It was another failure, in some ways more frustrating than the fabled ‘69 team.
Yesterday, I posted this article about how some players who the Cubs let go for almost nothing in the late 1950s and early 1960s might have helped the 1969 team get over the hump and make the postseason.
The Cubs, chastened by that loss, set out to put together a better team in 1970. Again, some failed transactions helped doom that team, even though several Cubs had better years in 1970 than they did in 1969.
Only about a month after the season ended, the Cubs shipped Dick Selma and Oscar Gamble to the Phillies for Johnny Callison.
Callison had been a very good player from 1962-65, posting four straight 6+ bWAR seasons and making the NL All-Star team three times. In one of those games (1964) he hit a three-run walkoff homer for the NL.
But by 1970 Callison was 31, not really a good defender anymore and not hitting the way he had in the mid-1960s. In that sense it can be seen as another Cub deal of the time, acquiring a “proven veteran” (read: “fading veteran”) for players the team felt they had no place for.
There has been talk and speculation for decades that the trade of Gamble was made because he was dating white women, something George Castle put in his book “The Million To One Team.” Remember, this was 1969 and the Cubs were still operating like it was the 1940s, so when reports came out that Gamble was dating white women when assigned to the Arizona Instructional League that fall, the Cubs made the trade.
Obviously Gamble would have been a much better player for the Cubs for several seasons. But also, the Phillies turned Selma into a reliever and he had a really good year in 1970, posting 5.2 bWAR and 22 saves (for a team that lost 88 games!), the save total fifth in the league. One of the reasons the Cubs failed in 1970 was a horrific bullpen. If they’d have done that with Selma… but of course, they probably wouldn’t have, given the reactionary way the front office and Leo Durocher thought back then.
After losing three of their first four, the Cubs rattled off an 11-game winning streak, which included a pair of walkoff wins. They continued to win through mid-June, and on May 12 Ernie Banks hit his milestone 500th home run:
On June 18, they defeated the Giants 6-0 at San Francisco, a complete-game shutout by Fergie Jenkins, to go to 34-24. They led the NL East by 4½ games. Billy Williams was batting .292/.363/.571 with 18 home runs in 58 games and Jim Hickman was tearing up the league, batting .339/.450/.701 with 16 home runs in 53 games, on his way to an All-Star nod.
It looked like the promise of 1969 was finally going to be fulfilled. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, you know the answer to that, which is: “Pretty much everything.” After that 34-24 start, the Cubs split their next two games and then lost 12 straight, basically negating the 11-game winning streak earlier in the year. Phil Regan, who Durocher kept using to close games even though he was not doing that, blew three saves during that losing streak, the worst of all coming June 23 when the Cubs had a 10-8 lead with two out in the ninth. Regan gave up a two-run single, then Mets backup catcher Duffy Dyer — who hit just 30 home runs in 2,266 MLB plate appearances — smacked a two-run homer in the 10th.
Why was Regan still in the game? Because the Cubs didn’t have any reliable relievers. Except… they could have had Ted Abernathy close games, as he had back in 1965. The Cubs traded him away, then reacquired him, and for some reason Durocher just didn’t want to use Abernathy. He pitched in just 11 games for the Cubs in 1970 before he was traded to the Cardinals for infielder Phil Gagliano. Yes, you’re saying, “Who?” Gagliano batted .150/.244/.150 in 26 games for the Cubs and after the season was traded to the Red Sox for Carmen Fanzone.
Meanwhile, Abernathy pitched reasonably well for the Cardinals and after the 1970 season they traded him to the Royals, where he posted three really good years, including a 23-save season at age 38 in 1971.
The Cubs sure could have used that.
They did come back from a 10-18 June to go 19-12 in July, but ended the month in third place, two games out of first. In June they acquired Milt Pappas from the Braves for cash considerations and he pitched well for the Cubs in 21 games (20 starts), posting a 2.68 ERA and 4.1 bWAR.
Williams and Hickman continued to have big seasons, but the Cubs lost 10 of 16 to start August and dropped to six games out of the division lead. Hickman, as noted, made the NL All-Star team, his only All-Star appearance, and he wound up driving in the winning run — the run Pete Rose scored by running into Ray Fosse.
After the All-Star break, no one was running away with the division. The Mets weren’t having the “miracle” year they had in 1969 and the Pirates weren’t yet the team that dominated the division for most of the 1970s.
At the end of August/beginning of September, the Cubs won six of seven to get to within half a game of the division lead — and that one loss, an agonizing 3-2, 13-inning loss to the Phillies, was yet another when Regan couldn’t do it. Durocher asked Regan to throw more than FOUR innings that afternoon. Was it just trust between Durocher and Regan? Or was it the fact that the Cubs had no other reliable relievers? Regan had 12 saves that year — and nine blown saves. The Cubs did manage to win two of the games in which Regan blew a save, but he also had nine losses, back in the day when relievers like that were often put in tie games.
The Cubs muddled around for a couple of weeks after that, no farther than two games out, no closer than one.
Then on Sunday, Sept. 13, the Cubs faced the Pirates on a cool (54 degrees), rainy afternoon. They went to the bottom of the ninth trailing 2-1 and the first two hitters made routine outs.
Willie Smith, the walkoff homer hero of Opening Day 1969, batted for starting pitcher Bill Hands, one of his last games as a Cub. And he hit a fly ball to center field that should have been another routine out. Pirates center fielder Matty Alou “camped under it,” as Jack Brickhouse used to day.
And then Alou dropped the ball. I’ve looked for video of this play for years and finally found it (apologies for the poor video quality)
Smith, hustling, reached second base and Ken Rudolph ran for him. That was odd: Smith, then 31, was not fast — but Rudolph was a backup catcher and not seen as a fast runner. At that point in his career he had never even attempted a stolen base.
Anyway, Don Kessinger singled, Rudolph scored and the game was tied. Glenn Beckert followed with another single and Kessinger stopped at second.
The Pirates removed starter Steve Blass — this was when Blass was one of the top starters in the league, before “Steve Blass Disease” and all that — for George Brunet, who had pitched for more than a decade for a number of teams. It was one of just 12 games he played in for the Pirates, at age 36, though Brunet wound up playing in the Mexican League until 1984 (!).
Billy Williams singled off Brunet’s second pitch, scoring Kessinger and the Cubs had won the game.
In the Sun-Times, Jerome Holtzman wrote:
This was a game for history. There was Gabby Hartnett’s homer in the gloaming, which lifted the Cubs to a pennant, and 32 years later, also on a dark September afternoon there is a companion piece — Matty Alou’s ninth-inning error. And who knows? From this another Chicago pennant could sprout.
Obviously, it didn’t. But that was how Cubs fans felt after that game was pretty much stolen from the Pirates. Just like that, the Cubs were one game out of first place with 17 to go. They beat the Cardinals the next day, then lost their last two home games to St. Louis and were two games out with 14 to go.
That’s right, the 1970 Cubs were forced to go on a 14-game road trip to end the season.
Why? It’s uncertain. In both 1969 and 1970, the schedule was front-loaded with home games. The Cubs played 20 of their first 34 at home in 1969 and had 17 of their first 29 at Wrigley in 1970.
The Cubs were not a good road team in 1970. They did manage to take the first three of a four-game series against the Expos in Montreal, so with 11 games to go, the Cubs were 1½ games out of first place.
Unfortunately, they didn’t have any games remaining against the Pirates, the team ahead of them. They lost the last game in Montreal and then got swept by the Cardinals in a doubleheader in St. Louis. They went 4-7 while the Pirates went 8-4, and that was that. They finished 84-78, five games behind the Bucs, the closest any of those late 1960s/early 1970s teams got to first place at the end of the season.
So what went wrong? The Cubs scored 808 runs in 1970, second in the league to the Giants. It was the most runs any Cubs team had scored since 1937 (!) and they wouldn’t score that many again until 2008. They were second in the NL in homers with 179, and Billy Williams’ 6.6 bWAR season was third in the NL to Tony Perez and Johnny Bench. Williams’ 42-homer season still stands as the only 40-homer season by a Cubs lefthanded hitter (yeah, that non-tender of Kyle Schwarber still hurts).
It was mostly the pitching that caused the failure. Durocher still over-used his starters. Jenkins, Bill Hands and Ken Holtzman started 115 (!) of the 162 games. They threw 41 complete games, and the Cubs were 65-50 in the games those three started, a .565 winning percentage which is equivalent to a 92-win season. But that means the Cubs were just 18-29 in the other 47 games, and that’s back in the day when the quality of starting pitching was much more critical than it is now. As noted, Pappas threw well for the Cubs but they got 17 starts from rookie Joe Decker, who had a 4.53 ERA as a starter.
The relief pitchers weren’t any better.
The Cubs had 25 saves in 1970, which ranked tied for 21st among the 24 teams. They also had 17 blown saves. The Pirates were worse with 18 blown saves, but even so, they were second-best in the NL in fewest runs allowed. If only they’d kept Ted Abernathy. It got so bad they claimed 47-year-old Hoyt Wilhelm on waivers from the Braves in late September. He pitched in three games for the Cubs with a 9.82 ERA and then was traded back to Atlanta after the season for Hal Breeden, who did pretty much nothing as a Cub.
The Cubs’ Pythagorean record in 1970 was 94-68, so their actual record was 10 games worse. Now, the Pythag record isn’t necessarily a predictor, but a 10-game swing is much higher than anyone might expect. The pitching, and bad managing, were the likely culprits. Durocher was 65 years old in 1970. Today, that doesn’t seem that old and some successful managers in 2024 (Brian Snitker, for one) are that age, though many are younger. In 1970, only Walter Alston and Don Gutteridge, both 58, were anywhere close to Durocher’s age and that was a time when younger guys like Sparky Anderson (36), Earl Weaver (39) and Chuck Tanner (41) were beginning their managerial careers. Those three would account for 10 league pennants and five World Series titles between 1970 and 1984.
Durocher? His heyday had been 20-25 years earlier. The game, and society, had changed, and he didn’t change with it. The failure of the Cubs in 1970 wasn’t as much his fault as the failure in 1969, but again in ‘70 he refused to use his bench — six Cubs played in at least 143 games — and Durocher didn’t seem to understand how to use a modern pitching staff.
The 1970 Cubs could have, and probably should have, been the team that took away all our bad memories of 1969 and at least won the NL East. Instead, that year just became another notch in the Cubs’ history of failure.