Cubs Legend Ryne Sandberg Dies, Age 65

[Matthew Trueblood]

Image courtesy of © Jeffrey Becker-Imagn Images

Without Ryne Sandberg, there would be no Wrigley Field. The old jewel at Clark and Addison was an attraction, of a kind, when Sandberg joined the Chicago Cubs in 1982, but it was a dying thing, not a vibrant, eternal thing. Sandberg was in his second season with the team on Apr. 29, 1983, when the Cubs lost a home game to the Dodgers before such an uninspired and unimpressed crowd of 9,391 that manager Lee Elia cut loose with his famous rant about Cubs fans thereafter. By then, it was already clear that there might be something special in Sandberg, but there was little special about the Cubs, let alone their decrepit septuagenarian home. That year would be their 11th straight season with a .500 record or worse, and it was usually worse—much worse.

Famously, at that time, Wrigley had no lights. They couldn't play home games at night; the place got dark and quiet enough during the days. In 1984, though, it was Sandberg—brilliant, even scintillating, not just playing well but playing dazzling all-around baseball—who lit the fire that has still never gone out in Wrigleyville. That year, he had the famous game in which he twice tied the game in the Cubs' final at-bat before a national TV audience, against the best closer in baseball. He hit 19 home runs and drove in 84 runs in 1984, but he also scored 114 times and added 36 doubles and 19 triples. He stole 32 bases, and played the surest-handed second base in the game.

He was the MVP of the National League, and nearly unanimously so. The Cubs were better than .500 again at last—a lot better. They won 96 games and the National League East. No, they weren't unfairly robbed of home-field advantage because they couldn't host games at night. No, they didn't hold onto what should have been an ironclad advantage in that year's National League Championship Series. And no (though he made it back to the postseason in 1989 and had a 1.258 OPS against the Giants), Sandberg's teams never came as close to breaking the curse of the billy goat again. But Sandberg was the spark, and the breath of air to make it spread. He was a one-man wildfire, and by 1988, Wrigleyville could be seen from space on summer weeknights.

That's Sandberg's legacy. He altered the identity of the Cubs and everyone who loved them. Second base is the closest landmark we have to a center of the diamond, and Sandberg sent a ripple out from his place at the keystone that would eventually be felt throughout Chicago. As great as Ron Santo, Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Fergie Jenkins were, they had not been able to shake the team out of the deep funk into which it fell after winning their war pennant in 1945. The city had adopted the Cubbies (that belittling moniker and all) as their lovable losers. No one, until Sandberg, managed to change that.

The actual results didn't change permanently, beginning in 1984. Losing seasons still outnumbered winning ones, over the course of Sandberg's career. Even as losses accumulated, though, those teams were much more respectable. They had someone fans could take pride in, with ample national profile. They began churning out other players, like Rafael Palmeiro, Greg Maddux and Mark Grace, who were similarly ineluctable in their quality and respectability. They became a place where, for instance, Andre Dawson wanted to play when collusion took financial incentives out of his decision-making process in the winter of 1986-87. Sandberg was the first Cub in a quarter-century to win an MVP award. Since then, they've had winners in 1987, 1998, and 2016, and very close finishers in a handful of other years.

Sandberg's fluid, exquisitely routinized movements on ground balls and on the bases were just extensions of his personality. He was a student of the game and a servant of its fans, so dedicated to them that he walked away for one stretch when he felt he could no longer give the game the tenacity and dignity it deserved from him. 

If you're a Cubs fan in 2025, you owe an overweening debt to Sandberg, because the Cubs as we know them would not exist without him. He wasn't the best player in team history, or its most vivid personality, but he brought the relentless, beautiful quality that makes baseball its best self to Wrigley Field. He was the main attraction of the very first Cubs Convention, and a fixture at those events for decades afterward. He was a proud steward of the game, and became an ambassador for the team on the condition that the team could acquit itself as a conduit of the game worthy of its fans. Thanks to his insistence on that standard, ever since he came along, the Cubs have thus acquitted themselves much more consistently than they used to.

Cancer needed two chances to finish off Sandberg. He beat it back once, but the pernicious form of metastatic prostate cancer he had is one of the few things in nature as tenacious as Sandberg the ballplayer was. It would have been wonderful if he could have thwarted its attempts to shut down the party twice, as he did to Bruce Sutter 41 years ago, but lives can't have happy endings. They matter because they end, and their ends are sad. Sandberg's certainly is; the world could do with another decade or two of fundamental decency, and he had it to give. While he was here, though, he gave heaping helpings of that particular blessing to fans, friends, and family.

Baseball is great, not because it frees us from mortality, but because it makes us more aware of ourselves and the people around us for however long the games last. Our attention is all drawn to the same place, and the hum of really well-played and fully felt baseball heightens our senses and slows entropy's march toward us. All entertainment is about stealing time from death itself. Really good entertainment never lets you ponder that for too long. Sandberg gave Cubs fans a decade and a half of great entertainment, and the reward for that is, in one small sense, immortality: his profound respect for the game will keep him alive in the memories of baseball fans for another 65 years or more.

Brewers hitting coach Al Leboeuf returned to the park as the Brewers came home for this homestand. LeBoeuf, 65, had been away from the team for weeks to undergo treatment of his own second bout of prostate cancer. Happily, his prognosis now looks good, at least for now.

That's life, of course—and, in some ways, baseball. As LeBoeuf said, he's been very lucky. Sandberg couldn't quite catch the same break. There are always winners and losers, but it's not always because they earned anything different from one another. It's comforting, sometimes, to be reminded that there are winners, even when we lose. It's certainly wonderful, even on this excruciating night, to know that there is still hope for many who face a similar thing to what Sandberg did.

My first game at Wrigley Field was Sandberg's last there, as a player, on Sept. 21, 1997. I remember a lot about it, but relatively little of it is focused on Sandberg. I was too young. I'd been a baby the last time he'd been able to reach October, and we'd just gotten cable so that I could watch the Cubs that very spring. I got just one summer with Sandberg, in real time, and when you're eight years old, Sammy Sosa and Brian McRae and Brant Brown look more interesting than Sandberg did at that late stage of his career. Ever since, though, I've been proud to say that that was my first game, because it's what ties me tangibly to the generation—to the man—who remade the Chicago Cubs and changed what they meant to the North Side of Chicago. Though he's now gone, he's left a lot to fans of the team, and to baseball fans in general. Cancer can't touch all of that, just as it can't tear down Wrigley Field.

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[Todd Trueblood]

Very good stuff!