100 Things Cubs Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die Read Online Free PDF

a sign as any that Opening Day is near.

    The First (Acting) African American Manager
    When Frank Robinson was hired as a player-manager of the Cleveland Indians in 1975, he broke an important color barrier by becoming Major League Baseball’s first African American manager.
    But he wasn’t really the first. Ernie Banks beat him to the punch by nearly two seasons.
    On May 8, 1973, Banks was a coach with the Cubs when manager Whitey Lockman was ejected in the 11 th inning at San Diego. The two coaches who would have taken over for Lockman were Larry Jansen and Pete Reiser. According to George Langford of the Chicago Tribune , Jansen missed the game due to his wife’s illness and Reiser had got hurt in a recent melee against San Francisco.
    The only two coaches left on the bench were Banks and Hank Aguirre, who incidentally were born on the exact same day. Banks took over, and in the top of the 12 th inning Joe Pepitone’s run-scoring double broke the tie and the Cubs went on to win 3–2.
    Acting managers don’t get credit for a win, and as a result Banks doesn’t have a managerial record. That doesn’t change the fact that the first time a black man managed in the major leagues, the win actually went to a man named Whitey.

8. The Most Dominant Game Ever Pitched
    If someone tells you they were at Wrigley Field to watch 20-year-old Kerry Wood throw a one-hitter and strike out 20 Houston Astros in his fifth major league start, you might want to ask for proof.
    Chances are they weren’t there. Few people were. Only 15,758 were in the park on May 6, 1998, to see perhaps the most dominant pitching performance in the history of Major League Baseball, certainly the most dominant by a boy who barely needed to shave yet.
    And who would have been clamoring to be at Wrigley Field on a chilly, rainy Wednesday afternoon in May? Sure, Wood was a former first-round pick out of Texas who had developed into an exciting prospect, striking out 329 hitters in 54 minor league starts.
    But just 12 days earlier, in his third major league start, Wood looked like a lost boy while getting only five outs and giving up seven earned runs in a 12–4 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers. There would be time for greatness to arrive. Nobody had any idea it would arrive so soon.
    The game began with Wood striking out the side, which was somewhat tempered by the fact that Houston pitcher Shane Reynolds did the same to the Cubs in the bottom of the first. So maybe it was just the cold.
    But Wood fanned the first five hitters he faced, and if not for an infield hit by Ricky Gutierrez that Cubs third baseman Kevin Orie couldn’t handle to lead off the third inning, Wood would have been working on a no-hitter.
    After six innings, Wood had 12 strikeouts. That’s a tremendous day for anyone, but to challenge Roger Clemens’ mark of 20 strikeouts in a game he would have to strike out practically every hitter he faced for the remainder of the game. That’s just what he did. With an array of fastballs, curveballs, and sliders, Wood struck out the side in the seventh and eighth innings and then in the top of the ninth fanned his seventh straight hitter to get within one of the record.
    Houston’s Craig Biggio managed to make contact and grounded out to short to end Wood’s bid to break the mark. But the next batter, Derek Bell, didn’t have a chance. He missed wildly on a sweeping curve to become Wood’s 20 th strikeout victim.
    After the game, Astros first baseman Jeff Bagwell, who struck out in each of his three at-bats, wasn’t just impressed that Wood had filthy stuff but that he had filthy stuff when he wasn’t supposed to.
    “He threw breaking balls behind in the count for strikes,” Bagwell told the Chicago Tribune . “You can never expect that, and I won’t expect that the next time we face him. You can’t expect anyone to keep doing that. If he does, then he may never lose.”
    So how good was this performance? According to Game Score, a