Free 100 Things Cubs Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die by Jimmy Greenfield Page B

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    Chicago Cubs announcer Harry Caray sits in the broadcast booth on Tuesday, May 19, 1987, at Wrigely Field during the first inning of the Cubs-Reds baseball game. This was Caray’s first day broadcasting that season after recovering from a stroke he suffered during spring training. (AP Photo)

    Along with singing the stretch, Harry brought his trademark “Holy Cow!” with him and a rapturous home run call that went, “It might be! It could be! It is! A home run!” Harry’s commercials for Budweiser turned him into a “Cubs fan and a Bud man,” and he became so popular longtime broadcast partner Steve Stone titled his autobiography, Where’s Harry?
    A statue to Harry Caray greets fans at the corner of Waveland and Sheffield outside Wrigley Field, and there are successful Harry Caray’s steakhouses in Chicago, all filled with photos, memorabilia, and a smiling bronze bust of the legend himself. And make no mistake, he was a legend even to other legends.
    Shortly after Harry’s death in 1998, longtime Cubs fan and actor Bill Murray was reminiscing about the day in 1987 that he spent filling in for Harry in the broadcast booth. Murray was just one of many celebrities who filled in for several weeks while Harry recovered from a stroke.
    “It was sort of like when you come down on Christmas morning and you look and the milk has been drunk and the cookies have been eaten and there’s a bite out of the carrot that you have left for the reindeer,” Murray told the Chicago Tribune . “It was like that when I went into the booth at Wrigley Field and sat in his chair and noticed there was a small refrigerator under the table and there was beer in it. It was like there really was a Santa Claus.
    “And there really was a Harry Caray.”

20. Baseball’s Sad Lexicon: Tinker to Evers to Chance
    These are the saddest of possible words:
    “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
    Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
    Tinker and Evers and Chance.
    Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
    Making a Giant hit into a double—
    Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
    “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”
    — Franklin P. Adams, New York Evening Mail , July 12, 1910
    For the record, they did have first names. It was Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance—the “trio of bear cubs”—who gained baseball immortality together thanks to Chicago native Franklin P. Adams’ simple eight-line poem.
    Now it would stand to reason that this double play combination, the most famous in baseball history, was exceptional, and surely it was. Each man had a long, distinguished playing career, and at one time each managed the Cubs. But has their prowess as a double-play combo been overstated?
    In 1947, Evers published a piece for a college magazine that was reprinted in the Chicago Tribune . He wrote, “We set a mark for double plays that has never been equaled. I don’t recall the exact number, however.”
    As is the case in baseball, you could look it up. And in 1954, a National League publicist, Charles Segar, did just that. A review of the box scores revealed that during their heyday—from 1906 to 1909—Tinker, Evers, and Chance only participated in 54 double plays. Even more incredible, the specific combo of Tinker to Evers to Chance—that’s a 6–4–3, if you’re scoring at home— only turned 29. They never led the National League in double plays in any season.
    So who were these men who rode Franklin P. Adams’ pen all the way to the Baseball Hall of Fame?
    Frank Leroy Chance was undoubtedly the greatest manager in Cubs history and bore a nickname by which newspapers of the day often referred to him: Peerless Leader. It was under their Peerless Leader, who became manager in 1905, that the Cubs won four NL pennants and their only two World Series titles in 1907 and 1908.
    He joined the Cubs in 1898 and spent five unspectacular seasons mainly as a backup catcher before his predecessor as manager, Frank Selee,