Once again, a talented Cubs team failed to make the postseason.
So, I figured after writing about the 1969 Cubs failures and those of 1970 the last couple of days, I’d continue this brief series with a look at the team in 1971.
General manager John Holland was curiously inactive in the offseason. The only players acquired were the Breeden brothers, Danny (from the Reds) and Hal (from the Braves), and Carmen Fanzone from the Red Sox. Neither Breeden brother did much of anything for the Cubs (they played in a total of 48 games) and neither did much elsewhere, though Hal would hit 15 home runs with an .888 OPS and 2.3 bWAR for the Expos in 1973. The Cubs could have used that.
Sigh.
The Cubs started 1971 well with a 2-1, 10-inning win over the Cardinals on a chilly 40-degree afternoon, a classic pitching matchup between Fergie Jenkins and Bob Gibson.
The game was won on this walkoff homer by Billy Williams:
The voice on that clip is Jim West, a Cubs announcer from 1971-76. He had been hired by WGN-TV to do Blackhawks games after Lloyd Pettit left, and joined Jack Brickhouse on Cubs broadcasts. That was the very first Cubs game West called.
Check out the game time of that 10-inning win.
But after that excitement, the Cubs flopped. They lost 11 of their next 15 and didn’t get over .500 until a seven-game winning streak in mid-May, culminated by a doubleheader sweep of the Padres May 16. Jim Hickman hit a walkoff homer in the first game of that twin bill, something he was good at — he hit five walkoff homers in his six Cubs seasons.
One of the biggest reasons for all this was a serious knee injury suffered by catcher Randy Hundley, after a similar injury cost him about half the 1970 season. He tried to play through it, but managed only nine games before knee surgery ended his season. The Cubs used five other players to catch that year: Danny Breeden, Chris Cannizzaro, Frank Fernandez, J.C. Martin and Ken Rudolph and they combined to hit .216/.319/.323, a far cry from Hundley’s better hitting years. He never recovered his previous level of performance due to the injuries.
The Cubs floundered about near the .500 mark most of May and June; a highlight was Ken Holtzman’s second no-hitter, pitched against the Reds June 3 in Cincinnati:
But even with that, they finished that win two games under .500 and eight games out of first place.
Finally, in late June the Cubs went on a 15-8 run that got them to 53-43… but still stuck 10 games out of the division lead.
A 12-6 run that began Aug. 1, culminating with a doubleheader sweep of the Astros on Aug. 20, put the Cubs at 68-55 and just 4½ games behind the first-place Pirates. Fergie Jenkins was having a magnificent season that would end up winning him the Cy Young Award. He threw 30 complete games, posted 24 wins, and threw 325 innings. No one would do that today, obviously. Beyond that, Jenkins also posted a great year as a hitter, batting .243/.282/.478 with six home runs in 115 at-bats. The six homers, now that we have the universal DH, will stand forever as the team record for a pitcher in a season (it was tied by Carlos Zambrano in 2006). Jenkins posted 1.7 bWAR as a hitter — fourth-best on the team, and that’s one of the reasons for the failure.
But it wasn’t enough. From Aug. 21 through the end of the season, the Pirates went 23-13 while the Cubs sank to 15-24. It was the same old story: Not enough starting pitching, and a bullpen that had only 13 saves all year — dead last in the National League. The Pirates had 48, another sign they were modernizing while the Cubs were not. Dave Giusti had 30 of those saves and dominated the Cubs in particular. How did the Cubs react to that? Of course, they acquired Giusti in 1977, long past his sell-by date. Durocher again put too much stock in his starting lineup. Three guys played 154+ games, and Glenn Beckert would have if not for an injury. Even so, Beckert hit .342, his best MLB season by far.
The Cubs offense dropped from its 808-run season in 1970 to just 637 in 1971. That was sixth-best in the league. Their 648 runs allowed ranked eighth, and that was most of the issue — beyond Jenkins, there just wasn’t enough good pitching.
The team was so desperate for pitching that after drafting Burt Hooton with their No. 1 draft pick in June, they put him on the mound at Wrigley only a week later. He threw 3⅓ innings in an extra-inning win over the Cardinals June 17, then went to the minor leagues. Recalled in September, he threw a complete-game win over the Mets Sept. 15, striking out 15, tying the then-club record. Here’s the record-tying strikeout:
The video, unfortunately, cuts off the last digit of the year it had been set — 1957, by Dick Drott. (May 26, 1957 vs. the Braves — that year’s eventual World Series champion.)
Then Hooton shut out the Mets again a week later at Wrigley on just two hits.
By then it was way too late. The Cubs began September 8½ games out of first place, then lost 10 of 12. That 12th loss mathematically eliminated them, and really, it was the Pirates’ year. They won 97 games and the Cubs went 83-79 (sound familiar?).
There were a couple of other notable things that happened in 1971. Ernie Banks, playing his final season, spent most of the year on the active roster but played in only 39 games, half of them as a pinch-hitter. Here’s his 512th and final home run, hit Aug. 24 against the Reds:
Banks’ last hit, a single, came Sept. 26 against the Phillies, the season’s last home game. It was in the eighth inning of a game the Cubs trailed 5-1, but Banks was not removed for a pinch runner so he could get some applause from a crowd of about 18,000. I suppose that sort of thing just wasn’t done back then.
One more thing happened late in that season when the Cubs were flailing around in August, something that showed how the core group and Leo Durocher were coming apart. A longtime dispute between Durocher and Ron Santo boiled over. It’s explained in this Hardball Times article:
Longtime manager Leo Durocher said it was the angriest he ever saw a player in his life. No one threw any punches, but it came close.
On Aug. 23, 1971, just before a Cubs-Reds game, Ron Santo exploded in the home team clubhouse at Wrigley Field.
The background: on the eve of a special Ron Santo Day at Wrigley, the third baseman was mired in a slump. A few days earlier, Santo had even asked Durocher if they could cancel the day because he didn’t want to be celebrated while playing poorly. No dice. The Cub general manager even told Durocher the special day was Santo’s idea, during contract negotiations for that season. As his hitting slump continued, Santo had since asked out of batting practice for a few days, hoping to break out of it, and Durocher agreed.
There’s more, explained in the article, and it culminated in this:
The press heard about the clubhouse blowout almost immediately. With stories of Durocher’s imminent departure circulating, Phil Wrigley took an unusual step to quiet them—a full-page advertisement in all the Chicago papers strongly defending Durocher. He flatly stated:
Leo is the team manager and the “Dump Durocher Clique” might as well give up. He is running the team and if some of the players do not like it and lie down on the job, during the offseason we will see what we can do to find them happier homes.
No way Wrigley was dumping the manager. Not in 1971, anyway. Instead, Wrigley canned Durocher at the All-Star Break in 1972, 11 months after the eruption.
Wrigley should probably have fired Durocher after the Camp Ojibwa incident in 1969. Durocher had done his job — bringing the Cubs out of their 20-year slumber. Wrigley nearly did fire Durocher then; Herman Franks, who was going to take Leo’s place, talked him out of it. Too bad, Franks would have been a much better manager for that group. Franks did eventually get three Cubs teams (1977-79) that had no business contending, into contention for much of those seasons.
The Cubs had talent in that time, just not enough of it, and it was managed poorly. Beyond that, in 1971 the Pirates had begun to show how their signings of Black and Latino players was the wave of the future in baseball. From 1971-79 the Pirates won six division titles and two World Series, and they utterly dominated the Cubs in that time frame. From 1970-80, the Cubs went 74-121 against the Pirates, a .379 winning percentage. Their next worst winning percentage was .424 (Astros). The Cubs were still old-school and could not adapt to the stolen base revolution and games on artificial turf, which were just beginning in the early 1970s.