryne Sandberg stood in the on-deck circle. Alas.

Despite the mistakes by each team, this was a fun game to watch. Despite Sandberg not having a big impact (he went 1-for-4 with an unimportant double), it was nice to be reminded of an unintentional competitive advantage the Cubs claimed back then, too. Sandberg batted second most days, which is (we now know) where a team's best hitter should go in the lineup. At the time, it was vanishingly rare for a player as good as he was to actually bat in that position. From 1984-90, the 1984 and 1990 Cubs were the fourth- and fifth-best teams in terms of OPS from the second spot in the order. The only clubs who beat them were two Red Sox iterations for whom Wade Boggs took that duty, and the 1985 Mariners, thanks to the one All-Star season of left fielder Phil Bradley.

This concludes our three-part tour of one random game on YouTube. More such games will be recapped and rehashed later this winter, so don't feel too put-out about this one being a loss. If nothing else, we hope you had fun remembering some guys—and some broadcasters' habits, and some forerunners to modern controversies about the use of technology in baseball, too. Happy Thanksgiving.

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