Sutcliffe Delivers an Unusual Pitch

Rick Sutcliffe, the Cubs’ pitcher, says that going to Wrigley Field in Chicago is like going to the opera: “It’s loud, crowded, confusing and emotional --and everybody dies in the third act.”

Among those who die in the third act is the pitcher.

A ballgame in Wrigley is also like a golf Open in Britain--it all depends on which way the wind is blowing.

It was probably a ballplayer who first dubbed Chicago the Windy City. Natives probably thought every place in the world blew you back two feet for every foot you walked.

Wrigley is baseball’s version of the elephant’s graveyard--ERAs go there to die.

It has two distinct personalities. When the wind is blowing in, it’s Dr. Jekyll; when it’s blowing out, Mr. Hyde.

Pitchers have been known to tear their uniforms, trash their lockers, scream to be traded and retire sobbing to the training room when asked to pitch in the Wrigley monsoon. Others have been known to cross Wrigley off places they would consent to be traded to.

Rick Sutcliffe loves it.

Now, Rick Sutcliffe is a member in good standing of the baseball pitchers of America. He’s one of the best. In fact, at the moment, he’s the National League’s best with a 15-4 record, and if the Cubs are ever going to win a pennant, he’s going to have to win it for them. He almost single-handedly put them in the only playoff they’ve ever been in and won them their first title of any kind in 39 years when he went 16-1 with them in 1984.

Still, you would think he would want to be far away from a place where routine fly balls land 20 rows up in the bleachers or on rooftops across the street and good pitches ricochet off the outfield ivy.

How can anyone like pitching in a place where he is made to feel like one of those guys who used to sit on a stool over a pool of cold water in an amusement park and let the public dunk them with a throw?

Nine pitchers out of 10 would be throwing notes out the window slugged, “Help!” Or, “Get me out of here, they’re trying to kill me!” Pitching in Wrigley is not an occupation, it’s a sentence.

There’s no other ballpark in the country like it. It is one of the last remaining relics of the game, one of a vanishing number that were built in the time of World War I. All of them were constructed in the dead-ball era, when the home run was an oddity, not a commonplace.

But none of them can persecute a pitcher the way Wrigley can. Fenway Park in Boston has an unconscionably short left-field fence. But a pitcher has an airport in right to direct the hitters’ attention to. Tiger Stadium in Detroit yields home runs but not necessarily on good pitches.

In track and field, they have a category, “wind-aided,” which can negate performance when a following wind is above allowable limits. Records don’t count. It’s not likely, though, that Mike Schmidt will want to give back the four home runs he hit on one day in April 1976 or that anyone will put an asterisk beside the 33 home-field home runs Hack Wilson hit in 1930 on his way to his league record of 56.

Wind is a factor at Candlestick Park in San Francisco but it works against the batter and fielder, not the pitcher.

The Cubs have not won a pennant or been in a World Series in nearly half a century because of the peculiar climatic conditions on the shore of Lake Michigan. Consider that the Cubs have not really had a heroic pitching star or staff since the era of the ‘20s and ‘30s, or before .230 hitters began to swing from their heels.

The caprice of the winds led to the suspicion that the one effective pitcher they did have --Ferguson Jenkins--must have been a towering genius and what he’s doing not in the Hall of Fame is something for others to answer, not me. This man won 20 or more games six years in a row pitching in Wrigley. For that exploit alone, he should be in the Hall of Fame.

“When the wind’s blowing out,” Don Drysdale used to grate, “it takes a yard off your fastball.” A measure of the treachery of Wrigley’s winds can be seen in the fact Cub pitchers managed only 11 complete games last season. They managed only 6 in 1981. True, it was the dead-ball era, but back before Wrigley was built, Cub pitchers used to rack up as many as 139 complete games.

So, what’s to love about this Hall of Horrors, this Cave of Winds? Can a pitcher sing, “My Kind of Town,” along with Sinatra? Is Sutcliffe into some kind of S&M;? Does he like seeing his good pitches turn into tape measures? Why isn’t he running, screaming for the exits?

“Look at it this way,” Sutcliffe explains sunnily, “where else in America could you give up five runs and still be in the ballgame? Where can you have a three-run inning and come in, and the manager can say, ‘Nice work’--and mean it? Where else can you give up a home run and it doesn’t mean a thing? Pitchers in other ballparks give up a home run and they wilt. Their confidence goes away. Here, you can figure, ‘Well, I got that guy to pop it up.’ The fact it went over the fence is incidental, a matter of climate. Besides, it makes it kind of fun. It’s fun pitching in Wrigley. I guarantee you the fans don’t go home early. They know the game, but most of all, they know the Cubs. It’s like a big family. They’re not abusive like New York or laid back like California. But if they ever got a World Series, they’d know what to do with it.”

But wouldn’t Rick rather pitch in one of those serene, shielded or domed, cylindrical ballparks where the wind doesn’t blow and the games are all 3-2 or 2-1 and you can hang up nice microscopic ERA decimals that look so good in a record book or on a plaque?

“Sounds kind of boring to me,” says Rick Sutcliffe, grabbing a glove and heading out to where they don’t call the wind Maria but where there are days when it keeps its reputation as the all-time career slugger of baseball, putting Babe Ruth’s and Henry Aaron’s home runs to shame by comparison.