Hendry: Winning 'was a little of everything'
CINCINNATI -- Baseball people are fond of saying that the championship season is a 162-game marathon, not a sprint.
It's also not supposed to resemble a crawl.
But that's the way it felt at many instances this summer.
Still, the nightmare that was the Cubs' first two months is no longer even a memory for Cubs GM Jim Hendry.
"Over 162 games, the team that's supposed to win will win, and it turns out it was us," Hendry said Friday night at Great American Ball Park. "Now, you start over with a clean slate.
"I don't think there's one team you can look at in the National League and say they're the prohibitive favorite to go to the World Series.
"Look at the Cardinals last year. Look at us in '03. The Braves had 103 wins and we had 88, and we beat them. You just don't know."
What you do know is the Cubs have spent nearly $400 million just since November, and their $100 million payroll this season was $30 million more than Milwaukee's.
But just because it took 160 games to win an admittedly weak division, you'll get no apologies from the Cubs.
"You let yourself drift and think about some losses earlier in the year, the hard-to-believe losses in April and May, and you have a chance to be a lot better and maybe have the best record in the league," Hendry said, noting how the leaders have fallen the past few weeks. "But you have a chance now to start over and you have a chance to go far if you do what you're supposed to do.
"What I'm happy about is coming off a terrible year, I really feel like we hired the right guy in Lou Piniella, and I'm glad we got contributions from some high profile free agents and some kids from the system.
"It was a little of everything.
"We knew we had to produce quickly after 66 wins last year. We couldn't think we were going win the division this year if we didn't make major changes and we did.
"And Lou just did a tremendous job managing what we gave him. He played the hot hand and the right guys, and he's just incredible at that job."
Piniella could only do so much, but he couldn't make high-priced guys like Carlos Zambrano and Alfonso Soriano emerge from early-season funks.
Only the players could do that, and both of them played a huge role in Friday's clinching victory.
"That was a 10, that performance tonight, especially after what happened this week in Florida," said Hendry, who waited upstairs for 15 minutes before joining the players in celebration. "They deserved some time alone. I wanted that to be their time. I'm just really proud of them and what they did all season and tonight.
"And, oh yeah, give Greg Maddux a thank you, would you?"
Done.