The core that had brought so many memories but no titles failed again.
I’ve written about this star-crossed 1973 Cubs team on quite a number of occasions, so this summary of that ballclub is going to kind of be a conglomeration of the previous articles, with some new material added.
Here goes.
The 1973 Cubs raced out to a 48-33 first half and after splitting a doubleheader with the Mets July 1, led the NL East by eight games. It felt as if the Cubs would finally, at last, bring home a division title, perhaps a NL pennant or even a World Series.
Before we get into the good stuff, here’s video of a brawl between the Cubs and Giants in San Francisco May 6:
Here’s what precipitated that, per the Retrosheet boxscore:
Milt Pappas threw pitch over Jim Barr’s head; both benches cleared; Dave Rader scored from 1B in the confusion; the Cubs protested the game because the umpires allowed Rader to score; Barr was hit by a pitch; the next pitch hit Jim Barr on the right elbow; Barr threw his bat towards Pappas; both benches cleared; Bobby Bonds and Giants coach Joe Amalfitano restrained catcher Randy Hundley; Cubs coach Pete Reiser was carried off field after being injured in the brawl; Pappas, Barr, Cubs Coach Hank Aguirre and Cubs Manager Whitey Lockman ejected by HP umpire Augie Donatelli
That’s future Cubs manager Joe Amalfitano, of course. The protest was disallowed and the Giants won the game 11-9 on a walkoff homer by Bobby Bonds in the 12th inning after the Cubs came back to tie the game 9-9 in the ninth.
Quite the scene, which we don’t really see anymore in baseball — and that’s a good thing. Reiser suffered a concussion, but left a hospital the next day and was all right.
Now, on to some of the good memories from 1973.
Ron Santo, in particular, got off to a great start. On June 10, he was batting .318/.410/.503, his best performance in years. He’d hit just .238/.310/.405 the rest of the way. Rick Monday and Jose Cardenal had decent years, but it wasn’t enough.
Here’s Cardenal driving in the winning run against the Mets June 29:
After that great start, the Cubs started losing, and losing, and losing some more. Even after losing four of seven, they still led the division by five games on July 10. But then… a six-game losing streak. One win. A seven-game losing streak. Three wins. Three losses. One win, and then an 11-game losing streak that pretty much killed any chance at a division title, the only way to make the postseason at the time. 48-33 became 56-64, an 8-31 run.
Eight and thirty-one. Only one Cubs team — the 2000 edition that lost 97 games — had a worse 39-game span (7-32). The 1999 Cubs, a 95-loss club, matched the 8-31 stretch.
But the ‘73 Cubs had far more good players, or supposedly did, than those 95+ loss teams. They were eight games in first place at mid-season!
Yikes. Things got so bad that at one point mild-mannered Fergie Jenkins got angry and flung bats out of the dugout, just a couple games before that 11-game losing streak finally ended.
The Cubs righted the ship to some extent, and the division was extraordinarily weak. After that 8-31 run they went 19-15 over a five-week stretch — that’s not great, but it passed for good that year. On Sept. 22, after defeating the Phillies, with eight games remaining in the season, they were 2½ games out of first place… but behind four other teams. The first-place Mets were one game over .500. The standings after Sept. 22 looked like this:
Mets 78-77 —
Pirates 75-75, -1.0
Expos 75-78, -2.0
Cardinals 76-79, -2.0
Cubs 75-79, -2.5
Two and a half games back with eight games remaining, and only two down in the loss column, and four remaining vs. the Mets. The Cubs had won five straight! Maybe this was going to be the year after all…
Five days later, after the games of September 27, the Cubs had fallen to four games out. But none of the other teams had taken charge:
Mets 80-78, —
Pirates 79-79, -1.0
Cardinals 78-81, -2.5
Expos 77-82, -3.5
Cubs 76-82, -4.0
The series for the final weekend involving the contenders were:
Mets at Cubs, September 28, 29, 30 (doubleheader)
Phillies at Cardinals, September 28, 29, 30
Expos at Pirates, September 28, 29, 30
As you can see, there were a lot of permutations. If the Cubs had swept the Mets, the Expos swept the Pirates and the Cardinals took two of three from the Phillies, there was a chance at a FIVE-way tie — and as you can also see, the Pirates were short a game. They had a makeup game against the Padres that was to be played in Pittsburgh only if needed to help decide the division title.
And then it rained in Chicago. A lot. That was, to my recollection, one of the wettest, most miserable late September weekends in Chicago history.
It rained until mid-afternoon Friday, Sept. 28, and with no lights in Wrigley Field they didn’t want to risk playing and having the game called for darkness and so another doubleheader was scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 29. Thus the Cubs and Mets would need to finish their seasons with back-to-back doubleheaders.
Meanwhile, the Expos beat the Pirates and the Cardinals defeated the Phillies on September 28, making the standings look like this with two days to go:
Mets 80-78 —
Pirates 79-80 -1.5
Cardinals 79-81 -2.0
Expos 78-82 -3.0
Cubs 76-82 -4.0
The five-way tie was still in play!
And then it rained again all day Saturday, Sept. 29 in Chicago. The Cubs/Mets doubleheader was postponed and the games were rescheduled for a doubleheader Monday, Oct. 1, the day after the season ended. The other teams played Sept. 29, with the same results as the previous day: Expos over Pirates, Cardinals over Phillies.
So now we have:
Mets 80-78 —
Cardinals 80-81 -1.5
Pirates 79-81 -2.0
Expos 79-82 -2.5
Cubs 76-82 -4.0
The Cubs could still force a tie with the Mets by winning all four games, and if that happened and the Cardinals lost their one remaining game, the Expos won their one remaining game and the Pirates split their two (including the makeup game with the Padres), there would be a five-way tie!
Finally, the rain cleared out of Chicago and the Cubs and Mets played their Sunday, Sept. 30 doubleheader. The Mets could clinch with a sweep.
The Cubs won the first game 1-0, a five-hit combined shutout by Rick Reuschel and Bob Locker, and stayed alive… until they lost Game 2 to the Mets 9-2. The loss eliminated the Cubs. 21,432 showed up at Wrigley Field to see the Cubs in contention on the last scheduled day of the season for the first time since 1945.
But the Cubs would still have a say in who won the NL East. The Pirates and Cardinals both won their Sunday games. Pittsburgh’s win over Montreal eliminated the Expos, so the remaining contenders looked like this after the scheduled end of the regular season September 30:
Mets 81-79 —
Cardinals 81-81 -1.0
Pirates 80-81 -1.5
There were three games left to be played: the makeup doubleheader between the Cubs and Mets at Wrigley Field, and the Padres/Pirates game in Pittsburgh, for which the Padres had to fly to Pittsburgh from San Diego. If the Cubs swept the doubleheader and the Pirates defeated the Padres, there would be a three-way tie at 81-81.
The Cubs/Mets doubleheader was scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. Central time. The Pirates/Padres game began about an hour and a half later, 1:35 p.m. Eastern time. About an hour after that game began in Pittsburgh, the Mets defeated the Cubs in the first game of the doubleheader, 6-4 on yet another rainy day in Chicago and clinched the NL East title.
Here’s the final play of that game. The Cubs had a runner on first and Glenn Beckert at bat, representing the tying run, with one out. This is how the game ended:
It would be Beckert’s final appearance in a Cubs uniform. You can see Ernie Banks coaching at first base; that, too, was Ernie’s final appearance on the field as a Cubs coach. It really was the end of an era.
Since the Mets had clinched the division title with their Game 1 victory, the second game of the doubleheader was cancelled. Only 1,913 paid to see that Monday afternoon action at Wrigley Field. Just five games since then have had lower attendance at Wrigley, the lowest 1,171 for a Cubs/Mets game September 22, 1980.
That ended a seven-year run of contention for the Cubs, when they had multiple Hall of Famers playing for the team. The 1969 collapse likely affected the franchise for many years after. It’s easy to say that things like that shouldn’t, that each year is new and different, and that teams should be able to get past them. Beyond that, there was a failure of management, with Leo Durocher overusing players in the way he might have in the 1940s, but that didn’t work in the 1960s and 1970s. There was also, largely due to ownership’s failures, a farm system mostly bereft of talent and an inability of management to acquire solid bench players.
So the Cubs never did get past that 1969 collapse, and after 1973 that core was broken up and Jenkins, Santo, Williams, Glenn Beckert and Randy Hundley were all traded away. It would take 11 more years and a change of ownership and management to get the Cubs to the postseason, and 32 years after that before the team would win the World Series.
And yet, the players from that era are beloved to this day, with Jenkins and Williams still making appearances at Wrigley Field. It’s an era we can remember fondly, even though the team never won anything.
This concludes a brief look at the late 1960s/early 1970s Cubs and their failures and some of the reasons for those failures. I’ll have many other historical articles about the Cubs here over this offseason.