Read 100 Things Cubs Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die for Free Online Page A

distributed almost perfectly with six players—Keith Moreland (80 RBIs), Matthews (82), Sandberg (84), Jody Davis (94), Leon Durham (96), and Ron Cey (97)—driving in at least 80 runs.
    The Cubs took over first place for good on August 1. As in 1969, the Mets were their fiercest competition but this time there would be no collapse. A four-game sweep over their rivals at Wrigley Field in early August increased their lead to 4½ games, and after August 24 the Cubs never led by fewer than five games.
    The clincher came on September 24 at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium, fittingly a complete-game shutout by Sutcliffe, whose 14 th straight win touched off a wild night as fans poured out of the bars to surround Wrigley Field in celebration.
    That was the end of a glorious regular season. The playoffs were a different story, the epic collapse against San Diego only serving to burn the 1984 season deeper into the mind of every Cubs fan.

    For Starters, 1985 Was Also Painful
    In 1985, the Cubs brought back the entire starting rotation that led them to the 1984 division title—and one by one the entire starting rotation got hurt.
    Rick Sutcliffe went down first, tearing his right hamstring in May, and a couple days later Steve Trout landed on the disabled list with a sore elbow. By August, Dennis Eckersley was on the DL with a sore shoulder, and Dick Ruthven joined him the same day when a line drive broke his left toe.
    On August 17, Scott Sanderson’s chronic bad back laid him up, and the entire starting rotation was on the disabled list at the same time. Sutcliffe alone was on the DL three times, and during the course of the season the original five-man rotation missed a combined 60 starts.
    The lineup was also hit as outfielders Gary Matthews and Bobby Dernier missed a significant number of games. After a 35–19 start, the Cubs lost 13 games in a row and finished in fourth place in the National League East with a 77–84 record.

10. “We Either Do or We Don’t, But We Are Going to be Loose”
    In an era when air travel still wasn’t commonplace, it wasn’t the least bit rare for a ballclub to spend several weeks at home and if the baseball gods were smiling, maybe fatten up their record a bit. This is what the 1935 Cubs had in mind, and sorely needed, as they returned to Wrigley Field for a 20-game homestand in third place, trailing St. Louis and the New York Giants. An up-and-down season was on the upswing—a 24–3 stretch in July had seen to that—but the Cubs still trailed the Cardinals by 1½ games and the Giants by a half-game in the National League pennant race.
    Cubs manager Charlie Grimm made the decision to ride his four-man rotation—Larry French, Charlie Root, Lon Warneke, and Bill Lee—and hope the Cubs would still be in contention when they closed the season with five games in St. Louis.
    The first two games against Cincinnati didn’t portend much when the Cubs split a doubleheader against the Reds, but the morning after an off day Grimm called a clubhouse meeting and found just the right words to light a fuse.
    “We’re home for the last long stand and we either do or we don’t,” Grimm said. “But we are going to be loose.”
    Augie Galan was pretty loose that afternoon as he hit two home runs, including a grand slam and drove in six runs, and French went all nine innings in an 8–2 win over Philadelphia. The next day Root went the distance in an 11-inning 3–2 win, and Warneke followed that with his own extra-inning complete game, another 3–2 triumph over the Phillies. Lee’s 4–0 shutout the next day completed the sweep of the Phillies.
    That was pretty much how it went for the next three weeks as the Cubs marched to the World Series with an incredible 21 straight wins. Only the 1916 New York Giants have ever won more consecutive games, but they finished a distance fourth that season. No team in baseball history has ever turned it on like the Cubs did so late in the season with so much