Tweet
In Hiring Mike Quade, Cubs Pass Over Ryne Sandberg
By TYLER KEPNER
SAN FRANCISCO – There is no way of knowing, right now, whether Chicago Cubs General Manager Jim Hendry made the right call Tuesday by hiring Mike Quade as manager. Quade, 53, paid his dues as a minor league manager for 17 seasons. The Cubs played hard for him this summer, going 24-13 after Lou Piniella resigned. He knows the Cubs, having spent four years as their third-base coach. He is personable and outgoing, and should handle the scrutiny well.
But it’s hard not to feel for Ryne Sandberg.
Susan Walsh/Associated Press The Cubs named Mike Quade, who served as interim manager after Lou Piniella resigned this season, as their new manager on Tuesday.Sandberg, the Cubs’ Hall of Fame second baseman, spent the last four seasons as a manager in the Cubs’ minor league system. This past season, he was the International League manager of the year at Class AAA Iowa. On Tuesday, he told Dave Van Dyck that the Cubs’ chairman, Tom Ricketts, had called him to break the news.
“I told him I’m disappointed and that I appreciated the process and being involved,” Sandberg said by phone. “That was the end of the conversation.”
Sandberg said he was not offered another position and has not heard from another team about a managerial opening, but he was hoping to be a major league coach or manager in 2011.
I spoke with Sandberg at length in Des Moines in August, for this feature article and this blog entry. He said he would welcome the chance to manage anywhere, not just in Chicago. But he relished the idea of helping the team win its first World Series since 1908.
“I’ve thought about that all the time, every day of the career,” Sandberg said then. “That’s pretty much ingrained in me on a daily basis, thinking that, and thinking of that possibility. With that in mind, I think that would be the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity for anybody. It’s one of the things that keeps me going, keeps me working hard every day, keeps me learning, to have a chance to now possibly do that in this capacity, rather than as a player.”
Now that chance belongs to Quade (pronounced KWAH-dee), who is a very different kind of choice for the Cubs. Their last two managers, Piniella and Dusty Baker, were former star players and veteran managers with extensive World Series experience.
But Sandberg would have been a change, too, and the Cubs’ rejection of him has to be crushing. The best precedent, for both parties, would be the Yankees’ recent experience.
The Yankees passed over their own 1980s icon, Don Mattingly, when they hired Joe Girardi as manager three years ago. Girardi – whose return to the Yankees now seems inevitable, without the Cubs job to tempt him – won the World Series in his second season, and Mattingly is now manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Unlike Mattingly, though, Sandberg put in his time as a minor league manager – and a successful one, at that – only to learn that it was not enough for his bosses. You have to imagine he is terribly bitter about that, though he told Van Dyck that he “wished the organization well.”
It would have been fun to see if Sandberg could have been the one to lead the Cubs to the World Series. As qualified as Quade is, unless he can do that in his tenure, Cubs fans will always wonder why Sandberg never got a shot.
Comment