“The Heckler” on A Fan Speaks Out

 
May 8, 2006
 

An Interview With George Castle
 

George Castle is an enigma on the Chicago baseball scene.  You’ve probably heard his name but just can’t place him.  He asks the questions that sometimes make managers twinge.  Just ask Dusty.  He’s also probably as knowledgeable as anyone around about the Cubs.  He’s written several books about the team and a book about Harry Caray shortly after he died.  In this interview, he surmises why the Cubs have had so much trouble developing players throughout the years, answers the question if the Cubs should renew Dusty Baker’s contract, and if there is still hope for the season now that Derrek Lee is injured.

The Heckler: How did you get your start in the media?

George Castle: I grew up wanting to be a sportswriter.   By the time I was in high school, I used to read all four Chicago papers everyday.  I think the 1969 Cubs the way they were covered in the media not only encouraged my love of baseball but also encouraged my love of the media and how it covers the sport.  I got a job as a copy boy at the Tribune in my freshman year of college and worked weekends and weekend nights for three years.  I had a chance to see Gene Siskel type his reviews and take all night on a manual typewriter to type it.  He’d fall asleep for fifteen minutes and then type a few paragraphs and fall asleep and keep repeating the process.

I made a big mistake earlier in my career.  I was actually offered a Tribune summer internship, which was tantamount to being hired full-time.  If you’re an intern, you have to mess up pretty badly not to get hired full-time and I actually turned it down because I didn’t think I was ready.  If I had a few more years of wisdom, I would have taken it and realized I had three levels of editors to correct my rookie mistakes.  I moved around to a few different jobs and was even out of the media business for a little while when I hooked up with the Lerner newspapers when I was out of work in 1980 and became their sports columnist and sports editor.  Their publisher Lou Lerner has a maniacal hatred of the Cubs and the Tribune Company so he exempted the Cubs as the one institution in this neighborhood that you couldn’t cover. 

After a few years I started building up my free-lance work outside Lerner and started to do a little more baseball work.  In 1992 I was able to develop a lot of my baseball work.  I started my syndicated radio show “Diamond Gems.” I started it as Chicago Baseball Weekly on 92.7 FM out of Arlington Heights in 1994.  A year later I took it syndicated.  It’s been on the air ever since.  It’s a weekly baseball show that has contemporary interviews with players, and a lot of nostalgia in terms of vintage baseball highlights.  In 1994, I started covering the Cubs for the Times of Northwest Indiana.  That’s where I really got into getting to know the players in the clubhouse covering the Cubs at home everyday and going to spring training every year.  That’s where I got into my philosophy of getting to know the players one on one through personal relationships rather than standing back and doing group interviews.  In 1998 after Harry died, I segued into the third arm of my media thing and that is books.  Sports Publishing Inc. out of Champaign needed somebody who was at the ballpark and had access to people to do a book of memories about Harry.  I’ve done several more books and a book about baseball in the media that is due to be published early next year.  It’s an inside-out look at this business.  Some people in our business won’t like it but it’s talking the truth covering all aspects of player-media relationships and the politics of the media. 

TH: Did you grow up as a Cub’s fan?

GC: Oh yeah.  My grandfather Morie Zutz took me to my first Cubs game in 1961.  You try to be objective when you’re in the media.  Even the media have their likes and dislikes when they grow up as fans of teams.  Despite growing up as a Cub fan, I’m probably the most critical ‘old Cub fan’ of anyone in the media because I wrote a book that dissected Cubs management called the “Million to One Team,” about why the Cubs haven’t won the pennant since 1945.  The title came from a Vegas odds maker who worked at Bally’s (John Avello) who told me in 1993 that if I had gone to him in 1945 and said to him that the Cubs wouldn’t be in the World Series through the year 1993, at that time 48 years, he said those odds would be off the board, they’d be a million to one.  Now, it has to be infinity. 

TH: This year the Cubs have tried to build the team with more speed and defense, but historically they have always been built on power.  Why has that been the case?

GC: They continue to get tricked by the ballpark despite the fact that they’ve been keeping track of the winds since 1982.  The Dallas Green regime started keeping track of it that year.  They don’t understand that even if the wind blew out that speed is necessary, blending both speed and power.  Even if you had a large ballpark you would have to have some power along with the speed.  Again, it’s an ignorance of history.   The model Cubs offense was in ’84.  If you were not around to watch that 1984 team, you’re not going to understand the value of speed.  Dernier (Bob) leading off with 45 steals.  Sandberg (Ryne) followed with 32 steals.  Your third hitter Gary Matthews led the league in walks with 103.  Then came the power.  You had six guys in the lineup with eighty or more RBI’s and you had 77 steals at the top of the order.  The problem is Andy MacPhail and Jim Hendry weren’t working in Chicago then.  They didn’t see this thing up close so the lessons of history are lost because the people managing it weren’t around to experience it.

TH: The Cubs have a couple of young players in the starting lineup this year in Matt Murton and Ronny Cedeno.  They acquired Murton in a trade while Cedeno rose through their farm system.  Why has it been throughout the years that the Cubs have been unable to develop successful everyday players?

GC: Andy MacPhail told me when I asked him about the Cubs way that he wanted them to be known for player development with an emphasis on pitching.  He thinks if you develop enough pitching he’ll have a pitching surplus, which he can use to trade for other needs, which is basically the Gordon Goldsberry model.  You develop your farm system so you can fill some of your own needs and trade for others.  I think this organization was so pitching challenged for so many decades that now they’ve gone a little bit overboard to stock the organization with pitching.  There’s a high mortality rate with pitching.  I think they feel that if you get enough pitchers as your basis, and it’s kind of a sound philosophy, but at the same time, the Cardinals brought up Albert Pujols, the Marlins brought up Miguel Cabrera, impact players, and you wonder when are the Cubs going to bring up an impact player.  When are they going to be able to bring up a guy who comes up who doesn’t require five years to develop and they find out at the end of that development stage with Corey Patterson that the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming freight train?   The only time the farm system really was consistently productive was under the Dallas Green regime when he imported the people that basically ran the successful Phillies farm system in the seventies and early eighties but he ran afoul of the corporate culture of the Tribune Company. 

TH: Jim Hendry recently had his contract renewed for two additional years.  Do you think that was a good move?

GC: I suppose so.  Jim has not done as well in player acquisitions and running the farm system as he did when he first started.  However, the Cubs problem over the years has been a lack of continuity.  They would keep changing general managers so I think it’s very important to have some continuity at the top.  What he needs to do is build up his baseball organization because I’m not sure if he has enough people advising him and analyzing both the talent and also the character in players.  I think if Jim is smart he would take a page from the White Sox and see how their organization is structured.  They seem to be able to properly evaluate people and the Cubs have had fewer people work in the front office than the White Sox and look where the White Sox are.  They’ve increased the payroll but I’m not sure if they spent that money wisely.  They should have spent that money on some scouts and some front office support staff that can help him. 

TH: Dusty Bakers is in the last year of his contract.  Do you think he should be extended?

GC: Well if Dusty continues what he is doing this year…he seems to be reinvigorated, he’s playing small ball, I know that he’s personally happy that he’s rid of all these swing and miss guys that bedeviled him his first three years.  For continuity’s sake, there are probably one or two advantages to keeping him to not keeping him.  Because once you start out with a new manager, you’re starting that same old merry-go-round again.  I like the fact he’s playing the young players like Matt Murton and Ronny Cedeno, so maybe he’s a new man this year.  I think the true test of his managerial skills will be keeping the team afloat while Derrek Lee is recovering from his injury.  This is going to be the challenge of his career.  If he can keep them in the race like Don Zimmer did in 1989 when Andre Dawson was injured and they still won the division, then Dusty Baker certainly deserves the extension. 

TH: How long do you think the Cubs should wait before giving him the extension?

GC: I think it should be very soon because then everybody knows who’s going to be in charge for the long run.  The young players know he’s going to be there.  The veterans can’t get away with jaking it as I’ve noticed in the Cub’s clubhouse the last few years.  If they know the manager’s going to be in there at least for the 2007 season, then there’s a little more discipline in the clubhouse.  I think Dusty had a real good first year but that he fell down in 2004; certainly the clubhouse got away from him.   I think in 2005 it looked like he was mentally beaten at times the way things were going but he seems to be recharged this year so let’s give him another chance. 

TH: Going back to the Derrek Lee injury, do the Cubs have anyone who can replace him and do you think they’re going to be able to hang in there until he comes back? 

GC: They don’t have a replacement to take his place.  There’s no way you can properly prepare for losing one of the two or three best offensive players in baseball.  What they can do is what that ’89 team did when Andre Dawson was out for a couple of months with that knee injury and have everybody produce and pull together.  What you have is your young players coming up and producing.  You need to have a player you didn’t count on coming up and producing and I use the Lloyd McClendon example from ’89.  Remember that ’89 team had only one thirty-homer producer in Ryne Sandberg and the next top power guy was Mark Grace with thirteen.  It’s not how many home runs you hit but it’s when you get your base hits.  Juan Pierre’s going to be the key.  He has to step up his game and have a vintage year.  If he’s on base and you get a good number two hitter on base, then you’ll score runs no matter if Derrek Lee is in or out of the lineup.  So the key is not how many home runs they hit but doing something they’ve been lax in doing and they’ve needed to improve in this anyway and that is getting the table setters on.  And of course they’re going to have to get good pitching.  It’s kind of weird that Greg Maddux at forty is their most effective pitcher.  It’s nice to see Greg being the vintage Greg Maddux.  He’s in shape.  He obviously knew that he wants to continue pitching and the only way he could do that is to get in shape and also to get another contract for next year.  Carlos Zambrano is the key.  If he straightens his act out and calms himself down on the mound, there’s no reason why Carlos Zambrano can’t win between sixteen and twenty games.  He’s got Kevin Brown type stuff, but he’s got to grow up in a hurry now.  His learning curve has to be greatly accelerated this year because we don’t when and in what quality Kerry Wood, Mark Prior, and Wade Miller will be coming back.  We don’t know how well they’ll be able to pitch.  If you get two out of the three back and pitching halfway decently, the Cubs will be in great shape. 

TH:  In your opinion, do you think the Cubs will still be in the playoff race when they get all of their injured players back?

GC: If their pitching doesn’t collapse.  I think it’s harder to replace an ace pitcher who goes down than it is to replace a slugger.  Other guys will have half to two-thirds of the missing guys production along with maybe other guys stepping up.  But I use the example of Rick Sutcliffe going down in 1985.  You replace him with a Steve Engel or a Derek Botelho and it just doesn’t work.  The Cubs have to get good starting pitching.  As of this interview, Angel Guzman was just called up and he’s just the type of guy coming up from the minors who can give a team a huge boost.  They say he’s healthy.  He was going to be their great up and coming pitcher in 2003.  Let’s see if better late than never three years later he comes through.  You’re going to need guys like him coming through that you didn’t expect.  I like the fact that there’s fresh blood on this team like the Murton’s and Cedeño’s, Guzman, and Howry and Eyre in the bullpen.  They needed to have a royal flush of some of the players they had on this squad the last few years.   And imagine where they would be without Todd Walker right now.  Some of the best trades are the ones you didn’t make.  

SportzNutz Columnist Darrell Horwitz isn’t shy when it comes to “A Fan Speaking Out”… he holds nothing back and tells it like it is, from a fan’s perspective.  A Chicago native, Darrell is a lifelong Cubs and Bulls fan. Along with his “A Fan Speaks Out” column, Darrell is the fan writer for the Chicago Cubs, here on SportzNutz.  If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email Darrell at darrell.horwitz@nutzworld.net