Cubs Basking in the Good Graces of the Baseball Gods

It was the eighth inning of an important game for the struggling Chicago Cubs. They were trailing, 5-1, against the San Diego Padres and on a losing streak.

Mark Grace was their batter and a curious thing happened: He swung at the pitch and apparently hit an innocuous ground ball down the first base line where he was an easy out.

But something bothered His Grace. The ball didn’t sound right. He distinctly heard two cracks of the bat. He stopped to talk to the first-base umpire. “I hit that ball twice. The first hit bounced in the batter’s box. My bat hit it on the bounce. What’s the ruling on that?”

Umpire Jim Kellogg was not sure. “Gracey, I didn’t see that,” he acknowledged. The matter was turned over to the home-plate umpire, Joe West. He deferred to the third-base umpire, the crew chief, Paul Runge. He ruled that, indeed, Grace had hit a bouncing foul. It was just a strike, not an out.

In golf, striking the ball twice--immortalized by T.C. Chen in an Open, who was thenceforward forever identified as “Two-Chip Chen”--it’s a two-stroke penalty.

In baseball, you get to hit over again. Grace promptly singled to right on the next pitch. The batter after him, Sammy Sosa, immediately hit a three-run, two-out home run.

The rally Wednesday fell short, but the incident illustrates a fact of life that has been clear to the league for a long while: Mark Eugene Grace is a thinking man’s ballplayer. He doesn’t make an out, so to speak, gracefully. Nine out of 10 batsmen might have accepted the ground out as just another at-bat.

Not His Grace. He doesn’t just accept outs.

This Grace is amazing, all right. One of the most popular players in Cub history--and that is a history which includes Ernie Banks, Gabby Hartnett, Hack Wilson, Charley Grimm, Billy Williams--you watch Mark play and you are not sure whether his last name is a name or a description. Chicago has been blessed with great glove artists from Grimm to Cavarretta, to Cap Anson, for all of that, and he has the highest fielding percentage of any Cub ever (.994). You’d have to say he plays the position with a lot of Grace.

He strikes out about once a week. He walks far more often than he fans.

Last year, the Grace note found him fifth in the league in batting (.326), third in the league in hits (180), sixth in the league in runs scored (97), sixth in total bases (285), and, as usual, first in the league in doubles (51). His skill at the two-bagger in the gap is so well established that announcer Vin Scully was moved to salute it the other night at Dodger Stadium. “It will come as no surprise that Mark Grace has just doubled to right center. As usual,” intoned Scully.

Grace is fourth in the National League this year in doubles (and first in hits, period). Since he was batting .375 going into Saturday night’s game against the Dodgers, 1996 shapes up as another Grace period.

Mark Grace ascribes his success to the difficulty of defending him. He does not have the attributes of some hitters. Henry Aaron, for example, had such quick wrists he could wait till the pitch was almost in the catcher’s glove before he would snap it out and drive it to the fences. Ted Williams had the eyesight of a circling hawk.

But many ballplayers can be played. The smart manager can position his fielders to cut off the probable lanes of his hits. Many great hitters have only one corridor for success--an area from right-center to the right foul line for left-handed hitters and an area from left-center to the other foul line for righties. The league ignores this at its peril. Ted Williams wore out the right-field fences till the St. Louis Cardinals pioneered the “Williams Shift” in the ’46 World Series and held Teddy Ballgame to five inconsequential singles for the Series.

“When I go to bat, I feel as if I have foul line to foul line to hit,” Grace notes. “You can’t play me because I can go with the pitch. It’s part eyesight and it’s part patience. I don’t try to pull the ball all the time. That’s why I don’t hit a lot of home runs (16 last year). I try to hit .300 and get runs scored and runs batted in. How you do it doesn’t matter. An opposite-field hit scores the same as any other. I don’t try to make the pitcher’s job easier swinging hard at bad pitches.”

How cerebral is hitting? “The art of hitting,” says Grace, “is to lay off the really nasty curveball which you probably can’t hit anyway. Lay off that public enemy and wait for the ball over the plate. Sooner or later the pitcher has to come in with it because he needs a strike. That’s the pitch you hit.”

Hemingway said valor was grace under pressure. When The Cubs’ Grace was under pressure, in the only playoff series the Cubs reached in his career, 1989, he batted .647, had a homer, a triple, three doubles and eight RBIs.

Any lineup would be lucky to be full of Grace, any manager happy to say Grace before games. But if any team can be said to have fallen from grace it is the Cubs. The last time they won the pennant, Harry Truman was President, gas was a quarter, and television was thought to be something out of Buck Rogers.

The Cubs would like to see those times graciously, so to speak, returned. In the meantime, though, every pitcher in the league would rather concentrate on getting No. 17 out, so they can murmur, “Say good night, Grace!”

They can begin by not letting him get two times at bat per plate appearance.