Game Now Has No Ryne Nor Reason

A line forms along Melrose and around the corner. Someone peers through the doorway of the Sports Books shop, trying to see who is in there, autographing books, drawing such a mob. “Must be Michael Jordan,” he guesses.

No, but pretty good guess.

Ryne Sandberg, the other Chicago athlete who quit before his time, never had much to say back when he was playing baseball. Turns out he was saving some for when he was done playing.

“The respect for the game has changed,” says the retired Cub second baseman, now 35. “Too many of today’s players don’t take pride in their work. Some of them don’t care about anything but themselves.”

Which is partly why he quit.

On June 13, 1994, the hot news story in Chicago was not that Los Angeles police were calling O.J. Simpson at an O’Hare hotel about a double murder committed the night before. Or that the opening game of the World Cup soccer tournament, to be held in Chicago, was only days away.

It was that Ryne Sandberg had suddenly retired, giving up $16.1 million left on his contract.

Sandberg didn’t go on strike. He was already gone. Only 34 when he turned in his uniform, two months before the great walkout of 1994, Sandberg was far from washed up. He had hit .309 the previous season. He made the All-Star team for the 10th time. And he was still the game’s best-fielding second baseman.

But the meek guy they called Ryno had had enough.

Taking a break in the bookstore’s back aisle Tuesday, away from adoring fans who obviously don’t lump him with the greedy strikers, Sandberg, sounding much as Jordan did in explaining why he quit, said: “The frame of mind I was in, it just didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel I was myself. It just wasn’t any fun anymore.”

All that money didn’t matter.

“I didn’t take the money and run. I left the money with the Cubs,” Sandberg said.

But will he come back, the way Jordan did? That is the question.

Sandberg fields it cleanly.

“No.”

His body hadn’t worn out, as Nolan Ryan’s had. He wasn’t crowding 40, like Robin Yount, or beyond it, like George Brett. His heart just wasn’t in it anymore.

In his new book, aptly titled “The Game Has Changed,” co-authored with Barry Rozner, the words flow from Sandberg far more easily than they did when he was being interviewed in clubhouses or dugouts.

“I was a player caught between two generations: The one I came up with, which still cared about the game, and the one I left behind, which hardly cared at all.

“When I was coming up, we played baseball because we loved the game. I don’t see that work ethic today. As soon as the game is over, it’s a race to see who can get out of the clubhouse the fastest.

“At the end of a game in Montreal, I’d come in off the field and I wouldn’t hear the young guys talking about the game. I’d hear them talking about what suits they saw on St. Catherine street. In New York, it wasn’t whether Doc Gooden had his best stuff that day--it was the sales at Bloomie’s (Bloomingdale’s) and Macy’s.”

Baseball was becoming drudgery for Sandberg. His average was down to .238 when he quit.

He walked away from $12.7 million due him over the last three years of his contract, plus $3.4 million more if the Cubs exercised their option to keep him in 1997.

Players making big bucks, Sandberg doesn’t object to that . . . not if they have earned it.

“The money is very good and the players are very deserving,” he says. “It takes 10 or 11 months of hard work each year to stay at the top of your game.

“But the structure of the game is way off balance. The young players today, they make it so early, without proving themselves. I feel they don’t pay their dues. They want it right away, sometimes before they’ve proven a thing on the field.

“No way they can go on like this and expect the fans to keep coming out. Something’s got to change.”

What changed in one city was the second baseman.

The game lost Ryne Sandberg, the only man who quit playing baseball in 1994 for a reason we can admire.