The Ex-Cub Factor
Want to know why the New York Yankees lost the 2024 World Series? Go back through history — behind almost every Series loser is a toxic collection of ex-Chicago Cubs. This year’s Yankees were burdened with three of them — Anthony Rizzo, Mark Leiter Jr. and Marcus Stroman. I’ve written versions of this story many times. Here’s the original, as it appeared October 1981 in the Boston Herald.
According to The Baseball Encyclopedia, 600 men have called themselves Cubs since the team last won a pennant, in 1945. Five of them — outfielders Oscar Gamble and Bobby Murcer, pitchers Dave LaRoche and Rick Reuschel and catcher Barry Foote — are currently New York Yankees.
This seems a trivial observation, but it will spell the Yankees’ doom should they reach the World Series. According to The Ex-Cub Factor, it is all but impossible for a team with three or more ex-Cubs to win the Series. Just how potent is it? Since 1945, twelve teams with three or more ex-Cubs have reached the World Series. Eleven have lost.
No doubt this comes as startling news to the sporting public: Behind every major failure in the sport stands a Chicago Cub.
It’s no secret that Cubs have always been “different” from other major leaguers. In fact, some say that the Cubs are the Moonies of baseball, that the ballclub possesses eerie, bewitching powers over its players.
“It’s hard to put a finger on it,” said former Cubs pitcher Jim Brosnan, in a contemplative moment. “You have to have a certain dullness of mind and spirit to play here. I went through psychoanalysis, and that helped me deal with my Cubness.”
“Cubness” is a term one encounters again and again when speaking with ex-Cubs. It is synonymous with the rankest sort of abject failure, and is a condition chronic among all Cubs, past and present. It is employed here because conventional language, such as “wretched” and “hideous,” does not sufficiently describe a team that has lost thirty-six pennants in a row, and whose fans have resorted to a tee shirt that reads, “Cub Fever. Catch It…And Die.”
“I had to be de-Cubbed,” confessed Pete LaCock, who escaped the team in 1976. “When you play with the Cubs, it’s like playing with heavy shoes on.”
LaCock, like other ex-Cubs, speaks with unaccustomed confidence now that he is free of his former team. He sees himself as a winner. “Leaving the Cubs changed my life in every way,” he said, exhaling.
He is being naive. “You can’t just decide one day you’re not going to be a Cub anymore,” said veteran Cubs broadcaster, Jack Brickhouse. “Cubness is a way of life — something that’s handed down from player to player, from veteran to rookie, from one baseball generation to the next.”
LaCock was traded to Kansas City. But Cubness still trolls him, hiding in remission now, to be disturbed only by his return to the Cubs — or, under special circumstances, by his appearance in a World Series as a member of another team.
Currently, 40 ex-Cubs are playing for other major league teams. But only the Yankees, who have acquired five of them, the Montreal Expos, Cleveland Indians and Cincinnati Reds, who have four each, and the Detroit Tigers, who have signed three ex-Cubs, have been foolish enough to tempt The Ex-Cub Factor.
Of all the Factor’s victims, perhaps the most cautionary tale is that of the 1978 Los Angeles Dodgers.
The Dodgers entered that season carrying three ex-Cubs — outfielder Rick Monday and pitchers Burt Hooton and Mike Garman. They had lost the 1977 World Series with the same three players but, clearly, had learned nothing from the experience. About a month into the season, though, Garman threw a pitch that so galled Dodgers general manager Al Campanis (Dave Kingman clubbed it for a game-winning home run that cleared the bleachers, left the ballpark, crossed the street and landed on the front porch of a house down the block) that Campanis banished Garman to the Expos the following day. The Dodgers, now down to two ex-Cubs, began to pull away from the pack.
But their run was short lived. For reasons that remain unclear, Campanis soon traded for a new ex-Cub — journeyman centerfielder Bill North, who was batting .212 at the time.
Meanwhile, 3,000 miles away, the defending champion New York Yankees were mired in turmoil and languishing in third place, fourteen games behind the Red Sox in the American League East. At about the time the Dodgers acquired North, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner traded away pitcher Ken Holtzman, the team’s sole ex-Cub. The Yankees rallied, and when they reached the World Series they were Cub-free. How could they lose?
The Dodgers took the first two games of the 1978 World Series but then imploded, allowing the Yankees to sweep the next four and win the championship, four games to two. When it was suggested to Campanis, reputedly an astute baseball man, that his team had lost due to The Ex-Cub Factor, the general manager turned apoplectic. “We are interested in good ballplayers, not the teams they played for,” he harrumphed. “You’re telling me superstitions, astrology. We don’t consider things like that.”
Campanis is not alone among baseball executives — an unenlightened species — in doubting The Ex-Cub Factor’s efficacy. Its most recent victim was the 1980 American League champion Kansas City Royals. By late August, the Royals had built an insurmountable lead in their division, and their roster, which included just two ex-Cubs (LaCock and Larry Gura), seemed fixed in place. But something compelled Royals general manager Joe Burke to make a last-minute purchase of ex-Cub outfielder Jose Cardenal from the New York Mets. This fateful move left them infested with three ex-Cubs.
Why they bothered to compete in the World Series, against the Philadelphia Phillies, we’ll never know. Cardenal, who opposed the deal, was aware of the effect he would have on the Royals.
“I was selfish,” he admitted, after the season. “I wanted to stay in New York. I didn’t want to go to Kansas City. So I didn’t tell them about my secret weapon. I said to myself, ‘If I have to leave New York, I want them to go down with me.’”
Down they most certainly went. Nineteen-eighty marked the Phillies’ first and only World Series championship since joining the National League, in 1883.
Since 1945, there has been just one exception to The Ex-Cub Factor — the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, who beat the Yankees in the World Series despite being handicapped by ex-Cubs Smokey Burgess, Gene Baker and Don Hoak.
It seemed an inexplicable occurrence, but Brosnan, a pitcher for the cursed 1961 Cincinnati Reds (ex-Cubs Brosnan, Bill Henry and Dick Gernert) has offered the most plausible explanation:
“Don Hoak played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a very good team, before he was traded to the Cubs, a very bad one,” remembered Brosnan, from his home in suburban Chicago. “It was hard for Hoak to relate. As far as he was concerned, he went right from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh without ever stopping in Chicago.
“He refused to accept that he was a Cub. He had nothing but obscene words for the Cubs and their organization; he even hated [former club owner] P.K. Wrigley.
“Hoak,” he concluded, “is quite possibly the only man who ever conquered his Cubness.”
For that alone, Don Hoak deserves election to the Hall of Fame.
A week after this piece ran, the Yankees played their way into the 1981 World Series — only to lose to the Dodgers in the same, humiliating manner that the Dodgers lost to them in 1978, winning the first two games and then getting swept in four straight. Shortly afterward, I interviewed George Steinbrenner and revealed to him the secret sauce behind his team’s meltdown. His response was as swift as it was emphatic. “If I had thought for one minute that my Cubs had done us in, I would have gotten rid of them immediately,” he harrumphed. “And if we get to the World Series next year, I will get rid of them.” The Yankees owner lived till 2010. He never again fielded a World Series team with three or more ex-Cubs.
