Oh, What Might Have Been

Even in America’s nominal National Pastime, all good things ultimately must end. That truism will be illustrated tonight at a Wrigley Field news conference where, after more than 56 years with baseball’s most dominant organization of the past half-century, Ken Hubbs is officially retiring from the Chicago Cubs.

Hubbs will be honored prior to tonight’s home opener against the Cincinnati Reds. The brief ceremony will take place exactly 10 years after the Cubs retired Hubbs’ number 16, the one he wore for 29 of the 30 seasons he spent in uniform with the team.

“There’s no doubt we’ll all miss his day-to-day presence here,” said team chairman Tom Ricketts in a statement, “but Kenny has more than earned the right to retire his way. It is his choice to do so with a minimum of fanfare.”

Hubbs had wanted to retire two years ago, but was talked out of it by the only person on the planet more synonymous with Chicago’s National League baseball team than he is.

“I wanted to call it a career after 2013,“ said Hubbs, whose intention at the time was to step back into an advisory role with the club that has employed him continuously since 1959. “But then Ernie [Banks] told me, “Hey, this is beautiful Wrigley Field we’re talking about. Let’s play two…more seasons!” Although Hubbs wanted to spend more time with his family (and more specifically with his 15 grandchildren), Banks’s exhortations, along with encouragement from Jill St. John-Hubbs, his wife of nearly 50 years, convinced him to stay on another two seasons.

Hubbs’ decision to remain Cubs CEO through the end of spring training 2016 was a good one. The team’s World Series titles in 2014 and 2015 brought the Cubs’ total number of Fall Classic championships during his time with the organization to an even dozen. But this time his decision to call it a career is a firm one. “My husband will always be a Cub in his heart. But at the risk of being selfish, I’d like to have him home with me a little more often!” said Ms. St. John-Hubbs, who gave up a promising acting career to marry Hubbs in 1967. Added longtime Cubs third base coach Joe Maddon: “Kenny’s been leading by example for better than a half a century now. I think he’s earned the right to take a break.”

That Hubbs is choosing to leave quietly makes perfect sense to Hall of Fame outfielder Billy Williams, who played alongside Hubbs during the 1960s and 1970s. “Kenny’s trademark was always getting the job done the best way he could; he was never about who got credit for our team’s success,” says Williams. Echoes another of Hubbs’ ex-teammates, fellow Hall-of-Famer Frank Robinson: “I think Kenny did at least as much for us {the Cubs} as Willie Mays did for the Giants, Hank Aaron did for the Braves, and maybe even as much as Babe Ruth did for the Yankees.”

On-field personnel aren’t the only people in the Cubs organization who appreciate and respect all that Hubbs has done for the team now universally acknowledged as baseball’s most successful franchise. Steve Bartman, a part-time ballpark employee for the past decade, recently told a reporter, “Mr. Hubbs’ commitment to excellence and his professionalism permeate every square inch of Wrigley Field.” When informed of the beer vendor’s sentiments, Ricketts remarked that the 39-year-old Chicagoan’s observation was, “as eloquent as it is accurate.”

After signing in 1959 with the Cubs at age 17, Hubbs rapidly rose through the organization, making it to the majors for 10 games near the end of the 1961 season. The following year he played 160 games for the Cubs and won the league’s Gold Glove award for second basemen. He also earned National League Rookie of the Year honors, despite leading the league’s hitters in strikeouts (129) and grounding into double plays (20). But he fell victim to the “sophomore jinx” in 1963; his average dropped 25 points as the Cubs finished in the National League’s second division for the 17th consecutive year.

“It was depressing,” Hubbs remembers. “I was only 21 at the end of the season, but I felt myself getting a little jaded. I wasn’t sure I wanted to make baseball a career. I had started to take flying lessons to conquer my fear of plane travel, and I was enjoying it so much that I was actually thinking of becoming a commercial pilot.”

But Hubbs had an epiphany on the night of Feb. 12, 1964. He was in Provo, Utah, where he and his friend Dennis Doyle had flown the day before to take part in a church-sponsored basketball clinic and to surprise Doyle’s wife, who was in Provo visiting her parents. The next morning the two men raced to the airport to try to fly home to Colton, Calif. ahead of a snowstorm that was headed for north central Utah. “I had driven about 25 mph over the speed limit just to get to the airport in time to take off before conditions got too rough,” Hubbs recalls. “I was all impatient; I actually snapped at Denny because I thought he was moving too slowly. That’s when he reminded me why we were such good pals.” As Hubbs remembers, Doyle calmly asked him what he was in such a hurry for. “’Kenny,’ he said, ‘You’re 22 years old. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Why rush?’”

Realizing the wisdom of his friend’s words, Hubbs shook Doyle’s hand and vowed to himself that he’d never again lose sight of what he considers “the big picture.” After staying two extra nights in Provo to wait out the storm, the two men flew home, with Hubbs more determined than ever to give his all to baseball.

In 1964 Hubbs established career highs in batting (.278), doubles (29), home runs (15), and runs batted in (67), while leading NL second basemen in fielding. The Cubs finished in the second division again, but it was a deceptive sixth-place finish in a 10-team league; their 86-76 mark left them a mere six games behind Phillies, who won their first pennant in 14 years by a game over the runner-up Cincinnati Reds before bowing to the New York Yankees and their rookie manager Yogi Berra in a six-game World Series.

Hoping to shed their image as pushovers the following year, the Cubs took a step backward, finishing in seventh place at a disappointing 81-81. Hubbs (.274, 14 homers, 72 RBIs) put in a solid season, though his offensive statistics paled in comparison to those of first baseman Banks (.265, 28, 106), third sacker Ron Santo (.285, 33, 101) and left fielder Williams (.315, 34, 108).

Management felt that something else was needed, and decided to make some radical changes. But that wouldn’t have worked without Hubbs’ cooperation. When head coach Lou Klein asked him if he’d consider moving to third base (a promising second sacker named Glenn Beckert was waiting in the wings), Hubbs, responded, “Why not?,” even though he’d never played the position. That allowed general manager John Holland to pull the trigger on a pair of blockbuster deals that not only reshaped the franchise’s immediate future, but transformed the Cubs from lovable losers to what most fans see them as today: the Yankees of the senior circuit.

The first involved the Cincinnati Reds, who were looking to move youngster Tony Perez across the diamond from third base to first base and were willing, if the price was right, to trade perennial all-star right fielder Frank Robinson to do so. When the Cubs offered Santo, who at age 25 was already an accomplished defensive third baseman with power, and minor league pitching prospect Fred Norman, the Reds were happy to swap them Robinson and minor league pitcher Dom Zanni. Then the Cubs sent veteran relief pitcher Lindy McDaniel and outfielder Don Landrum to the Giants for two top prospects, pitcher Bill Hands and catcher Randy Hundley.

The reaction to the transactions was lukewarm at best; critics claimed that Hands and Hundley were unproven, and Reds general manager Bill DeWitt chortled that Robinson was “an old 30.” But those two moves were only the beginning. Two other deals early the following spring completed one of the most successful quick makeovers in major league history.

Just over a week after the 1966 season started, the Cubs traded veteran starting pitchers Larry Jackson and Bob Buhl to the Phillies, receiving first baseman John Herrnstein, outfielder Adolfo Phillips and little-known Canadian right-handed pitcher Fergie Jenkins. But it was just over a month later that Holland pulled the trigger on a deal that directly led the Cubs to nearly total domination of the National League for the next decade and a half.

Knowing that St. Louis manager Leo Durocher, who had taken over the club the previous season after its disappointing seventh-place finish in 1964, had very little patience with young pitchers, Holland offered the Cardinals his choice of either of his two center fielders, (Phillips or Lou Brock) for 21-year-old Steve Carlton, a southpaw with an unusual personality. Buoyed by the early-season success of starting pitchers Bob Gibson and Ernie Broglio and lacking the patience to wait for Carlton to perfect the slider he was working on, Leo the Lip eagerly accepted the trade, choosing Phillips over the strikeout-prone Brock. He also insisted on Chicago including Zanni in the deal, offering to throw in young third sacker Ed Spiezio, “In case Hubbs didn’t work out at the hot corner,” Holland laughingly recalled years later. Durocher, who replaced as Redbird skipper by Red Schoendienst less than three months after the trade, needn’t have bothered.

Chicago’s revamped everyday lineup, which consisted of (in order) Beckert, Hubbs, Williams, Robinson, Banks, Brock, Hundley and rookie shortstop Don Kessinger) was one of the National League’s strongest; the team’s 92 wins were good for second place, just three games behind the pennant-winning Dodgers. Those Dodgers memorably shut down the American League champion Twins for the second straight year in a World Series that saw Sandy Koufax win the fifth and deciding game on a two-hit, 15-strikeout performance which turned out to be his swan song.

After a 22-year wait, the World Series returned to Wrigley Field in 1967 thanks to a variety of factors, not the least of which was ending the “College of Coaches” experiment and naming a fulltime manager. Since Klein had already been lured away to manage the American League’s woebegone Baltimore Orioles, owner Phil Wrigley looked elsewhere in the organization for a skipper and, to the surprise of many, hired John “Buck” O’Neil as big league baseball’s first African-American manager.

The quietly effective veteran of decades in the Negro Leagues put all the pieces together that year. He mentored his protégé, Brock, whom he had signed years earlier while working as a scout for the team, to the first of 10 all-star seasons. Brock’s 62 steals that season were just a harbinger of what was to come. Motivated by the snarky comments of his old employer with the Reds, Robinson, the team’s new right fielder, won the league’s Most Valuable Player Award while becoming the first NL triple crown winner in 29 years (49 homers, 122 RBIs, .316 batting average). Williams and Banks both drove in over 100 runs, and Beckert, Brock and Williams all scored over 100. Hundley masterfully handled a four-man rotation of Jenkins, Hands, Carlton and rookie Ken Holtzman, each of whom won 18 or more games. And on the rare occasions they needed help, veterans Cal Koonce, Dick Ellsworth and Curt Simmons, along with rookies Bill Stoneman, Rich Nye, Joe Niekro and Chuck Hartenstein were equal to the task . Hubbs drove in 84 runs, batted .270, and provided defense far better than anyone had the right to expect for his first year at the hot corner.

Chicago’s five-game World Series win over Boston’s “Impossible Dream” Red Sox that fall was seen at the time as the first Cubs championship in 59 years, but with the benefit of hindsight is now more appropriately remembered as the first of the record-tying five straight major league titles the team put together for O’Neil. That streak that was still intact when, at the age of 60, he handed the managerial reins over to Robinson at the start of the 1972 season.

The 1968 season is remembered by baseball fans as the “Year of the Pitcher,” and nowhere was that more true than in Chicago. Jenkins, Hands and Holtzman each won 20 games, Carlton 19, and the staff compiled a glittering aggregate ERA of 2.14. The Cubs again took the World Series, besting the Detroit Tigers in six games. They defeated 31-game winner Denny McLain in all three of his starts and were beaten only by unheralded Mickey Lolich, who hurled complete-game victories in the second and fifth games.

The switch to a 12-team, two-division league didn’t slow down the Cubs Express one iota. In 1969 they won the Eastern Division pennant by eight games over the rapidly improving Mets, swept the Braves in the first National League Championship Series, and then took home their third straight World Series title when Phil Regan struck out Tony Oliva and Harmon Killebrew with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game Seven to preserve a 3-2 win over the Minnesota Twins.

The beat rolled on in 1970, even as Robinson began sharing time with Banks at first base to create space in the outfield for fleet-footed, power-hitting rookie Oscar Gamble. O’Neil proved to be a master of actually using everyone on his roster, getting consistent contributions from players like Jim Hickman, Willie Smith, Paul Popovich and J.C. Martin, and adding bullpen depth with veterans Ted Abernathy, Juan Pizarro and Hoyt Wilhelm.

“Wrigley Field was where older guys wanted to come to finish their careers,” recalled former NL batting champion Tommy Davis, who contributed several clutch pinch hits during the September he spent with the team that year. The Cubs waltzed past the Reds in the playoffs and the rejuvenated Orioles in the World Series, with their only postseason loss coming on a Santo home run in the opener of the NLCS.

The Cubs sent O’Neil out a winner in 1971, winning the East Division by six games over Pittsburgh, the NLCS in four over the Giants, and the World Series in five over the Oakland A’s. During the five-year Cubs dynasty Hubbs was the model of consistency. He hit 90 home runs (never more than 20 in a season, and never fewer than 16) drove in 426 runs (his high was 92 in 1969; his low was 76, in 1971), and his batting average during the five championship years was an aggregate .279, with a high of .293 in ’70 and a low of .269 in ’68. He also won four of the five Gold Gloves for defensive excellence during the half-decade; only Cincinnati’s Santo (in 1970) was able to interrupt the streak.

Hubbs maintained his steady defensive play for first-year manager Frank Robinson in 1972 and put together the finest offensive stats of his career, but the rest of the team was aging, and fell out of contention early. He also privately questioned the effort of some teammates as the season went on. “He told me that season was the biggest disappointment of his career,” said Carmen Fanzone, a utility infielder on the team from 1972-74. “Kenny couldn’t understand anyone giving less than 100 percent every day. It frustrated him to see some guys ‘mailing it in.’”

The Pirates became the first team other than the Cubs to win an Eastern Division title that year, but lost the NLCS to Cincinnati. For Hubbs that was doubly disappointing, since the Reds had traded his friend Santo to the Astros during the previous offseason in a deal that brought Joe Morgan, Jack Billingham and Cesar Geronimo to Cincinnati. “Everyone in Chicago loved Ronnie, and we wanted him to get a shot at postseason play. But that year made it look like it just wasn’t going to happen for him,” Hubbs remembered.

After another down year in 1973 the Cubs began the process of rebuilding. Jenkins, Hands, Hundley and Williams were all traded to American League teams for prospects, and Robinson was let go as skipper, landing in Cleveland as the AL’s first African-American manager a year later.

In 1974 Hubbs went on the disabled list for the first time in his career after his his right hand was broken by a Bill Greif pitch in an Aug. 18 game against the Padres at Wrigley Field. With the Cubs fighting for the division title in late August, manager Al Spangler called Hubbs into his office. The club had a chance to reacquire fan favorite Santo; the catch was that doing so would significantly lessen Hubbs’s playing time when he returned from his injury.

“We felt we owed it to Kenny to sound him out,” GM John Holland recalled in an interview less than a year before his death in 1979. “He had played nearly 13 full years for us and had just gotten his 2,000th hit; I didn’t want to blindside him.” A selfish player might have been hurt or even angry at the prospect of being replaced, but Hubbs’ reaction was exactly what the manager and GM had hoped for and expected. “He was thrilled,” Spangler said. “After he finished jumping up and down his exact words to me were, ‘Well, what are you waiting for? Make the deal!’”

Prospects Pete LaCock, Gene Hiser and Dave Rosello went to Houston; Santo came back to Wrigley Field to a seemingly endless standing ovation, hit .339 for the last six weeks, and ended up winning a World Series ring when the Cubs bested the Dodgers in the NLCS and the A’s in the Fall Classic. “I think it’s safe to say I’d have never gotten into a World Series if it hadn’t been for the encouragement and unselfishness of Kenny Hubbs,” Santo said in the speech he gave on the day he was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1985. “He never stopped advocating on my behalf, even after I stopped playing baseball.”

After two seasons of service as a valuable clubhouse leader and utility player, Hubbs retired after the 1976 season and was immediately offered the first base coaching position by new manager Herman Franks. “Herman offering me a big league job was an awfully nice thing for him to do, but taking it would have been too easy,” says Hubbs. “If I was going to get to the big leagues as a coach or a manager I wanted to earn my way there.”

He applied for (and got) the job managing the Cubs’ short-season affiliate in the New York-Pennsylvania League. And even though the 1977 Geneva Cubs lost more than they won, Hubbs found the experience exhilarating. He wasn’t the only one; infielder Dan Rohn, the only player on the team who later logged time in the majors, describes Hubbs as, “Far and away the best man I ever played for. He taught me more about the game than anyone else ever did, and he did it without ever raising his voice. He was truly a born leader.”

Hubbs managed for four more minor league seasons, the last of which was 1981, when he piloted the Iowa Cubs of the Triple-A American Association. The team didn’t win many games that year, but Hubbs, who turned 40 that winter, still managed to do his part for the long-term health of the organization. During the team’s player development meetings in December that year there was talk of the Cubs swapping shortstops with the Phillies.

“When I heard that I was astounded, because I thought {Ivan} DeJesus was a far superior player (to Larry Bowa, the infielder the team would get from Philadelphia in the proposed deal),” remembers Dallas Green, the Cubs general manager at the time. “I knew a lot about the Phillies, having come from their organization, so I told them we’d need at least one prospect thrown in in order to make the deal happen. When they agreed to do that I put it to my staff: which Phillies prospect did they want? Well, let me tell you: I have never seen anyone as adamant about something as Kenny Hubbs was about us getting {Ryne} Sandberg! He told me he’d seen him play for Oklahoma City that summer and he’d stake his reputation on the kid. It turns out Kenny was a pretty good judge of talent, too!”

After the De Jesus for Bowa and Sandberg deal was consummated on Jan. 27, 1982, Hubbs got the opportunity to help his glowing predictions about Sandberg’s future come true; he was named to manager Lee Elia’s coaching staff that year. And when Elia was dismissed in August of the following season, Hubbs was hired to replace him.

After a sub-.500 season in 1984, the now-legendary Cub skipper put together a string of nine consecutive seasons with 85 or more wins. When he moved to the front office after winning the World Series Championship in 1996, Hubbs could look back at a job well done; a .579 winning percentage, eight divisional titles, five National League pennants, and four World Series championships.

Perhaps most remarkably, Hubbs accomplished all that while never getting ejected from a major league game by an umpire. “That’s the most awesome record in sports,” says Reggie Jackson, who finished his career as a part-time outfielder for the Cubs in 1987 on the squad that won the first of the four World Series titles under Hubbs. “He never got thrown out, not one time! That’s more amazing than Wilt Chamberlain never fouling out of an NBA game. But let me tell you, we never felt like he didn’t support us. That man was as loyal to his players as the day is long; we knew he had our backs. He’d get into it with the umpires. But they just respected him too much to ever run him.”

Hubbs never lost his eye for talent. Bucking the opinion of nearly everyone in the organization, he all but demanded the team protect a 28-year-old catcher from the November 1992 expansion draft to stock the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins. Joe Girardi was perceived by many as nothing more than an expensive backup for up-and-coming backstop Rick Wilkins. Hubbs’ insistence on keeping Girardi paid off; when Wilkins went down with an injury it was Girardi who mentored the young Cubs pitching staff to a division championship on 1993. Two years later it was again Girardi, who’ll enter his eighth season as Cubs skipper in 2016, who squeezed the final pitch of the 1995 World Series. It was a called third strike delivered by Todd Jones, who had been picked up in a trade Hubbs had advocated for earlier that summer… for Rick Wilkins!

Hubbs, who had quietly earned a Black Belt in karate after his playing career ended, was also tough physically when he had to be. He was 53 in 1995 when he broke up a potential clubhouse brawl by putting a choke hold on Jose Canseco, a free-spirited, muscular and notoriously self-absorbed outfielder who came to the Cubs in a 1994 trade.

“I was using some supplements at the time that affected my moods, and when I wasn’t feeling good, look out,” Canseco recalled. “Nobody would mess with me. Then one day I had some trouble with a teammate and was getting ready to lay him out when Hubbsie got between us. He told me I needed to back off, and I asked him who was going to make me. When he said he would, well, I just lost it. I went for him, and the next thing I knew, it was 10 minutes later and I had smelling salts under my nose.” Hubbs apologized profusely for letting his temper get the better of him, but Canseco, now an ordained minister who runs a bilingual Unitarian Universalist church outside of Miami, says, “He (Hubbs) has nothing to apologize for. Kenny Hubbs talked straight to me when no one else would, and he wouldn’t back down from me when everyone else did. I owe my life to that man.”

After leaving the field for good Hubbs served as the Cubs’ vice-president of community affairs for three years and general manager for three more until his promotion to president/CEO in 2003. That’s the position he has held continuously until his official retirement tomorrow.

Hubbs steadfastly refuses to take credit for any particular accomplishments during his tenure in management, preferring to attribute the Cubs’ continued success on the field and at the box office to “a team effort.” However, when pressed on the subject, he didn’t hesitate to mention how proud he was of helping to get Santo hired as a part of the club’s broadcast team in 1990. “No one combined knowledge of the game, enthusiasm, and love of the Cubs in the way that Ronnie did. I just thought he’d be a natural,” said Hubbs, who first floated the idea of putting Santo into the broadcast booth.

His only regret about his looming retirement: that his friends Santo (who passed away from complications of diabetes in 2010) and Banks (who died in 2015) won’t be there to share the day with him. “Ernie always said he wanted to win an even dozen championships, but we didn’t get the 12th until nine months after he died. What I had really wanted was 14 championships for Ernie (that was his uniform number), but that was an awful lot to ask for, even for a dominant organization like the Cubs.”

Hubbs will hardly be alone when his retirement becomes official. Among those scheduled to be on hand for the occasion are former teammates Beckert, Brock, Williams, Robinson, Jenkins, Hundley, George Altman and Joey Amalfitano.

Don’t expect Hubbs, who celebrated his 74th birthday two days before last Christmas, to disappear now that he’s officially retiring after 55 years with the Cubs organization. “My dad always told me to never retire from something, but to something,” Hubbs says. “I’m not retiring from baseball; I’m retiring to my grandchildren, my garden and the business (batting cages) a friend and I are running outside of Chicago. Who knows; maybe I’ll even try to renew my pilot’s license!”

References & Resources

• This story imagines an alternate universe where Ken Hubbs lived a full life. Unfortunately, Hubbs died in a plane crash in Feb. 1964.