Baseball Way Back: Why in some ways the 1970 Cubs season was even more wrenching than the heartbreak of 1969

As heartbreaking as the 1969 season was to Cubs fans, in some ways the 1970 season was even more wrenching.

That is the view of William S. Bike, author of "The Forgotten 1970 Chicago Cubs: Go and Glow," published by Arcadia Publishing in 2021.

Memories of that team still resonate with me. I remember my dad would take me to the park, where I would watch some of the Cubs greats - Billy Williams, Ron Santo and Ernie Banks - while savoring the delicious Smokie Link. After, my dad and I would stand out in the parking lot to wait for the players to scrawl their names on the little two-page scorecard.

I tended to favor the lesser stars on the team, people like Johnny Callison, Jim Hickman and Al Spangler, a man who looked more like somebody's grandpa than a ballplayer.

Callison figured in one of my favorite memories. My grandfather was supposed to take me fishing one afternoon. I did not look forward to an afternoon of watching him catch bucketloads of fish while I stood by with an inert line.

At the appointed pickup time, he arrived at my apartment at Lincoln and Rockwell in Chicago. But I was in the middle of watching a Cubs game on Channel 9. Callison was at bat, fouling off pitch after pitch. It seemed the at-bat would never end, while my grandfather began honking impatiently. Finally, my patience was rewarded when Callison's bat sent a home run ball flying out of Wrigley Field.

During a recent phone conversation, Bike and I exchanged memories.

"The '70 season was actually my favorite," he said. "They had more interesting characters. They had Milt Pappas. They had Joe Pepitone. But even some of the young guys contributed too."

That year, he said, Manager Leo Durocher, who never liked to use rookies, was forced to deploy such up-and-coming talents as pitchers Jim Colborn and Larry Gura and outfielder Cleo James.

The team also acquired later in the season some interesting players, including former Dodger batting champion Tommy Davis and knuckleball pitching legend Hoyt Wilhelm.

Bike said Pepitone was a particular favorite because of his tendency to go against the grain.

"The Cubs in that era, they liked the guys with the crew cuts, they liked guys who drank milk. They liked the solid citizens. And then suddenly they threw that out the window in the last ditch effort to win with this team, and so they got Joe Pepitone, who got into bar fights and was a drinker and a marijuana smoker and a playboy," he said.

He said some of the minor players also came with some baggage, such as pitchers Juan Pizarro and Steve Barber.

"The bad boy players that they got just went against type for the Cubs," said Bike, who mentioned they even acquired one of the hated 1969 Mets, J.C. Martin.

Bike, who was 13 and living in Logan Square at the time, remembered going to games with his mom on Ladies Day - this was before Wrigley Field had lights.

One of his vivid Ladies Day memories was of a game against the St. Louis Cardinals. "The game went 17 innings. My mom took me, and one of her friends took her son. Of course we stayed for the whole 17 innings. Nobody ever thought of leaving early."

In the 15th inning, the Cubs nearly won the game, loading the bases with one out but failing to score. The Cardinals wound up winning in the 17th, but "being there for every pitch of a 17-inning game was fantastic."

Another vivid memory was of a September game against the Mets before a standing-room-only crowd, with the Cubs one-half game out of first place.

"My mother found a seat on the aisle and I actually was sitting on the steps of the aisle, which is totally illegal." In the bottom of the sixth inning, with the score tied at 3, the unexpected happened. Bill Hands, one of the worst hitting pitchers in the majors, doubled. Durocher, who hated to use the bullpen, was forced to put in Brock Davis as a pinch runner. Davis didn't score, and Durocher wound up emptying his bullpen, using Roberto Rodriguez, Phil Regan, Juan Pizarro and eventually Bob Miller. The Cubs won 7-4, helped by Randy Hundley's two-run single in a three-run seventh.

"The whole atmosphere, it was like a World Series," Bike said.

The Cubs were involved in a three-way race with the Mets and Pirates, but Bike said Durocher squandered the bullpen.

"The starters were great. You had (Ferguson) Jenkins. You had Hands. You had (Ken) Holtzman. And then you had Pappas. That is actually considered one of the top rotations in the major leagues since 1954," he said. "But unfortunately, Leo stuck with the starters. Leo was managing like he managed in the 1940s."

Durocher, he said, kept relying on reliever Phil Regan, even though he was having a bad season, and then in May, the Cubs traded reliever Ted Abernathy to the Cardinals for reserve infielder Phil Gagliano. The following year, Abernathy had a stellar season with the Royals.

"If they had kept Abernathy that year, I absolutely believe they would have been in the World Series," he said.

Bike said he wrote the book after retiring in 2019 from his job in communications with the University of Illinois Chicago. Bike, who also is associate editor of Gazette Chicago and works as a freelance writer, found his freelance assignments drying up after COVID hit and decided to chronicle the 1970 Cubs. He had plenty of reference material from when he collected scrapbooks of newspaper clippings as a kid. He found a publisher in Arcadia, and the rest is history.

He said the 1970 team was an important one in Cubs history.

"It really set the tone for the next few decades," he said. "If the Cubs had won in 1970, nobody could remember '69 as anything other than a fun warm up to the '70 season, when they finally won the pennant. After they didn't win it in '70, after they didn't win it in '69, then the monkey was on their back. Even when they won the division in '84, everybody expected something bad to happen. I think if they had won the Eastern Division, they would have won the pennant, the World Series, and everybody would remember the 1970 Cubs as their favorite team instead of them being the forgotten 1970 Chicago Cubs."