Chicago Baseball History News

Good things are worth waiting for – Vince Lloyd attains the Silver Circle honors of TV Academy

By  on December 13, 2022

On a February night in 2002, I stood outside Vince Lloyd’s Green Valley, Ariz. retirement home with the host. We both looked to the countless stars in the desert sky.

Vince Lloyd, depicted at Comiskey Park, in 1964 (Image courtesy Tribune Content Agency).

Vince Lloyd, depicted at Comiskey Park, in 1964 (Image courtesy Tribune Content Agency).

The previous year, Lloyd’s old WGN comrades-in-arms-Lou Boudreau and Arne Harris had died. Back in 1998, Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray passed away. Talking about Brickhouse, Vince said he had a telling feeling that Jack had died earlier that day, before he heard the news. That’s how connected the WGN boys were through what Brickhouse called “80-hour work weeks” and rotating poker games at the sports staff’s homes.

“They were my friends,” Lloyd said, looking up.

Nothing is forever except friendship and great memories. A year and a half later, the man born Vince Lloyd Skaff in South Dakota in 1917 also was consigned to fond remembrance, his stout heart, trademark baritone voice and old Marine Corps toughness unable to outlast cancer at 86. I cherished Vince’s good fellowship and support of my career in his later life, after he had served as a youthful soundtrack of summers as he did for several million Midwest listeners as a verbally animated Cubs radio voice.

I committed to the concept to garner honors and recognition for Vince, probably underrated during his prime since Brickhouse had the highest regional profile as Cubs TV play-by-play with the most games on video in the majors. But the Ford Frick Award, baseball’s  highest honor for an announcer, seemed beyond Lloyd’s reach posthumously.  Soon after his July 2003 death, I added Vince Lloyd at the last moment to my “Where Have All Our Cubs Gone?” book, published in 2005, as a means to remember him.

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Wry, sly and dry persona a core value for Frick Award winner Hughes

By  on December 8, 2022

Pat Hughes probably merited the Ford Frick Award simply for being on duty and keeping his composure as the only Chicago announcer ever to call a Cubs World Series clinching out.

Pat Hughes' Ford Frick Award truly celebrates a lifetime achievement of smooth-as-silk announcing.

Pat Hughes’ Ford Frick Award truly celebrates a lifetime achievement of smooth-as-silk announcing.

After all, radio was in the hands of hobbyists and experimenters – the Marconis of the world — in 1908, the last Cubs world’s championship. Commercial radio did not start ’til 1920 and the first baseball game was not aired ’til the next year, in Pittsburgh.

But even if the Cubs had blown Game 7 in 2016, Hughes surely deserved the top broadcaster’s honor given out by the Hall of Fame for lifetime achievement. Few can match Hughes’ smooth-as-silk baseball voice or his wry, dry and sly sense of humor around boothmates such as the two Rons, Santo and Coomer.

Hughes beat out former Cubs colleague Steve Stone and a host of other contemporary announcers for the 2023 Award on Wednesday, Dec. 7, hard on the heels of his induction into the Cubs Hall of Fame under the left-field bleachers. He is truly one of the golden voices of our time.

We go back to his first season in Chicago in 1996, when Hughes had to maintain interest as the Cubs, a marginal contender at mid-season, lost 14 of their final 16. An announcer had to keep it interesting until the last out on the final day. As Harry Caray advised the newcomer then, a Cubs voice does not just sign up for winning seasons, which were then at a premium at Wrigley Field.

Those memories and more flowed in a phone conversation, the day after receiving his Ford Frick honor, that was as much congratulatory as interrogatory.

“It’s as good as it gets,” said Hughes, who said his emotions ranged from “shock” to being “on Cloud Nine. You work hard, you really don’t think about the award while you’re (on the air). It’s such a lofty achievement.”

In July 2012, Hughes was in Cooperstown for Ron Santo’s posthumous induction into the Hall of Fame.

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Sutter, Ellsworth were stingiest of Cubs, but their pitching feats don’t get enough credit

By on October 18, 2022

Bruce Sutter

Bruce Sutter

Bruce Sutter and Dick Ellsworth were united in death recently with not else much in common other than a couple of salient facts.

The pair were practically the stingiest pitchers in modern Cubs history in one season — both counseled by crafty pitching coach Fred Martin — who got scant recognition for their feats at Wrigley Field and team events after their careers.

Hall of Famer Sutter died too young at 69. Ellsworth lived to a riper old age at 82. But if you looked around at Cubs Conventions and other alumni gatherings from the mid-1980s, they were not around, given despite their status in Cubs annals for two of the best pitching seasons ever. More about that in a little while.

Master of the most deceptive pitch this side of the knuckleball, split-finger fastball master Sutter was the first reliever to win the Cy Young Award, in 1979, as a Cub, a feat that unfortunately speeded his departure out of town. Ellsworth, at his best the epitome of a “stylish left-hander,” was the last Cubs southpaw to win 20 games, in 1963. No, two-no-hitters Ken Holtzman and World Series champion mentor Jon Lester never got to 20 wins as Cubs.

When “stingy” is broken down further, no other Cubs pitcher with the exception of Jake Arrieta can compare with Sutter’s and Ellsworth’s one-season accomplishments.

Sutter was taught the forkball-type splitter by Martin in 1973 in Quincy, Ill., the Cubs Class A affiliate in the Midwest League. The savvy pitching tutor had been banished to the Cubs minor-league system over an apparent personal issue after serving as Ellsworth’s ’63 big-league pitching coach. Martin has never gotten the credit he deserves for being connected to two of the Cubs’ best pitching seasons in franchise history.

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‘Coach Katie Krall’ has a good ring to it for lifelong Park Ridge sports, academic achiever

By on February 15, 2022

Timing and politics are intertwined in baseball, just like peanuts and Cracker Jack once were.

Thus Katie Krall has picked just the right moment to learn and thrive as a uniformed female pro baseball coach. Supplementing her own merit and drive is a game-wide commitment to diversity that not only promotes women working in baseball operations in the front office, but also in the dugout.

Katie Krall works with a pitching machine in the Red Sox's recent mini-camp in Ft. Myers. (Photo courtesy of the Boston Red Sox)

Katie Krall works with a pitching machine in the Red Sox’s recent mini-camp in Ft. Myers. (Photo courtesy of the Boston Red Sox)

The very presence of a woman in uniform might have been unthinkable two decades ago, let alone a half-century back, when Leo Durocher ordered Chicago Today sportswriter Linda Morstadt off the field at Wrigley Field as a supposed distraction to his Cubs players. Move the clock forward 17 years, and Chuck Tanner, best-known for his unorthodox handling of Dick Allen with the White Sox, harangued and harassed Robin Monsky, his Braves media relations director, until she was driven out of the organization.

Now, the hiring of Park Ridge, Ill. native Krall as the second female coach in the Red Sox farm system, soon after the Yankees hired a female manager, results in a series of stories temporarily distracting from baseball’s labor problems. But the news was hardly earth-shaking in the manner of Jackie Robinson’s and Frank Robinson’s breaking the color line as a player and manager, respectively, in 1947 and 1975. Baseball seemed to be organically moving this way, anyway.

“I definitely feel appreciative,” Krall said amid the warmth of southwest Florida. “I am the beneficiary of my time, and of all the women that came before me. I hope I can move the needle more.

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Les Grobstein had to keep moving like a shark, or else…

A 17-year-old Les Grobstein stands between Fergie Jenkins (left) and Ernie Banks (right) at the Thillens Stadium softball benefit Les organized on July 15, 1969. At far left is Thillens game worker Bob Pollack, who went on to become a CNBC camera operator.

A 17-year-old Les Grobstein stands between Fergie Jenkins (left) and Ernie Banks (right) at the Thillens Stadium softball benefit Les organized on July 15, 1969. At far left is Thillens game worker Bob Pollack, who went on to become a CNBC camera operator.

By George Castle, CBM Historian

Les Grobstein already was a legend in his travels when he agreed to co-host my syndicated “Diamond Gems” baseball radio show in 2003 after predecessor Red Mottlow had passed away at 76 from a brain tumor.

Once in a while, you could catch Les Grobstein in a sport coat and tie, but more often you’d see him as his informal self, pictured here.

Once in a while, you could catch Les Grobstein in a sport coat and tie, but more often you’d see him as his informal self, pictured here.

As the story goes, one seemingly impossible trip had The Grobber finishing his all-night show on The Score AM 670 at dawn Friday, then hopping a plane to Seattle to cover the White Sox-Mariners American League Division Series Game 3 scheduled for 3 p.m. Central Time. When the Sox lost, The Grobber simply turned around on the longest Lower-48 States flight to Chicago and returned home. The next afternoon, he supposedly was in attendance as usual at a Northwestern home football game.

Another all-nighter on radio, then a round-trip to a Cubs-Cardinals game in St. Louis, were also endurance feats to Grobstein’s credit.

“He lived the life that he wanted to live,” said Mark Grote, Grobstein’s Score teammate, former Cubs radio pre-and-post-game host and Frank Gorshin-like imitator of Les and Sweet Lou Piniella.

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Roland Hemond R.I.P…

Roland HemondBy Mark Liptak, White Sox Historian
December 13, 2021

Word came to me on Monday afternoon that Roland Hemond, a friend and former executive with the White Sox had passed away at the age of 92. I knew Roland had been ill for the past few years but still to actually find out that he had passed was jarring and sad.

Roland and I had spoken a lot over the years and as I explain later in this tribute to him, he was always a man of his word.

The role of a general manager cannot be understated. He is the person directly responsible for acquiring and evaluating talent needed to win games at the big-league level. He also has to balance in his head the roles of economics, baseball rules, the player’s union, dealing with the media and thousands of other things on a daily basis. It is not a job for the faint of heart or for those who don’t have the experience of upper management.

In my opinion Roland was the best G.M. in the history of the organization and I mean no disrespect to others who also deserve consideration for that title…men like Frank “Trader” Lane, Ed Short, Ron Schueler or Kenny Williams.
When Hemond took over the organization the franchise was literally in shambles. He faced challenges no other individual who held the position of player personnel director/G.M. ever faced.

The Sox were on their way to a franchise record 106 loss season in 1970. Comiskey Park was falling apart from disrepair. Fans were staying away in droves because the area was supposedly in a bad neighborhood. In 1969 for example the team drew, for the season, only 589,000… even that would fall to a paltry 495,000 in 1970. In 1968 and 1969, owner Art Allyn was playing a portion of his home games in Milwaukee trying the market to see if it would accept a move of the franchise from the South Side. The Sox would even lose their radio station and have to broadcast games starting in 1971 on two small outlets in LaGrange and Evanston, Illinois. Anything and everything that could go wrong for the White Sox did. And into this cesspool stepped Hemond along with new field manager Chuck Tanner when they were hired in September 1970.

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‘War on the Diamond’ a gateway to baseball’s crucial year: 1920

War on the Diamond book cover.

By George Castle, CBM Historian
April 23, 2021

Here’s a nugget you likely don’t know. I surely didn’t. The White Sox wanted to trade for young shortstop Ray Chapman from the Cleveland Indians in 1915 before settling for hard-hitting outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson.

Maybe this fact won’t make it into Andy Billman’s upcoming documentary, “War On the Diamond,” about the tragic death of shortstop Chapman after a beaning from the Yankees’ Carl Mays on Aug. 16, 1920 in New York. With a pedigreed ESPN background, Billman displays his Cleveland roots by detailing the hot rivalry between the Indians and Yankees over the next century. You’ll be able to watch his finished product on several platforms, probably including streaming, later in 2021.

But the remembrance of Chapman, only major leaguer to die of an injury on the diamond, opens the door to an even wider look at the world of 1920, perhaps the most impactful season in baseball history this side of 1947.

Just in the “baseballscape,” the relationships include the White Sox, whose roster was stocked with the under-suspicion Black Sox players from the previous year’s World Series. Seven of the eventual Eight Men Out – ringleader Chick Gandil had moved on after 1919 — were suspended by Sox owner Charles Comiskey with three games to go. The Sox, having been locked in a tight race with the Chapman-mourning, yet inspired Indians, for weeks, still had a shot at the American League pennant.

The suspensions collapsed the franchise and consigned the Sox to second fiddle in the Chicago market to the Cubs, a status that was maintained despite the Sox’s revival in their “Go-Go” years in 195 — thanks to superior TV exposure on WGN.

The Chapman tragedy would not have the legs it should have possessed. On the New York end, one outsized personality would instantly transform both baseball into its present long-ball-happy form and the concept of celebrity. Babe Ruth, Boston owner Harry Frazee’s all-time gift to the Yankees, slugged 54 homers, more than any other AL team. No longer would baseball be a pitch-and-putt, low-scoring, below-the-fences sport, with an underpinning of gambling and attempts to fix games.

Ruth immediately paved the way for the Yankees to become baseball’s dynastic franchise. At their performance peaks over the decades, both the Sox and the Indians just were a little short of the Yankees and could count AL pennants on one hand total through 1995.

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Rosey saved his best for last with his support of Swedish Hospital’s women’s center

By George Castle, CBM Historian
December 29, 2020

Jack Rosenberg with a typical pose in the old WGN-TV broadcast booth, ready to work with his trusty manual typewriter.

Jack Rosenberg with a typical pose in the old WGN-TV broadcast booth, ready to work with his trusty manual typewriter.

Jack Rosenberg had to be the ultimate people person with the persuasive touch to book sitting presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan for WGN-TV baseball broadcasts.

But as adept as “Rosey” was for the station for whom he served as the “glue” for sports programming for more than three decades, he was even better when it came to dedicating his good works in memory of beloved wife Mayora Rosenberg.

Rather than simply mourning his beloved Mayora through his 80s, Rosey ensured her social-work career in tough inner-city circumstances would be remembered. Using the phone and pressing the flesh, two of his sublime attributes, the gravel-voiced native of downstate Pekin, Ill. helped spearhead a multi-millions fund-raising campaign for a women’s center at Swedish Hospital (formerly Swedish Covenant) in Chicago.

The value of a women’s center was not taken lightly. For religious or other reasons, many women felt uncomfortable seeing a male physician. At the new center, they could visit a female doctor in welcoming surroundings. Rosey’s involvement and work ethic ensured the project would get done.

Unfortunately, the next time Rosenberg’s name came up in connection with Swedish Hospital was the kind of bad news that 2020 — rivaling 1932 and 1861 as the worst years in U.S. history — has trademarked. Media accounts on Monday, Dec. 28, reported Rosey had died at 94 at the hospital.

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“Better late than never” Dick Allen 1942-2020

By George Castle CBM Historian
and David Fletcher, CBM President
December 7, 2020

“Better late than never” truly defined Dick Allen’s baseball life.

“Late,” but properly credited, can sum up Allen’s epitaph. The man who likely saved the White Sox for Chicago with his Most Valuable Player season in 1972 died at 78 on Monday, Dec. 7, after a long illness in Wampum, Pa., Allen’s hometown. And now the statistical perspectives will come forth to show Allen is Hall of Fame worthy — unfortunately, posthumously.

Allen was the controversial slugger recognized as one of the game’s best all-around players — a seven-time All-Star, an MVP winner (1972), and a Rookie of the Year winner (1964 — in his 15-year career spanning an era of pitching dominance. Yet decades later the clearer eye of history could put his performance and his impact on baseball in a more proper perspective. He was a man ahead of his times who overcame racism with dignity and grace.

When Allen was on top of his game, he was one of the most feared sluggers in baseball. During the 10 seasons between 1964 and 1973, Allen had an Adjusted OPS (OPS+) of 165, which was the highest-ranking OPS+ in the majors during that decade. That figure was greater than 11 Hall of Famers who played during that era, including No. 2 Hank Aaron (161), No. 3 Willie McCovey (161), No. 5 Harmon Killebrew (152), No. 6 Willie Stargell (152), No. 7 Roberto Clemente (151), No. 8 Mays (148) and No. 10 Al Kaline (140.)

During that decade-long span, Allen averaged 29 homers and 89 RBIs while hitting .299 with a .940 OPS (on base Percentage + slugging percentage.) Only Aaron’s .941 OPS was better over that span.

Dick Allen holds 1972 MVP award at the June 2012 tribute to Allen at US Cellular Field

Dick Allen holds 1972 MVP award at the June 2012 tribute to Allen at US Cellular Field

Allen should have been honored continually on the South Side for his 1972 Most Valuable Player season that teamed with broadcaster Harry Caray to save the White Sox for Chicago. But not until 40 years later was Allen properly recognized for his heroic one-man show in a special tribute and retrospective press conference at US Cellular Field set up by the Chicago Baseball Museum in June 2012.

The man tagged with the nickname “Richie,” after Phillies demigod Richie Ashburn, and not his preferred Dick, was Philadelphia’s first star African-American baseball player in 1964, almost a decade after top players of color broke through in many other big-league cities. He produced, but had clashes aplenty and was booed. Both the Phillies fans and front office did not really know what they had. Time travel to pandemic-upended 2020 before the Phillies franchise properly honored Allen and retired his No. 15 with the Phillies on Sept. 3 at Citizens Bank Ballpark. Allen finally got the apology and redemption from the City of Philadelphia he had deserved for a half-century.

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Trade of base burglar Brock swiped the Cubs’ future, made Cards champs

By George Castle, CBM Historian
September 8, 2020

Lou Brock in the Polo Grounds, where in 1962 he slugged a 460-foot homer to center.

Lou Brock in the Polo Grounds, where in 1962 he slugged a 460-foot homer to center.

The true measure of Louis Clark Brock goes far beyond his Hall of Fame status, 938 stolen bases — including 14 in the World Series and an NL record 118 in 1974 – along with 3,023 hits.

The complete tally is Brock’s baseball intellect. He was a true student of the game whose bottom line was striving to improve. And those “smarts,” as baseball second-sight was once called, radically affected the fortunes of the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals, the two teams to which Brock will always be tethered now that he has passed into the ages at 81, less than a week after worthy foe Tom Seaver.

Ever since June 15, 1964, one of the most infamous days in Cubs history, Brock has been the biggest ghost in the franchise timeline, the all-encompassing “What if?” that took away MVP-style production along with heart and soul from sports’ most star-crossed team.

The Cubs were a slow, ponderous team, and not just on the basepaths. A substandard baseball organization starved for both financial and intellectual capital by Phil Wrigley, likely baseball’s most affluent owner in his time, and then for decades by the Tribune Company could not nearly put together a championship-caliber team for an impossibly long time. All the while when the Cubs could advance just one base at a time, they had squandered away base burglar Brock and Bill North, two-time American League stolen-base king.

Three-hundred miles down Route 66/I-55 and in a more tropical climate, the Cardinals quenched their own 18-year pennant drought by stealing Brock from the Cubs in exchange for aching right-hander Ernie Broglio. Both team and man were simultaneously freed from shackles. Brock stole 33 bases and batted .348 in two-thirds of the remaining 1964 season, as if afterburners were suddenly affixed to Gussie Busch’s franchise. Busch paid decently, for the time, and Brock well-earned his pay leading the Cards to two World Series triumphs and three pennants to round out the Sixties.

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