Sandberg logical choice as Piniella’s successor in 2011

Ryne Sandberg as Peoria manager in 2007 (image via Wikipedia).

Ryne Sandberg did not call as scheduled the other day. But that’s no problem.

I was going to ask the Cubs Hall of Famer if he felt ready to manage in the major leagues after three seasons in the minors. He might have equivocated. Yet I’ll put words in his mouth — I think he was ready a few years ago when he started his managerial apprenticeship at Class A Peoria. And thus he’s the best choice to succeed Lou Piniella when the latter is expected to retire as Cubs manager after the 2010 season.

There’s a prejudice at work in baseball — if you don’t have mangerial experience in the minors, or have not worked as a coach in the majors, or already had another big-league mangerial job — then you don’t know how to run a team. That’s similar to my journalistic days in which if you worked on a weekly newspaper, you were perceived as not able to handle deadline pressure on a large daily.  Sorry — the weekly scribes churned out far more copy than their well-paid, sometimes-underworked big-city daily counterparts. Good talent is good talent, whether at a keyboard or pacing a dugout.

Did anyone say Greg Maddux needed managerial experience when he retired? I thought Mad Dog, an old Cubs teammate of Sandberg’s, was so astute about baseball he could have managed in the majors by mid-career. He already was calling pitches for his fellow Cubs starters by age 26.

Sandberg’s physical talent was a given. But, like Maddux, the desire, dedication and discipline placed him far above the crowd.  He set the highest standards for himself and expected teammates to follow suit. Block out all distractions and play the game right. No wonder he chided members of the 2004 Cubs for allowing themselves to be agitated by the broadcast commentary of Steve Stone and Chip Caray instead of taking care of the business of winning the National League wild card, a task at which they flopped in shocking fashion in the season’s final week. And it was a given he’d throw barbs at slackers who took shortcuts — including steroids — in his memorable Hall of Fame acceptance speech in 2006.

But Sandberg’s best qualifications are his passion to guide the Cubs to the World Series — a goal he missed as a player — and his institutional memory, a quality that has been lacking throughout the organization as it changed managers, front-office executives and minor-league and scouting staff too often for its own good. As the National League Most Valuable Player of the NL East titlist 1984 Cubs, Sandberg knows exactly what it takes to win in Wrigley Field. He was the centerpiece of a perfect blend of speed and power that led the NL in runs scored. No. 2 hitter Sandberg jump-started the productive lineup with a total of 77 stolen bases teaming with leadoff man Bobby Dernier in the memorable the “Daily Double” one-two punch. Then Gary Matthews served as the equivalent of a second leadoff man batting third, where the Sarge led the NL in walks and on-base percentage, the last Cub to pace these categories.

Later, Sandberg was eyewitness to blending home-grown kids with veterans for the NL East champion 1989 Cubs. He saw the value of pitching in the cramped confines of Wrigley Field. And he remembered all too well how not to put together a team, from the waves of Frankenstein-monster rosters assembled by a succession of mediocre general managers.

None of the recent Cubs managers possessed this kind of historical background. They’ve had to take courses in Cubs 101 the moment they accepted the jobs. Piniella is a Tampa native who resided in Kansas City and New York during his playing days, and did not know much about why the Cubs are what they are when he took over late in 2006. Remember Sweet Lou’s reference to the “Michigan Mile” (really the Magnificent Mile) in his introductory press conference? Except for his break-in years as an Atlanta Braves outfielder, Dusty Baker was a lifelong West Coast guy as a player and manager.  Don Baylor had no previous Cubs connections, having played  on the East and West Coasts before managing in Denver. None was witness to the mondo bizarro twists and turns of Cubs history, nor had a previous emotional involvement in the quest for the World Series Holy Grail.

That same dispassionate stance has hurt the Cubs at the top management level with no real Cubs fan owning the team since William Wrigley, Jr. died in 1932.  The GM’s and team presidents always have come from elsewhere — Dallas Green from Delaware, Jim Frey from Cincinnati, Larry Himes from California, Ed Lynch (a youthful 1969 Mets fan) from New York and Miami, Andy MacPhail from New York and Baltimore, and Jim Hendry from Dunedin, Fla, a Tampa suburb. We’ll give Hendry a pass on this one — he grew up a passionate baseball fan in an area devoid of the sport other than spring training in his younger days. He’d fiddle with his radio dial at night to pick up distant baseball games from Atlanta. Hendry’s become an authentic Cubs fan and his own passion is unquestioned even if his talent and character evaluations are.

Interestingly, Sandberg can be expected to be more emotional than the mellowed-out Piniella, a shocking turn of events. He’s been ejected from a number of games as a minor-league manager, and even was suspended at one point. That’s not the strong, silent Sandberg we knew from his playing days. Asked why he suddenly became volatile, Sandberg responded that he adopted the personality necessary for the job — and he needed to show his players he had their backs.

Nobody will outwork Sandberg the manager. When I watched him put his Peoria team through its paces late in the 2007 season at Elfstrom Stadium in Geneva, Ill., he had a regimen that took advantage of every minute. He kept  gabbing with the players to a bare minimum as he threw batting practice for half an hour, then switched to hitting ground balls from both sides of the batting cage.

Only after nearly an hour did Sandberg take a two-minute water break in the dugout. Then it was back to work helping groom possible future Cubs. He attempted to teach his young players the value of a pre-game routine and work habits that carried over into the game itself — and surely you’d expect the same philosophy at the big-league level.

Such a routine permitted just a 10-minute interview with me, not a second more. I started  with some small talk. “C’mon, the clock’s running,” Sandberg said, and then proceeded to provide thoughtful and insightful answers to questions about his managerial style.

That latter quaility will help as a big-league manager, where handling the media and, in turn, communicating to the fans is a top job requirement.  The verbally-reticent Sandberg of his playing days is consigned to memory. Sandberg admitted that as he passed into middle age, his personality loosened in a natural progression of life. His second wife, Margaret, a wonderful, vivacious person, has been key in opening him up

If there’s one mistake Sandberg could be making, it’s in an apparent campaign for the Cubs job. It’s considered bad form to talk about a desire to manage a specific team when it already has a sitting manager possessing a contract for next season. His recent publicity tour that somehow skipped here could rub someone in the front office the wrong way.

However, I can’t taken Sandberg to task very much. He’s merely saying what everyone was thinking anyway.