Chicago Cubs: David Ross, meet Yogi Berra

Once, Yogi Berra was named to manage his friends. For Yogi it was win the pennant, then lose your job the sneaky way. For Chicago Cubs manager Ross, beware.

Among numerous moments not to forget from the 2016 World Series was David Ross, the veteran catcher whose playing career would end with a Chicago Cubs World Series ring on his finger, doing his level best to settle the jitters of his buddy Anthony Rizzo.

The only way Ross could have topped that was doing exactly what he did in a little earlier Game Seven—atone for a horrific throwing error one half-inning earlier by leading off the next with his last major league hit, off spent Cleveland Indians relief star Andrew Miller, hitting a 2-2 pitch into the left-center field bleachers.

More from Chicago Cubs

• Stock Up, Stock Down: Braves, Yankees, Cubs, Red Sox
• Chicago Cubs face a conundrum in 2024 when it comes to Cody Bellinger
• Stock Up, Stock Down: Two teams rising, two falling post-trade deadline
• Chicago Cubs: The 4 players who are on the franchise’s Mount Rushmore
• Stock Up, Stock Down: MLB trade deadline winners and losers

That is, unless you predicted then that the respected journeyman would become the Cubs’ manager after the Joe Maddon era ended with a whimper last season. If you did predict it, you should send your crystal ball to the Hall of Fame.

“How can I top this?” Ross asked when he was found reposing with his family after that surrealistic Cubs triumph. Then, he answered his own question: “If I come back, it’ll be to get my ring and maybe yell at Rizzo from the seats.”

Now Grandpa Rossy gets to yell at Rizzo and any other Cub if and when needed from the dugout or in the clubhouse or around the Chicago Cubs spring training complex. And he gets to try walking a very fine line that isn’t walked easily by the rare breed of major league managers who were their players’ friend just a short time earlier.

Chicago Cubs: David Ross, meet Yogi Berra

A Brief History of Yogi’s Raw Deal

Berra finished his playing career as a player-coach in 1963. He got the Yankee job in the first place for three reasons.

Reason one: When general manager Roy Hamey decided to retire, the Yankees decided to take advantage of incumbent manager Ralph Houk‘s smarts and kick him upstairs into Hamey’s old job. Leaving them in need of a man on the bridge.

Reason two: Freshly swept by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1963 Series, the first time the imperial Yankees ever lost a Series in four straight, the Yankees were still imperial enough to find it impossible to fathom that the crosstown, infant Mets began out-drawing them at the gate despite being . . .

Put it this way: The 1962-63 Mets featured Abbott pitching to Costello, and as often as not nobody knew who was on first. Or anyplace else. They had the Four Marx Brothers covering the infield, the Three Stooges patrolling the outfield, the Harlem Globetrotters on the bench, the Keystone Kops in the bullpen, and Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton on the coaching lines. They had the still phenomenally popular Casey Stengel managing the troupe. And they were about to get a brand-new playpen named Shea Stadium for 1964, too.

Reason three: Somebody else actually wanted Berra on the bridge. After previous rumors that the Boston Red Sox had eyes on him, the Baltimore Orioles were ready to name Yogi their skipper for 1964. And the Yankees had nobody else anywhere near prepared to manage who also had box office appeal.

Well, they still had Hall of Fame pitcher Whitey Ford, as brainy as it got, but Ford wasn’t quite ready to give up the mound. They also still had Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle. But just like Babe Ruth a few generations before, the haunted Mantle wasn’t exactly the most responsible of men off the field. The Yankees wanted a baseball mind who was box office bank and unlikely to be caught carousing, hustling, or behaving like a law unto himself off the field.

When you looked past Ford and Mantle, there was only one man who answered to all three qualifiers affirmatively. And if the Orioles were so serious about thinking of him as managerial material, the Yankees married that to Stengel’s old only-half-kidding attachment of “my assistant manager” to their longtime catcher and decided Yogi Berra on the bridge made baseball and box office sense.

Grandpa Rossy, pay attention now: It isn’t going to be as easy managing your buds as you think. And your team isn’t aging half as fast as the 1964 Yankees began to age. Yogi was about to learn the hard way.

In baseball terms, Berra had many of the same growing pains as other first-year managers often do. He also had his big hitters slumping on and off, and he didn’t have a terrific bullpen, either. “The relief pitcher who can come in over the last two innings and get the other side out can cover up a multitude of sins,” wrote Bill Veeck in The Hustler’s Handbook. “Yogi didn’t have him. Except for one brief period early in the season when Steve Hamilton was stopping them, and the final month of the season when they had [Pedro] Ramos, the Yankee bullpen was useless.”

Veeck also revealed a backchannel pipeline to Houk’s office in the executive suite for assorted Yankees to complain about their former teammate now proving himself what they thought was a  half-competent skipper. Yogi also didn’t know what even Veeck knew: when the Columbia Broadcasting System bought the Yankees controversially in mid-1964, Houk “told them that the Yankees weren’t going to win the pennant because Berra had butchered the job, but that everything was going to be fine again next year when Yogi was gone.”

Houk even had a candidate in mind to replace Berra after the season: Cardinals manager Johnny Keane, facing a lot of the back-channel backstabbing Berra faced, despite Keane’s ability to make and keep the Cardinals cohesive especially when it came to managing their young black players. Somehow, Houk got the back-channel word from Keane that, yes, since his own execution papers were being drawn, he’d love to have the Yankee job if Yogi was going to lose it.

Then came the earthquakes down the stretch:

• The Philadelphia Phillies collapsed into the infamous ten-game losing streak, and surges by the Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds (hoping to win one for their cancer-stricken manager Fred Hutchinson) threatened a National League season ending in a three-way pennant tie.
• Thanks to late-season rookie call-up Mel Stottlemyre and the acquisition of Ramos for the bullpen, in hand with a sudden surge of regrouped hitting, the Yankees fought their way back to win the last American League pennant of their fabled old guard. (“Unless I have been very sadly misinformed by all those sensation-seeking columnists,” Veeck snarked, “the manager during that stretch run was Yogi Berra.”)
• The Phillies and the Reds finished the season against each other while the Cardinals, given two surprise losses by the Mets (of all people), won on their final day and put the pennant into their pocket.
• The Cardinals beat the Yankees in seven in the Series. “[T]hey kicked all four losing games away,” Veeck wrote, “something not even the most visionary Yankee-haters ever expected to see.” (Actually, it didn’t help that Ford’s elbow began ailing in earnest starting and losing Game One and wouldn’t be able to pitch again in the set. Future Ball Four author Jim Bouton’s 1.56 Series ERA in two starts wouldn’t be enough. Hall of Famer Bob Gibson‘s gutty Game Seven would prove too much.)
• The following day, Keane showed up at a press conference called by Cardinals owner Gussie Busch to announce his re-hiring. Keane handed Busch a letter of resignation instead. Berra went to the Yankee offices thinking he’d been called in to start planning for 1965 and came out with his head on the proverbial plate.
• CBS learned the hard way they’d bought a white elephant: the Yankee farm was parched, the few promising prospects proved to be journeyman major leaguers until the advent of Thurman Munson, and the company proved to know as much about administering baseball as their most popular international entertainment discovery, the Beatles, knew about playing the game. By the time the Yankees returned to competitiveness, CBS sold the team to George Steinbrenner.

Yogi moved to the crosstown Mets as a coach. In due course he succeeded Gil Hodges as their manager, even winning a National League East at the last minute before winning a pennant in five arduous games against the West champion Reds before getting close-but-not-quite to beating the Oakland Athletics in a seven-game World Series.

Keane learned the hard way he’d outsmarted himself into disaster: he proved unable to handle an aging team built for the big innings that no longer came. (Bouton would observe in due course that Keane was too willing to sacrifice a season to win a game.) When he was fired early in 1966, he looked twenty years older than he really was and would in fact end up dead of a heart attack at the near-beginning of 1967.

Chicago Cubs: David Ross, meet Yogi Berra

Beware, Rossy, Managing Ain’t as Easy as It Looks

The Cubs didn’t exactly hire David Ross for his box office alone, though Ross’s popularity in Cub Country certainly doesn’t hurt. No less than president Theo Epstein laid it out when he agreed to introduce Ross’s 2017 memoir:

More from Call to the Pen

• Philadelphia Phillies, ready for a stretch run, bomb St. Louis Cardinals
• Philadelphia Phillies: The 4 players on the franchise’s Mount Rushmore
• Boston Red Sox fans should be upset over Mookie Betts’ comment
• Analyzing the Boston Red Sox trade for Dave Henderson and Spike Owen
• 2023 MLB postseason likely to have a strange look without Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals

The watchful eye from the dugout to make sure we respected the game and played the Cub Way. Unselfish, team-first, winning baseball. The glare when someone did something that wasn’t Cub. The rare harsh word when it happened again. The high-fives and pats on the rear when it got fixed. The instinct when to know when to create levity and when to get guys locked in. Reminding the young players how good they are. Reminding them they can get better. Words to keep the team grounded when winning seemed easy. Words to lift up the team when losing just one more would end the season.

That sounded as though the Cubs looked at Ross even then as a charter member of Future Cub Managers of America. But take heed, Grandpa Rossy. Beware that the Cubs’ front office isn’t exactly immune to foolishness itself. Remember that your buds-turned-subordinates are only human, too, especially in the event that they hit a few rough patches during the season to come.

Joe Torre admits to Stark that when he became the Mets’ manager it “was horrible” when he had to suspend a player for “insubordination.” Decades later, managing the Yankees, Torre hooked Denny Neagle when Neagle was an out away from qualifying for what would have been his only World Series win. Neagle never spoke to Torre again.

Ross thinks he won’t have quite such problems even as he admits that you never really know. He tells Stark of a talk he had with Cubs pitcher Jon Lester, for whom he was once the personal catcher. After Ross talked to Lester about the possibility of a hook in the big moments, Lester cracked up. “You’ve been taking me out of games your whole career, coming out there and telling me I’m done,” the pitcher told his former catcher. So don’t worry about it.”

Well, those old Yankee pitchers could have said likewise to Yogi Berra until it actually happened, too. Ross is about to learn the hard way how simple it isn’t to manage your friends. And it’s to pray that he doesn’t have to face even half the treachery that even the beloved Berra had to face.