RIP, Ryno.
I spent a good portion of my summers as a young boy watching TV in a three-season room on the back of our house in Fort Wayne, IN.
In the mornings, it was game shows—Card Sharks, Sale of the Century, and, of course, Press Your Luck. No Whammys!!
Then came lunchtime with Days of Our Lives.
But come 1:20 p.m.—or the occasional late start time of 3:05—the TV was on Channel 9, WGN.
“Hello again, everybody,” Harry would say. It was time for the Cubs.
That was my afternoon, and that’s when I came to know my first sports hero: Ryne Sandberg.
Sandberg, the Cubs Hall of Fame second baseman—“Ryno”—died yesterday from prostate cancer.
Like many kids of that time—man, my fingers crackled with old age just typing those six words—I became a Cubs fan almost by default.
With no MLB.com, or even baseball on ESPN, the Cubs were literally the only game on TV.
Sure, the Braves were on too, but my fourth-grade class could never hop on a charter bus in late May and drive to Atlanta on a Friday afternoon and make it back home the same day. But we did for the Cubs, with a visit to the Museum of Science and Industry in the morning.
It was always the Cubs. And Ryno was their star.
Two signature Sandberg memories stand out to me. The first is one I know I share with thousands of Cubs fans. The second is only mine.
June 23, 1984… the “Ryne Sandberg Game.”
If this game were played today, there’s no way I would have been around to witness Sandberg’s late-inning heroics. Social scrolling would have long killed my attention span for a game that started with the Cubs down 7–1 to the Cardinals after two innings.
Even so, that Saturday afternoon, on national TV as the NBC Game of the Week, and with the Cubs starting in “typical” Cubs fashion, I went outside with my glove and a tennis ball—because this wasn’t their day.
My glove and tennis ball were my go-to entertainment between innings or during game show commercial breaks.
I’d throw the tennis ball up off the pitch of our roof, trying to find just the right angle to require a diving catch in the grass on a somewhat challenging fly ball. Or I’d go to our gravel driveway and pitch the ball against the brick chimney as hard as I could, working on both my throwing accuracy and the inevitable short hops that came bouncing back a second later—hard, low, and always in the dirt.
I spent a lot of that afternoon in the backyard and driveway—not in front of the TV. The Cubs were down 9–3 heading into the bottom of the 6th when the comeback started. But something—maybe the emerging legend of Ryno—drew me back to the three-season room.
The rest, as they say, is history, and I watched every pitch. Sandberg homered twice—once in the 9th and again in the 10th—both to tie the game, both off Hall of Fame closer Bruce Sutter.
I hated Bruce Sutter. He was always so good and almost always a sign that the Cubs were about to lose.
But not on this day. Not on national TV. Not with Bob Costas in the booth. (Confession: I’ve always loved Costas, but I’ve also always wished I could have heard Harry Caray call the final innings of the Sandberg Game. By the 10th inning that afternoon, he would have been three sheets to the prevailing southwest wind.)
“Cubs win! Cubs win! Holy Cow!” 12–11 in 11. Ryno’s line: 5-for-6, 2 HRs, 7 RBI.
Cubs second baseman Ryne Sandberg became MVP Ryne Sandberg that afternoon. He became Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg. He became my baseball hero—and in that, I know I was not alone.
1984 was the year the Cubs went on to win the National League East (back when there only were two divisions). I hadn’t been a Cubs fan long, but it was long enough to know that this wasn’t normal.
’84 was different. The Cubs were good, and Sandberg was a big reason why. Still, we lost to the Padres in the playoffs, and while I cried, I also knew I wanted no part of the Tigers in the World Series.
For Christmas that year, my parents got me two tickets to the “Cubs Caravan”—a touring group of Cubs players who visited banquet halls across the Midwest each January to sign autographs and share baseball wisdom. A lot of “You know, we’re just going to go out there and play hard” kind of wisdom.
The Caravan of January 1985 had Ryne Sandberg onboard. I got to get out of school and go to the Fort Wayne Holiday Inn North to meet him.
I brought a baseball and a pen, and I wore the new brown sweater I’d gotten for Christmas—a slightly less exciting gift than the tickets to see Ryno.
The lunch started with Cubs players sitting at a big table at the front of the room. They played a highlight film from the Cubs’ pennant-winning season. Each of the players spoke for a few minutes (I remember exactly none of what they said). Then I waited in a long line of young boys and old men to ask Sandberg to sign my ball.
I got to the front, reached up to the table with my ball. Ryno signed it. And I went back to my seat. I was thrilled. But the excitement was just beginning.
As the event ended, I made a trip to the bathroom. Standing at the urinal, I took my young, limited understanding of “stage fright” to a new level.
A man entered and stepped to the urinal next to me. Breaking the cardinal rule of the men’s room, I looked left.
It was Ryne Sandberg.
We did our business—or at least, he did. All my bodily functions immediately froze.
We stepped back. Washed our hands. And at the paper towels, he said, “Hi. How’s it going?”
“Hi,” I said. “Good, thank you.”
And with that, he walked out and down the hall back to the Holiday Inn ballroom.
Ryne Sandberg was always soft-spoken, a man of few words. He was never flashy or cocky. He was calm. Always collected (until he became a manager after his playing days). He was the perfect example for a young boy of just going out there and playing hard. And playing well!
My year was made. I met Ryne Sandberg… in the bathroom.
That autographed baseball traveled with me for nearly 30 years—from room to dorm, to apartment, to house—until one day, my ironically named Bernese Mountain Dog, Wrigley, found it and ate it. At least the part with Ryno’s name on it. She left the Thad Bosley autograph untouched.
When I woke up this morning to a text from my mother that simply said, “Ryne Sandberg,” I knew what she meant and that he had passed.
In your honor, Ryno, today I’ll quite figuratively be throwing my tennis ball against the wood-paneled walls of our old three-season room, pretending to take an errant toss from Shawon Dunston, dragging my bare foot across the top of a pillow on the floor, jumping and spinning in the air to throw a strike across the room to Leon “Bull” Durham to turn the double play.
I may or may not break a window, but I will always be a huge fan of Ryne Sandberg, and thankful he was the source of so many of my baseball—and bathroom—memories.