By Paul Sullivan
The Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
December 3, 2010
Ron Santo (L) and Billy Williams at Cubs' spring training in 1971. (Tribune archive photo)Legendary Chicago Cubs player and broadcaster Ron Santo died Thursday night in Arizona. He was 70.
Friends of Santo's family said the North Side icon lapsed into a coma on Wednesday before dying Thursday. Santo died of complications from bladder cancer, WGN-AM 720 reported.
The former Cubs third baseman had overcome several debilitating injuries, including the amputation of both legs, to continue to work as a Cubs analyst on WGN, the team's flagship radio broadcast. He was expected to return for the 2011 season.
Despite ongoing health problems, including a lifelong battle with diabetes, Santo never considered giving up his work alongside play-by-play man Pat Hughes. He missed several road trips in 2010 but insisted he would return.
"What else am I going to do?" Santo said during this past season. "Doing the Cubs games is like therapy for me."
Santo was the quintessential Cubs fan and made no apologies for his on-air cheerleading or his utter frustration over a Cub's misplay.
On many occasions, when Santo was upset with the way things were going for the team, a simple grunt sufficed.
"I'm a fan," he explained last summer. "I can't plan what I do. I get embarrassed sometimes when I hear what I said, like, 'Oh, no, what's going on?' But it's an emotion.
"This is being a Cub fan."
Santo never witnessed his longtime goal of election to the Baseball Hall of Fame despite career numbers that mark him as one of baseball's all-time great third basemen. He finished with a .277 average over 15 major league seasons, with 342 home runs and 1,331 runs batted in.
Though Santo came close to Cooperstown enshrinement in the last decade in voting by the Veterans Committee, he always fell short. In 2007, Santo received 39 of the 48 votes necessary to reach the 75 percent threshold of the living 64 Hall of Famers to cast a ballot. His 61 percent lead all candidates and no one was elected to the Hall.
It was the fourth straight time the Veterans Committee had failed to elect a member, leaving Santo frustrated.
"I thought it was going to be harder to deal with, but it wasn't," he said that day. "I'm just kind of fed up with it. I figure, 'Hey, it's not in the cards.' But I don't want to go through this every two years. It's ridiculous."
Ron Santo and Glenn Beckert with their Gold Glove awards in 1968. (Tribune archive photo).Santo was up for the Hall of Fame on 19 occasions, and first appeared on the Veterans Committee ballot in 2003. He got his hopes up on every occasion.
"Everybody felt this was my year," he said after the last vote in December 2008. "I felt it. I thought it was gonna happen, and when it didn't. ... What really upset me was nobody got in again.
"It just doesn't make sense."
Santo was consistent that he did not want to make a posthumous entrance into the Hall of Fame. After being denied so many times, he was resigned to what is now the only possibility.
"(Induction) wasn't going to change my life," he said. "I'm OK. But I know I've earned it."
Santo was beloved by many Cubs fans and players alike. When he was ill during the 2003 playoffs and couldn't travel with the team, pitcher Kerry Wood hung a No. 10 Santo jersey in the Cubs dugout in Atlanta. The Cubs won Game 5 of the division series to capture their first postseason series since 1945. Wood made an emotional call to Santo afterward, dedicating the game to him.
Wood once made a case for Santo's election to the Hall of Game in an article in ESPN the Magazine, writing: "When it happens, and if the schedule lets us, I'm going to be there for the ceremony. He's the epitome of Chicago baseball. He's still part of the team. He lives and dies with it. In fact, I think we've put him in the hospital a few times. He should get in just for that."
Santo got a laugh from Woods' words and denied the Cubs' play had ever put him in a hospital.
Santo began his major league career with the Cubs in 1960, and spent one season with the White Sox in 1974. He earned National League Gold Glove awards five straight seasons from 1964 to 1968 and was a nine-time NL All-Star. He was one of the leaders of the 1969 team that blew the division lead to the New York Mets, a season indelibly etched in Cubs' history.
Santo never forgot the hurt and hated going to New York thereafter. Before one of his final Cubs-Mets games as a WGN broadcaster in Shea Stadium in 2007, Santo told the Tribune: "I would come back here personally to blow it up. I'd pay my own way. Maybe even just to watch it."
Long after his playing career ended, Santo wound up as a Cubs analyst on WGN-AM 720 in 1990. He was teamed with Hughes in 1996. Santo epitomized the long-suffering Cubs fan, frequently grousing about the play on the field when things went bad.
(Tribune photo by Phil Velasquez / August 2, 2007)Ron Santo sings a round of "Take me out to the ball game" in the 7th inning stretch of the Cubs vs Phillies game at Wrigley Field.
His most famous call was a simple two-word utterance -- "Oh no!" -- when outfielder Brant Brown dropped a fly ball with two outs and the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth of a crucial game in Milwaukee in the final week of the 1998 season.
He also suffered through incidents along the way that could seemingly happen only to Ron Santo.
His toupee caught fire in the Shea Stadium press box in New York on Opening Day 2003 after he got too close to an overhead space heater. And last spring in Mesa, Ariz., Santo lost his front tooth while biting into a piece of pizza.
Though Santo never made the Hall of Fame, his number was retired by the Cubs. He said that was equivalent to being inducted in Cooperstown. Being a Cub, and playing at Wrigley Field, meant the world to Santo.
"When I got here, two years after my senior year, I'm walking out of the corner clubhouse with Ernie Banks and there's nobody in the stands, and the feeling I had was unbelievable -- walking with Ernie and walking on that grass," he said. "I felt like I was walking on air. There was an electricity and an atmosphere that I'd never experienced in my life. Any ballplayer that's ever played here can tell you about that great atmosphere, and anybody who's come here to watch a game feels the exact same way."
psullivan@tribune.com
Remembering Ron Santo
By Phil Rogers
The Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
December 3, 2010
Santo carries his offensive weapons during spring training in 1965. (UPI)Go ahead, Ronnie.
Click your heels again. Follow a muttered, "Oh, no!'' with stony silence to describe a play that was bungled in true Cub fashion. Tell us what you really think about New York.
Ron Santo is entering a new league, the highest level of all. And there he will never again be betrayed by his passion, his perseverance, his enormous love of life, the joy he found amid more pain and heartache than any dozen men should have to endure.
Bladder cancer reportedly claimed the Cubs' greatest cheerleader, who had battled diabetes for most of his life. He slipped into a coma on Wednesday and died Thursday in Arizona. He was 70, going on 17.
If these things could be measured like runs crossing the plate, the finally tally for Santo would be something like this: Delight 5,410, Bitterness 0.
Well, OK, maybe Bitterness 1.
Santo was never quite sure where to direct his disappointment, but he knew that somebody had screwed him out of his spot in baseball's Hall of Fame, the one he should have reveled in alongside teammates Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Fergie Jenkins. It was only natural that slight would trouble him as he celebrated a game that he had loved, even as it changed from small-time enterprise into a $7-billion corporation, complete with phonies and drug cheats, like the two he watched match each other home run for eye-popping home run in the summer of 1998.
From Santo's mouth to your ear, seldom was heard a discouraging word, and that's not a bad measure of the man. No matter the heartbreak, no matter the disappointment, no matter the physical challenge, No. 10 always took comfort in one of the greatest truths about baseball: Tomorrow there's another game.
For generations of Chicagoans, Santo was a reminder that light follows darkness. He wasn't the greatest Cub - that distinction belongs to Banks or Greg Maddux - but he was most assuredly the most beloved Cub, and it would have been wondrous to see him celebrate a championship by the team he joined as a 20-year-old in 1960.
You could almost touch that moment in 2003, but Mark Prior and Kerry Wood couldn't close the deal, and not even Lou Piniella and a $144-million payroll could bring back the magic that died in Game 6. No one was more of a comforter for Prior, Wood and Piniella than Santo, who was installed as the team's captain when Banks and Williams were also in the lineup, and who never really stopped serving. He merely exchanged his bat and glove for a microphone.
Cubs great Ron Santo clicks his heels en route to the locker room after his ninth-inning sacrifice fly gave Chicago a 5-4 win over Pittsburgh in 1969. (AP)In an era before insulin pumps and other innovations of modern medicine, Santo played 15 seasons while battling diabetes, the disease that would eventually claim both his legs before his life. He was scared stiff that it would take him off the field one day, yet he played 2,243 big-league games (all but the last 117 for the Cubs), all the while concealing his illness. He hit .277 with 342 home runs and 1,331 runs batted in. He won five straight Gold Gloves in the 1960s and played in nine All-Star Games.
Bill James, baseball's leading numbers guy, has ranked Santo as the sixth best third baseman of all time, behind only Mike Schmidt, George Brett, Eddie Mathews, Wade Boggs and Home Run Baker. In his book The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, he writes that Santo was a better player than most of the third basemen in the Hall of Fame, even though fewer third basemen have been elected to the Hall than at any other position. He concludes his piece saying that "Ron Santo towers far above the real standard for the real Hall of Fame.''
Santo, in my opinion, was excluded for three reasons: His career totals simply weren't gaudy enough; he was placed back onto the Baseball Writers Association of America ballot after being off it for four years, which unintentionally prevented him from ever coming before the old Veterans Committee, and he alienated New York-based BBWAA voters and his fellow players (who would comprise the new Veterans Committee) by clicking his heels after victories at Wrigley Field in the summer of 1969.
Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan recently told me that Santo's heel-clicking rubbed the Mets the wrong way as they reeled in the Cubs. "We didn't think much of that,'' Ryan said last summer. "In those days, people just didn't do those kind of things.''
But Santo wasn't trying to attract attention. He was simply doing what came naturally when overjoyed. The first time he did it, he remembered, was after a Jim Hickman home run capping a four-run, ninth-inning rally against Montreal on June 22, with the Cubs on top of the baseball world.
"I was always an emotional player,'' Santo once said. "I carried my emotions on my sleeve. I ran down the left-field line to our clubhouse and didn't realize I had clicked my heels. That night it was all over television. The next day, when I got to the ballpark, Leo Durocher called [me into his office for] a meeting. He says, 'Can you click your heels again? We ought to make that our victory kick, but only at home when we win.'
"So, from that moment on, when we won at home, I would run down toward our clubhouse doing it. The fans really got into it. I actually got telephone calls from friends on other teams saying, 'Our pitchers don't like that.' My response to them was, 'Too bad.' I ended up getting knocked down a lot, but it didn't matter.''
Not a bad epitaph, is it?
Ron Santo a player unlike any other
BY TONI GINNETTI
Staff Reporter
Chicago Sun-Times
http://www.suntimes.com/index.html
December 3, 2010
To his legions of fans, Ron Santo was more than a Hall of Fame baseball player--even though their beloved Chicago Cubs third baseman was always denied entry.Even objective baseball observers acknowledged Santo to be "the best player not in the Hall,’’ his career statistics and accomplishments on par with some of the eight third basemen who were enshrined at the time he played--but who had the World Series credentials Santo’s Cubs were denied.
But what Santo had that set him apart from every other position player in the game’s history was a Hall of Fame-type career achieved despite the life-threatening disease of diabetes. No one had ever played the game on a daily basis as an insulin-dependent diabetic.
And almost no one knew he did it.
At a time when living with the disease was far more risky to control for even a layman, Santo managed to not only doctor his life daily but hide the truth from all around him through a 15-year career in which he almost never missed a game.
"I lockered right beside him for years, and I never knew he had this disease,’’ teammate, friend and Hall-of-Famer Ernie Banks wrote in the forward to "Few And Chosen,’’ one of several books Santo co-authored. "I remember once after I found out about Ronnie’s diabetes, I mentioned to him that I had a friend who had recently found out she was a diabetic. He told me to call her, and he got on the phone and talked to her and told her what she had to do.
"This was someone he didn’t even know, but he took the time to counsel her, and his talk encouraged her and lifted her spirits.’’
It was something Santo did countless times for countless unknown faces whose only bond with him was the disease. But he treated each as a kindred spirit, and for children afflicted, as a hero to look up to in more ways than one.
"Even before the public disclosure [in 1973-check] that I was a diabetic, I made private visits to local hospitals to visit people with diabetes,’’ Santo wrote in his 1993 biography "For Love of Ivy.’’ "Whenever possible, I try to make a personal call to the children, and I try to relate my experiences. I try to alleviate their fears associated with diabetes.
"Unless you have been young and ill with such a disease, you can’t appreciate the apprehension that can exists in the mind of a youngster in this condition. The stories of courage of the young people I’ve met could fill a book in itself. The children who have juvenile diabetes have a special place in my heart.’’
Though baseball’s Hall of Fame eluded him, Santo’s greater legacy would come from that love and his personal quest to find the cure for them he would never have in his own lifetime.
His annual Ron Santo Walk to Cure Diabetes has raised more than $40 million alone since its inception 1979, though Santo was constantly raising more through golf outings, appearances, donated royalties and appearances.
In 2004, his son Jeff, an independent film maker, aided his father’s charity by donating a major portion of the proceeds from a movie about his father’s life, "This Old Cub,’’ to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. But in making the film, he also gave a gift to his dad, to countless fans who had never seen him play.
The film focused not only on memories of his career, but on the rigors of going through daily life with seeming normalcy despite the extraordinary debility of having both legs amputated caused by diabetes.
It showed, too, the heartbreak Santo felt when he was first rejected by the Hall of Fame veterans committee for induction into Cooperstown, a snub that would come twice more.
But that same season, Santo was embraced in a different way that he later would say meant as much--his No. 10 retired by the Cubs to fly daily at Wrigley Field beside the numbers of his former teammates, Banks (14) and Billy Williams (26), both members of the Hall.
"This is my Hall of Fame,’’ Santo said on Sept. 28, 2003, during Wrigley Field ceremonies that equaled those the team would put on for its later inductee, Ryne Sandberg.
Pure emotion may have been part of the reason for the Cubs’ decision to retire Santo’s number the first time the veterans committee denied him entry, but the facts of his career trumped sentimentality.
On Thursday, the franchise icon died at the age of 70, according to multiple reports.
*******
The best-known number about the Cubs is the team’s near-100 years without a World Series championship.
The other near-100 number the team’s faithful know well is this: 99 different players tried to take over third base in the 30 years after he left the team in 1973.
It was Santo’s position for 15 seasons, 14 of them on the North Side before he accepted a trade to the South Side White Sox in 1974. That move was historic for all of baseball as well as the city, because it instituted what became known as "the Santo rule’’ allowing any player with 10 years experience and five years with the same team to have a say in a trade.
When he left the Cubs, Santo had established historic numbers for the franchise:--he hit 337 of his career 342 home runs, ranking fourth all-time behind Sammy Sosa, Banks and Williams;
--he drove in 1,290 runs as a Cub and 1,331 in his career and had more than 2,243 career hits;
--he won five consecutive Gold Gloves at his position from 1964-1969 and was selected to nine National League All-Star teams;
--he led the National League in triples in 1964 with 13 and hit .277 overall in his career;
--in 2,130 games as a third baseman he handled 4,581 chances and committed only 317 errors, a .954 fielding average;
--he established major league records for most years leading the league in assists by a third baseman (7) and the most consecutive years of leading the league in assists by a third baseman, later broken by Brooks Robinson, and for most years leading the league in chances (9);
--he set National League records for assists in a season by a third baseman, later broken by Mike Schmidt; most double plays by a third baseman in a career and most chances accepted;
--in 1966, he set a then franchise record by hitting in 28 consecutive games. The streak was threatened at 26 when Santo was hit in the face with a pitch from New York Mets righthander Jack Fisher. He suffered a broken cheekbone and missed almost two weeks. When he returned, he added two more games to the streak and a new piece of equipment to baseball’s arsenal--a helmet ear flap that became standard ever since.
It also marked one of the few times Santo missed playing time on the disabled list for any reason.
In 14 seasons with the Cubs, Santo played in every game or all but one or two seven times, another record.
His durability would have been laudable under normal circumstances, but playing as an insulin-dependent diabetic at a time when monitoring the disease was far more unpredictable, Santo’s career was as remarkable as it was miraculous.
*****
Santo was born Feb. 25, 1940 in Seattle, one of two children whose father left the family when Santo was six. His parents divorced a year later.
"I’m sure the lack of paternal guidance had an impact on my behavior, which wasn’t always great,’’ Santo wrote in his biography. "I got into a lot of trouble.
"My mother wasn’t a big woman, but she could really deck me. Which she did. She had become both mother and father to us, which couldn’t have been easy. Determined to straighten me out, she sent me to a parochial school, even though the high cost made things tight at home.
"Sports saved me,’’ he wrote. "The nuns at the school were pretty good athletes--no Babe Ruths but good enough--and we had a coach named Vito. Between school and the Little League, I was spending a lot of time learning about competitive athletics.’’
Santo’s mother, Vivian, remarried several years later while her son blossomed as a multi-sport athlete. Baseball remained his favorite sport, though. "Just to be near it, I got a job at the stadium where the Class AAA Rainiers played, and I did it all--grounds crew, mowing the lawn, ushering in the bleachers,’’ Santo wrote.
As a high school senior, Santo was chosen to play in the Hearst All-Star game in New York’s Polo Grounds in 1958. He was a catcher then, and despite a less than stellar game, scouts sought him out. A Yankees scout asked him to stay several days to work out in Yankee Stadium while a Cleveland Indians scout asked him to stop in Ohio to work out before returning home.
Santo instead went home to find his mother and stepfather, John Constantino, already swamped with calls from scouts for all 16 major league teams. He had offers of a $50,000 bonus to sign with the Indians, and $80,000 to sign with the Cincinnati Reds. "It was tempting,’’ Santo wrote. "I had grown up watching those Class AAA Rainiers, the farm club for the Reds. I knew the team. I had shined their shoes. I even had a tryout with the team when the big league Reds came to town to play their minor league counterparts in an exhibition game.’’
For some reason, Santo held off, waiting for a call from the last major league club to make an offer--the Cubs."I had become pretty friendly with the Cubs scout, Dave Kosher, and I was confident he was going to come through,’’ Santo wrote.
But when Kosher did call, it was with bad news. "I know what you’ve been offered. We can’t even come close to your lowest offer,’’ he told Santo. "Bring [head scout Hard Rock Johnson] over anyway,’’ Santo answered.
The negotiations were blunt. "We know what you’ve been offered and we’re offering $20,000,’’ Johnson told Santo and his stepfather. "There’s no way you’re every going to be a third baseman in the major leagues, son,’’ he said. "Maybe you can make it as a catcher.’’
Santo drove an apologetic Kosher home, having already secretly made up his mind. ``Even though I grew up watching the Reds system, I had an affinity for the Cubs. I loved to watch Ernie Banks, and I was intrigued by the incredibly long dry spell they had had since their last championship,’’ Santo wrote. "And I believed I had a better chance of making it to the majors with the Cubs since they weren’t as rich in the talent department.’’
Santo’s stepfather left the decision to him. "My mind was made up. I was signing with the Cubs. To me, $20,000 was the same as $50,000 or $80,000. It was all a lot of money,’’ he wrote.
All the money in the world couldn’t buy a reprieve from the life sentence Santo learned of soon after he signed.
During his annual physical before leaving for his first minor league camp, doctors found sugar in Santo’s urine.
At 18, Santo was diagnosed with Type 1 juvenile diabetes, the most serious and insulin-dependent form of the disease.
"It was unbelievable,’’ he wrote. "I work up that morning a happy, healthy teenager, and suddenly I had a disease I had never heard of. I didn’t have the common symptoms--fatigue, frequent urination, weight loss, constant thirst--but I was a diabetic. And no one could tell me whether I could play baseball again.’’
What medicine could predict was more dire.
Santo took it upon himself to learn all he could about the disease, "yet what I was reading wasn’t making me any less afraid,’’ he wrote.
" 'The life expectancy of a juvenile diabetic is 25 years,’ I read. I was 18. 'It is the number one cause of blindness, the number two cause of kidney failure, and number three cause of hardened arteries.’ I stopped reading. I couldn’t absorb the horror.’’
Santo found a clinic in Seattle offering a two-week course on the disease and individual assessments for patient treatment. The young Santo tried to convince himself he could control his condition through exercise. But during a class, a woman sitting next to Santo suddenly collapsed into a coma.
Santo thought she needed only insulin--then learned the woman already was on insulin.
"Are you telling me I could be playing third base at Wrigley Field and just pass out?’’ he asked the doctors.
"You’ll have symptoms first, and you have to learn what they are,’’ he was told.
Santo kept his secret from the Cubs, but his personal vow to avoid insulin through diet and exercise lasted only a few years. In 1961, his second year in the majors, Santo’s condition reached the life-or-death point of needing insulin. He worked with a doctor in the off season to learn the danger signs and symptoms of impending collapse from low blood sugar, how to take daily insulin injections and to keep candy with him at all times.
He told only team physician, Dr. Jacob Suker, swearing him to secrecy.
Santo’s fear was that the disease might be used against him should he go into slumps--or even an excuse to release him.
Not until 1971 when the Cubs held a day in his honor on Aug. 28 did Santo make public his secret. By then he was firmly entrenched as a star--though his Cub teams kept having stardom slip from their grasp.
*****
Diabetes was his burden, but his greater pain was was the season of 1969.
The Cubs, under third-year manager Leo Durocher, were riding high from opening day when Willie Smith’s pinch hit home run in the 10th inning won a game over the Philadelphia Phillies.
The first-place Cubs featured three future Hall of Famers in Banks, Williams and pitcher Ferguson Jenkins, a "million dollar infield’’ of All-Stars including shortstop Don Kessinger, second baseman Glen Beckert and Santo, a hard-nosed catcher in Randy Hundley and a towel-waving cheerleader of a closer in Dick Selma.
A black cat crosses the path of Chicago Cubs player Ron Santo as he waits his turn at bat in a crucial game against the New York Mets. The Cubs went on to lose this game and the pennant after having a 9 game lead. The Mets went on to win the 1969 World Series.IMAGE:© Bettmann/CORBIS, September 9, 1969
"People weren’t talking politics, war or economics the summer of 1969 in Chicago,’’ wrote Santo, whose joy in winning led to a heel-clicking frolic after victories. "They were talking about the Chicago Cubs.
"We were treated like rock stars. We would have to fight through the crowds just to get to our cars--three hours after the game. Some athletes will tell you they don’t care for that kind of adulation. We ate it up. We loved the fans. They loved us.’’
The fans’ love affair with Santo never receded since then--even in the heartbreaking end to that season when the New York Mets overtook the Cubs in September and went on to win the World Series.
But despite the adulation, team captain Santo also was a lightning rod for all emotions Cub. At mid-season, when the team lost a crucial series to the Mets in New York, a young rookie outfielder, Don Young, took the brunt of criticism from Durocher for two dropped fly balls.
But Santo was the one reporters went to for comment when Young quickly left afterward. "It’s like anybody as a rookie,’’ Santo said. "Sometimes you put your head between your legs. I’ve done it as a player. Those things happen.’’
The ensuing stories said Santo blamed Young for the loss, and some columnists vilified him. He was booed at Wrigley when the team returned home--but the worst came privately in letters threatening him and his family.
One threat kept coming regularly, and it led to Santo and his family getting 24-hour police protection for a time.
At the end of the 1970 season, a series of threatening calls said Santo would be the target of a sniper in Shea Stadium. The threats were deemed serious enough that the FBI assigned Santo protection on the trip. When security wires to Shea were found to be cut the day of the alleged assault, Santo was sent home with the security detail.
The threats eventually stopped, but not before the Santo family had spent a year in police protection.
The Cubs finished with 92 victories in 1969--eight games behind the Mets.
"How did they win? How did they come from eight back and beat us and then beat the Orioles [in the World Series]? That’s a good question. I wish I knew,’’ Santo wrote.
******
Santo spent 14 years in a Cubs uniform--but he retired from baseball as a White Sox.
"The thought that I would end my career with any team other than the Cubs was foreign to me,’’ he wrote. But it happened after the 1973 season as the Cubs dismantled the last remnants of the 1969 club.
Cubs general manager John Holland actually wanted to trade Santo to the California Angels as part of a five-player deal. But Santo qualified for a new reserve clause right to reject the move. He didn’t want to leave Chicago, where he had established his personal life and outside businesses.
With the team set on trading him, Santo went to the South Side on Dec. 11, 1973 in exchange for pitchers Ken Frailing, Jim Kremmel, Steve Stone and catcher Steve Swisher.
Santo spent one season with the Sox, playing some second base and designated hitter. His unhappiness was reflected in a .221 average, five home runs and 41 RBI in 117 games. Despite a two-year guaranteed contract, Santo told Sox GM John Allyn he would retire at season’s end, foregoing the $130,000 left on his contract.
He spent the next 15 years as a businessman in Chicago, his only baseball ties as a fan.
In 1989, the Cubs reached the playoffs, and Santo was invited to throw out the first pitch before one of the games. It was the first time he had been back to the field since his trade, and it led to his return.
The next season, Santo auditioned for and was accepted to fill a spot in the team’s revamped WGN-AM radio booth. He joined Bob Brenly and Thom Brennaman and worked with both until 1991 when Brenly went back to coaching. Santo and Brennaman were partners until 1996, Brennaman leaving for Arizona and Santo getting a new partner in Pat Hughes.
Santo’s broadcast career rekindled his bond with the Cubs and fans, his analysis often colored with the rooting interests he couldn’t always temper.
It was characterized most in a September, 1998 game when Cubs outfielder Brant Brown dropped a fly ball in a game against the Milwaukee Brewers, leading to a ninth inning Brewers come from behind victory,
"Oh, no!!’’ Santo yelled into the microphone, the sentiment of most who were listening.
But Santo’s broadcast career, like his playing career, was good enough to earn him nomination as one of ten finalists for the 2005 Ford C. Frick Award, the Hall of Fame’s highest broadcast honor.
Chicago Cubs manager Lou Piniella talks with former Cub Ron Santo, now a radio analyst, in the dugout after Piniella announced he will retire from coaching at the end of this season, before the Cubs' baseball game against the Houston Astros on Tuesday, July 20, 2010, in Chicago. (AP)As he did through his career, Santo continued dealing with the effects of diabetes. His health issues included laser eye surgeries, cardiac bypass surgery in 1999 and a series of right foot operations in 2001 trying to avoid amputation. But Santo eventually lost his right leg below the knee in December, 2001. A year later, his left leg also was amputated.
Despite his handicaps, he continued his broadcasting duties almost without interruption. But Santo did miss the Cubs’ post-season of 2003 when he was diagnosed with bladder cancer requiring another surgery.
His medical woes never dampened his spirits, and never sidetracked his on-going fundraising work to find a cure for diabetes.
Ryne Sandberg, whose No. 23 was retired by the Cubs after his Hall of Fame induction in 2005, considered Santo a Cubs teammate though they played decades apart.
"My one regret is that I never got to play alongside Ron, and I never got to see him play,’’ Sandberg wrote in an introduction to "Few And Chosen.’’ "But I have looked at the back of his baseball card and his numbers were tremendous--and to think he did all that, playing 15 years in the major leagues while battling diabetes throughout his career.’’
Hall of Fame catcher Johnny Bench, who became a close friend, marveled at Santo’s achievements in the face of his disease.
"Many might not have been up to the task. Ron was,’’ Bench wrote in a foreword to Santo’s autobiography. "The Big Red Machine of the 1970s would have had a very nice spot in their lineup for Ron Santo. We tried out many different people at third base, and we were always seemingly looking for 'a Ron Santo type.’ If we had been lucky enough to obtain Ron Santo from the Cubs, I don’t know how many more games we would have won.’’
But there was only one team for Santo, his year with the Sox aside.
"Ronnie had all the qualities you look for in someone you would want to carry the name 'Mr. Cub,’ ‘’ Banks once wrote. "As a player, he was a great competitor, a hard worker and a leader. He had intensity. He was determined and ambitious. He wanted to win more than anybody I’ve ever known.
"Ronnie has handled his own ailment like the true champion he is,’’ Banks continued. "He is the most courageous person I’ve ever been around. I’m inspired by him and by his spirit. He is one of my idols, one of my heroes. I love Ron Santo.’’
Ron Santo died a thousand deaths with his Cubs
BY RICK MORRISSEY
rmorrissey@suntimes.com
Chicago Sun-Times
December 3, 2010
Cubs first baseman Ernie Banks restrains teammate Ron Santo as Santo tries to go after a heckling spectator in the stands during a spring training game in Scottsdale, Ariz., in March 1970. Santo stayed in the game and the spectator was removed.People would ask me whether I knew Ron Santo, and my response was always the same: “Yes, and so do you.’’
The man who cheered and groaned on the radio, who urged and ached and pleaded, who died a thousand deaths with his Cubs – that was Ron Santo. What you heard in that raspy voice was everything there was to him. He was pure, uncut fervor.
He died one last time Thursday night, and no, he never did get the things he wanted so badly: a Cubs’ World Series title and a bust in Cooperstown, N.Y. But what a good life he led, 70 years’ worth, and he knew it.
You can say his love for the Cubs went unrequited, that the team let him down season after season, often in cruel fashion. But he wasn’t alone; there were thousands and thousands of fans who gladly stayed in the same co-dependent relationship with the franchise. He spoke for them.
His humanity was always on display, and that’s why so many of us liked him. His diabetes would throw him a setback, and he’d endure. He’d get his hopes up for making the Hall of Fame, and he’d be crushed when he didn’t get enough votes. A couple days later, he’d emerge with a new layer of scar tissue and a renewed appreciation of the wonderful life he was leading.
Then he’d get back to bleeding over the Cubs. Nobody gave as much blood as this guy did.
He deserved to be in the Hall, but I always wondered if it was better that he didn’t get inducted. He taught us perseverance. It was OK to really, really want something and to show it publicly. How many of us live our lives behind masks? Here was a man unafraid to show us everything he was feeling.
Former Chicago Cub third baseman Ron Santo is joined by former teammates Ernie Banks (l) and Billy Williams (r) during a retirement ceremony for Santo's uniform number 10 before a game against the Pittsburgh Pirates on September 28, 2003 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. (Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)Santo was much more popular as a WGN radio broadcaster than he was as a player. When he was playing, the Cubs weren’t the cultural phenomenon they are now. Wrigley Field-as-theme-park has been a bigger curse than any billy goat: The team put more emphasis on the entertainment value of the franchise than on the product on the field. So the ballpark became the star. So did Harry Caray. And so did Santo.
It wasn’t coincidence that the first statue outside Wrigley was Caray’s, not Ernie Banks’. Santo deserves one, too, but how does a sculptor capture the spirit of the man who screamed “Nooooooooooooo” when Brant Brown dropped that routine fly ball in 1998? Maybe something along the lines of “The Scream’’ by Edvard Munch.
That was the essence of Ronnie, wasn’t it? He didn’t need to rip players. You didn’t have to read into anything he was saying. More so than the actual words, his tone said it all. “Gosh!” or “Jeez!’’ was followed by unintelligible grumbling and then, finally, deep depression. He didn’t live and breathe Cubs. He radiated Cubs.
Whenever one of the players said, “Nobody feels worse about what’s going than we do,’’ he was wrong. The guy up in the booth was, at that very moment, opening another vein. And when the Cubs were in the middle of a rally, Santo was in the middle of a religious experience.
Hardcore baseball fans, the ones who want strategy and numbers from their announcers, didn’t have much patience with Santo. He wasn’t about that. He was about emotion.
It hurts to know that the byplay between Santo and play-by-play man Pat Hughes is gone. Santo would go off on a tangent, and Hughes would play him like a violin.
Santo hated Shea Stadium with a passion, thanks to the Cubs’ collapse in 1969. It didn’t help that his toupee once caught fire in the visiting club’s broadcast booth. There might not have been a happier person on earth than Santo when Shea was demolished in 2009. There might not have been a happier play-by-play announcer than Hughes when that rug started smoking. He had one more thing to kid his partner about on the air.
Santo didn’t measure his life in wins and losses, which is a good thing because he wouldn’t have lived past ’69 if he had. He measured his life in the blessings that he had been given: his family, his health and his Cubs.
He appreciated his fans too. He never took them for granted. In his mind, he was the same as they were. You could see it in how he treated them. That was his gift. He was as loyal as a guide dog.
He lived with his diabetes and fought it, but he didn’t make many concessions to the disease. You couldn’t help but look at his blue jeans when he sat down and see the outline of the prostheses he wore. You also couldn’t help but notice he didn’t give them much of a thought.
He played 14 years with the Cubs and played a mean third base. People forget that Santo wasn’t always a beloved character in Chicago. Other players viewed him as a hot dog. They didn’t like when he jumped and clicked his heels after a victory. During a 1969 dustup, Santo had his hands around manager Leo Durocher’s neck before other players separated the two.
But he was a competitor with talent, the best kind of competitor.
The Cubs retired his number in 2003, and it flaps proudly on the left-field foul pole at Wrigley.
Goodbye, No. 10. We knew you well.
The Greatest Player Not in the Hall
By Joe Posnanski
http://joeposnanski.si.com/
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/
December 3, 2010
Ron Santo poses with his son, Jeff, in the press box before a Cubs spring training game in Phoenix. Jeff's documentary -- This Old Cub -- tells the story of his father's secret life as a diabetic athlete.(2004)There is something about the Baseball Hall of Fame — all Halls of Fame, really — that people don’t really like talking about. Somebody has to the best player not in it. There’s no way around this. It can be a big Hall of Fame or a small one. It can be an inclusive Hall of Fame or one as exclusive at Augusta National. Wherever you draw your line of greatness, there are remarkable people left outside.
For many years, Ron Santo’s identity was wrapped up in being left outside. He was, simply, the greatest player not in the Baseball Hall of Fame. This is not to say that he was a better baseball player than Dick Allen or Minnie Minoso or Bert Blyleven or Ken Boyer or numerous other terrific players who have not yet been elected and inducted. That is a matter opinion. This is not to say he was a more egregious oversight than any of these players or others. That, too, is opinion.
Santo played his entire career in Chicago and later became a Cubs broadcaster. (AP)
What I mean is that Santo carried the title as Greatest Non-Hall of Famer. Nobody else really wanted it. Every year, his name came up for the Hall of Fame — is this finally the year? And every year, he fell short. Fifteen times he was on the Baseball Writers ballot and needed 75% to be elected. He never once got even 50% of the vote. Three times he received the most votes from the Veteran’s Committee, but never once got the percentage he needed to qualify for the Hall of Fame. He handled all this with great dignity. In so many ways, it was the story of his career. He had grown used to being under-appreciated.
There are usually easy-to-understand factors that make anyone underrated. There’s no mystery about it with Ron Santo. He played baseball in a time when runs were especially hard to come by — and so his numbers are not jaw-dropping. He played third base, which has long been baseball’s vacuum — when Santo retired in 1974 there were only three third basemen in the Hall of Fame. Many of his skills were subtle — Santo twice led the National League in on-base percentage and four times led in walks — and these were not especially appreciated talents during his playing days.
Santo also played for losing teams, year after year after year. He never played in a single postseason game. In 1967, Santo may have been the best player in the NL — he hit .300 with 31 homers, he walked 96 times, he scored 107 runs, he drove in 98 and he won a Gold Glove. The Cubs, in what would turn out to be one of their most successful seasons during Santo’s career, finished a mere 14 games back.
He was as solid as oak, the captain of the Cubs, and he put up virtually the same numbers year after year after year. Consistency is boring and underrated. From 1963 to 1970, he ALWAYS hit 25 home runs, and he ALWAYS drove in 94-plus runs, and he ALWAYS played 154 or more games. He won five Gold Gloves in those eight years, and he led third basemen in assists just about every year, and he led the league in sac flies three times, and he was good for 90-plus walks. It is true that he took advantage of the friendly confines of Wrigley Field, where he did most of his good hitting. Over a career, he hit .296/.383/.522 in Chicago. And he hit .257/.342/.406 outside. He hit 216 of his 342 homers in Chicago. He scored 180 more runs and drove in 155 more runs at home.
But it is just as true that he played in a very low-scoring time in a very low-scoring league. Baseball Reference’s Wins Above Replacement takes a pretty good measure of a player’s contribution. In the 1960s, in the National League, only Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente had a higher WAR than Ron Santo.
Most Wins Above Replacement, NL (1960-69):1. Willie Mays, 84.1
2. Hank Aaron, 79.8
3. Roberto Clemente, 59.2
4. Ron Santo, 54.4
5. Willie McCovey, 46.0
6. Eddie Mathews, 42.1
7. Frank Robinson, 38.9
8. Vada Pinson, 38.7
9. Dick Allen, 37.2
10. Orlando Cepeda, 36.7
Now, this might be a bit misleading if you put too much faith in it — Robinson went to the American League, Dick Allen played 600-plus fewer games, and so on. But I’m not trying to make the point that he was the fourth-best player in the NL during the decade, but that his value was greater than his good numbers suggest, and that whatever Wrigley Field gave, playing in an era of high mounds and high strikes took away. He was very good year after year after year after year.
And there was something else — Santo was a Type 1 Diabetic. He had no easy way to monitor his blood sugar, so according to his son Jeff, he learned to do it by his mood. He did not share that he was diabetic for many years, and he kept his struggle hidden from teammates, and he refused to come out of the lineup. He quietly visited hospitals to talk with children with diabetes. Later, he made his fight against diabetes a public fight so he could inspire people. There are those who would say that while his quiet (and later public) triumph over diabetes is admirable, it has little to do with his Hall of Fame case.
I suppose it depends on what you believe the Baseball Hall of Fame means.
Santo was so under-appreciated as a player that when he first appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot in 1980, he received exactly 15 votes. That was not even enough to get him on the ballot again in 1981. It was only in 1985 that a minor uproar reinstated him and a few other overlooked talents to the ballot*. This time around, Santo received 53 votes, which hardly made him a Hall of Fame threat but did keep him comfortably on the ballot. And that’s how it would go for 14 more years — he never came close to getting into the Hall, but he would always stay comfortably on the ballot.
*The reinstated players included Santo, Ken Boyer, Curt Flood, Vada Pinson, Harvey Haddix, Dave McNally, Ron Fairly (who had received zero votes the year before) and, most remarkably to me, Denny McLain.
Of course, he stayed around the game. He became an enthusiastic Cubs radio broadcaster. He remained a wonderful presence in Chicago. He was beloved. That’s the overwhelming feeling on Friday after Ron Santo died at the age of 70. He was beloved as few ballplayers are ever beloved. I have little doubt that he would have loved to have been elected to the Hall of Fame, and my own baseball instincts tell me that it should have happened long ago. But when I was around him, when I listened to him, when I once interviewed him about the Hall of Fame, I never heard any disappointment or bitterness. I heard a man who loved the game and loved life.
And I look at it this way: Someone has to be the greatest player to not get into the Hall of Fame. Not everyone could handle that sort of thing. Ron Santo wore it beautifully.
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