Yes, Sandberg Deserves the Job

Ryne Sandberg's name has been spoken an awful lot since Lou Piniella made his retirement a little sooner than first planned or announced. Including by Sandberg himself. The Hall of Fame second baseman isn't necessarily shy about wanting to manage the team for which he was once their biggest star. Even if he isn't anywhere near Gary Carter's shamelessness in job hunting.

But Sandberg isn't just looking to trade on his name. He's spent the past four years managing in the Cubs' system, including this season with the Iowa Cubs (AAA). He's made it impossible to think of the parent club hiring him permanently (third base coach Mike Quade was handed the job on an interim basis to finish this season) as nothing more than a marquee name from Cub glory past who will put the proverbial fannies in the proverbial seats.

Sandberg wasn't exactly an idiot savant as the best second baseman of the 1980s, and probably one of the five best of all-time. There were few players in the game smarter than him, few players who knew and executed the complete game with his aplomb. And there are few minor league managers now who have the reputation Sandberg has been building, sometimes well beneath the radar, as a thinking manager who can get his players to think before they act. (Wouldn't that be something to behold if and when Sandberg gets hold of Carlos Zambrano?)

Could it possibly hurt the Cubs to have a competent manager who just so happens to have a storied name of his own? They could do much worse and too often have. Nobody wants to shove Quade out the door at least until the season concludes, necessarily. But it would require a unique brand of naivete to believe it wouldn't be just too rich for words if Sandberg should be the one to bring the Cubs even once in a century plus what the Boston Red Sox finally landed twice in the past six years.

Sandberg isn't exactly interested in his marquee value. He never really was in his playing days, and he couldn't care less about it now. "He is so serious about getting to the big leagues and managing in the big leagues," his former Cub teammate Rick Sutcliffe told Tyler Kempner of the New York Times, "and you've got to admire him for the way he's going about it. He didn't just walk into the Cubs and say, 'Hey, I'm your guy, the fans want me to manage, give me the job.'”

We didn't need Sutcliffe to remind us. Sandberg made it plain enough when he was inducted into Cooperstown, where he delivered a sober speech in which he may have broken the record for using the word "respect." It showed up in practically every paragraph. He wasn't merely taking a thinly-veiled shot at Sammy Sosa (a teammate for Sandberg's final six seasons) when he intoned:

The fourth major league game I ever saw in person, I was in uniform. Yes, I was in awe. I was in awe every time I walked on to the field. That's respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponent or your team mates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. Make a great play, act like you've done it before, get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases, hit a home run, put your head down, drop the bat, run around the bases, because the name on the front is a lot more important than the name on the back. That's respect.

... People like Harry Caray and Don Zimmer used to compare me, they used to compare me to Jackie Robinson. Can you think of a better tribute than that? But Harry, who was a huge supporter of mine, used to say how nice it is that a guy who can hit 40 homers or steal 50 bases drive in a hundred runs is the best bunter on the team. Nice? That was my job. When did it become okay for someone to hit home runs and forget how to play the rest of the game?

Sandberg manages that way, from all accounts. He has a well-deserved reputation for teaching; his players at all levels learned to respect him as their manager and not just a Hall of Fame showpiece. "At first," outfielder Jim Adducci told Kempner, "it was a little surreal to have a Hall of Famer and a Cubs legend as your manager. But after about a week of that, you just realize that he's your manager and he's going to help you out. He's just like one of us, trying to get to the big leagues, and that's big with us down here."

A man who stuns a Cooperstown audience by speaking of respect for the complete game ("If [my election to the Hall of Fame] validates anything, it's that learning how to bunt and hit and run and turning two is more important than knowing where to find the little red light at the dugout camera") can do no less.

That is Sandberg's virtue. It may or may not prove to be his burden as well. Jim Hendry, the Cubs' general manager, once told Sandberg that if he wanted to manage in the Show, he'd have to slog his way through the system all over again. Hendry has been making sounds indicating that Sandberg just isn't experienced enough to take over the Cubs. Maybe he just couldn't believe Sandberg would take his advice and, if you'll pardon the expression, hit and run with it.

Now Hendry says it's going to be an "exhaustive" search for the next Cubs manager. It could cost the Cubs both sound baseball thinking and a fan magnet if they exhaust themselves on behalf of Joe Girardi or a couple of rumored others.

ESPN's Gene Wojciechowski has cited "an MLB executive," unnamed, as saying "at least one big league organization seriously considered" hiring Sandberg as its manager this season. "With as many as ten likely openings this offseason," Wojciechowski says, "Sandberg will be in demand. If the Cubs try to romance Girardi first, they'll risk losing Sandberg to another team. And if Girardi stays put in New York and Sandberg goes elsewhere and wins, (owner Tom Ricketts) might want to consider full-time residence in Bolivia."

Mr. Hendry, the next Cubs' manager now has the best record in the Pacific Coast League, and will finish his season playing for a championship. If he wins, there will be a lot of people demanding to know why that performance didn't write his ticket to Wrigley Field. That's how many championships the Cubs have won since the Roosevelt Administration? (Theodore's, that is...)