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Today we welcome back Michael Keedy with an interesting essay detailing the long, highly successful career of Charlie Grimm. Michael calls him the original “Mr. Cub.” He makes a strong case that Charlie deserves a plaque in Cooperstown. I tend to agree with him. Very few can match Charlie’s player-plus-manager stats. Read Michael’s highly informative essay and see if you agree. -GL
The Original Mr. Cub:
“Jolly Cholly” Grimm
Virtually every surviving baseball fan who lived and died with the Chicago Cubs in the latter half of the Twentieth Century remembers and adores “Mr. Cub” to this day. He didn’t get to play a single inning of post-season ball in his 19 years in the majors, but he will forever be associated with 500-plus career home runs, back-to-back MVP awards while with a second-division team, and an infectious enthusiasm for the game he so obviously loved. Who else but the incomparable Ernie Banks, then, to carry the mantle of Mr. Cub?
Answer: One Charlie Grimm, whose kaleidoscopic career in the majors included 20 years as an agile and acrobatic first baseman, mostly for the Cubs, and 19 years as one of the premier managers in the game, including 13 with the Cubs. In fact, it’s difficult to find anyone in the long life of big-league baseball who more capably combined his talents as player, then manager, than “Jolly Cholly.” For decades and in a wide variety of ways, he truly was the original “Mr. Cub.”
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Although he was heavily and reliably involved in our national pastime his entire life, there was really nothing conventional about Charlie Grimm. In perhaps a gross understatement, Cubs owner Philip Wrigley called him “my favorite baseball character,” with a likely emphasis on the term “character.” Indeed, can you name another big-leaguer who entertained fans during the pregame with his singing voice and left-handed banjo-playing, playfully mocked and mugged with umpires, went into and back out of the (WGN) radio broadcast booth several times during his career (swapping positions once with Lou Boudreau, another former manager), and kept the faithful loose with innumerable related antics on and off the field?
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In his autobiography (1968), Grimm wrote that he “tried to make it fun for my players after I became manager…I always thought a pat on the back, an encouraging word, or a wisecrack paid off a lot more than a brilliantly executed work of strategy.” For Charlie Grimm, that extraordinary and occasionally madcap approach to the game resonated with his men, and it definitely paid off in the box scores as a result.
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Born in St. Louis in the 19th Century and with baseball seemingly in his blood from the start, Grimm began as a bat boy for the Cardinals before being signed by Connie Mack to a Philadelphia A’s contract while still a teenager. When he broke into the big leagues, at age 17, he was already a top-flight fielder, but struggled with the bat until his early twenties. In 1923, at age 25, he batted .345 for the Pirates, and in 1925, his first season with the Cubs, for whom he was to have a sustained and storied career into the 1940s. he again topped the .300 mark.
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Charlie’s relaxed and fun-seeking persona did not elude him, at any time. There was scarcely a routine moment in his entire life. When he left Pittsburgh for the high ground in Chicago, he promptly discovered kindred spirits: “Even before I had unloaded my stuff…I had become a member of the Cubs’ string band,” he said. “Hack Miller, the muscular outfielder, played a guitar that was held together with bicycle tape. Barney Friberg, the third baseman, played the mandolin. Cliff Heathcote’s instrument was the ukulele. I quickly brought my left-handed banjo out of hiding. We had a group.” (It’s a wonder he didn’t also drive the team bus, bake cookies between games of a doubleheader — or clean the windows, sweep the floor, and “polish up the handle of the big front door.”)
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Charlie first led the Cubbies to the N.L. pennant in 1929, posting a .298 average during the season and topping it off with .389 in the World Series, won by Philadelphia. By 1932 he became the team’s player-manager, raised his average above .300 once more, and took Chicago to its second pennant in four years. In his first two World Series, 1929 and ’32, Grimm batted a combined .364 with four runs, two doubles, a home run, five runs-batted-in, and three walks in just nine games. After hanging up his glove to manage full-time, he won pennants with the Cubs again in 1935 and ’45. (When Charlie died, in 1983, his loving widow Marion was given an appreciative ball club’s rare permission to scatter his ashes onto Wrigley Field, where he presumably lay fitfully until 2016, and the Friendly Confines’ first brush with the World Series in more than 70 years.)
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Charlie Grimm never came close to enshrinement in Cooperstown, regrettably, but if one were to combine his two tenures with the Cubs, on and off the field, he seems plenty qualified for the right to join the likes of Joe Torre and John McGraw there, let us say, or other stars from out of the past with remarkably blended and successful careers as players and field generals. As a player he was one scratch single short of 2,300 base hits, batting in nearly eleven-hundred runs and hitting a cool .290, with averages above .300 in five separate seasons over a span of ten years. He led his league’s first basemen in fielding seven times, posting an enviable lifetime average of .993.
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As manager, he won 946 games with the Cubs (second only to Cap Anson), took his beloved Cubbies to the World Series three times, finished second three times and third in another four seasons, and wound up with a total of 1,287 major-league wins overall. His career winning percentage (.547) ranks in the top twenty among managers with 1,000 wins, and he is one of a rare few big leaguers to have played in 2,000-plus games and managed in 2,000-plus games.
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If there’s merit in Mr. William Schaefer’s standing support for an “honorable mention” wing at the Hall of Fame, Jolly Cholly would definitely qualify for a plaque there, without delay. But having researched his life and career in preparing these few words of approbation for today’s blog, I cannot begin to think of Grimm as an also-ran, and I do not hesitate in going for broke: “Charlie Grimm for the Hall of Fame!” Never, in the long and serpentine saga of our favorite sport, has there been another quite like the very first “Mr. Cub.”
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Michael Keedy
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