The 1994-1995 offseason was a time of great uncertainty for baseball fans. With the owners prepared to start the season with replacement players, the strike was not settled until April 2, 1995 and play did not actually begin until April 25. 1995 became the fourth season in which games were lost to labor problems, joining 1972, 1981, and 1994. Unlike in the other years, each team played the same number of games, 144.
Rightly or wrongly, Tom Trebelhorn was ousted as the Cubs' manager after overseeing one tremendously disappointing season. The new manager was Jim Riggleman, who had served as the Padres' skipper for part of the 1992 and 1994 seasons and all of 1993, compiling a 112-179 record. There were several other changes, but, because of the timing of the strike's settlement, most of them took place either during the season or just before it started.
The biggest preseason addition was probably Brian McRae. Son of Royals great Hal McRae, he had debuted with his father's team at age 22 in 1990 and had been Kansas City's primary centerfielder from 1991 to 1994, hitting .262 with 93 stolen bases. On April 5, Chicago acquired him in exchange for minor league pitchers Geno Morones and Derek Wallace. The Cubs hoped he could establish some consistency in centerfield; four different players had been opening-day starters at the position in as many seasons heading into 1995.
Four days after trading for McRae, the Cubs signed Jaime Navarro, a right-handed pitcher who had been with the Milwaukee Brewers. Navarro had shown early promise, finishing at 15-12 with a 3.92 ERA in 1991 and 17-11 with a 3.33 mark in 1992. Two weak seasons after that, with ERAs of 5.33 and 6.62 made him expendable, but the Cubs took a chance that he could bounce back with a change of scenery. The desperately need some sort infusion to their starting rotation. The only pitcher on the roster who had ever won more than 11 games in a season was Mike Morgan, and the club's opening day starter would be Jim Bullinger, who was 9-10, mostly as a reliever, in his three major-league seasons prior to 1995.
Other than McRae and Navarro, the cast was much the same. Longtime holdovers Mark Grace and Shawon Dunston were healthy and ready to go, as was Sammy Sosa, back for his fourth season in Chicago. Left field would be held down by a pair of rookies, lefthanded-hitting Scott Bullett (who had played a few games for the Pirates in 1991 and 1993) and righthander Ozzie Timmons.
1995 Opening Day Lineup
McRae, cf
Sanchez, 2b
Sosa, rf
Grace, 1b
Wilkins, c
Dunston, ss
Buechele, 3b
Bullett, lf
Bullinger, p
Meeting the Reds in Cincinnati on opening day, April 26, McRae started the season by striking out. He hit into a double play in his last at-bat, in the 8th inning. However, in between those to at-bats, he singled, tripled, and doubled. Grace also had three hits, and Bullinger pitched six scoreless innings. The Cubs were off to a good start in 1995, winning 7-1. After beating the Reds again on April 27, the Cubs came home to Wrigley and won two more against the Expos to start 4-0. The fourth game was Navarro's first start as a Cub and it was a success, with the newly-acquired hurler giving up just one earned run and five hits in seven innings to earn the victory.
The Cubs lost their next three, but then settled into a pattern of winning two and losing one that was broken by a three-game winning streak from May 19-21. At the end of May, the Cubs stood at 20-11 and were tied for first place with the Reds. It was an inspiring turnaround; in 1994, they hadn't won their twentieth game until their 46th contest of the season. After pitching six innings of one-run ball on May 27, and getting a no-decision in a game that the Cubs won, Navarro was 4-0 with a 2.83 ERA, giving the Cubs a legitimate number one starter. Sosa was hitting .315 with 10 home runs and 27 driven in, and Grace was at .322.
Unfortunately, the Cubs couldn't sustain their early success and suffered through a horrendous "June swoon," posting a terrible 9-20 record for the month. Between June 5 and June 14, they lost nine of ten games to fall 5.5 games back in the division. On June 6, the Braves teed off on Steve Traschel for 7 runs in just 3 1/3 innings on their way to a 17-3 shellacking of the Northsiders. But even that was not as bad as it got for the Cubs; on June 25, they suffered a 19-6 disaster at the hands of the Houston Astros. With a tired bullpen, Riggleman allowed reliever Bryan Hickerson to take a fearful pounding in the eighth, leaving him in to absorb nine Houston runs in the inning. Hickerson's ERA was 3.26 going into the game and 7.03 coming out. The loss dropped the Cubs' record to 28-27 on the season and began a string of five losses in six games that left them 29-31 at the end of the month. They seemed to have returned to their 1994 form.
The team rallied, however, to take eight of the next nine, putting them back on the good side of .500. After that stretch, though, they returned to their losing ways, dropping 11 of 12, including a seven-game losing streak that left them at 38-43 on July 23. Then, they won 8 of 10. They were a streaky club; just when they looked hopeless, they would go on a tear, and then, as soon as fans' hopes were up, they seemed to revert to being one of the league's worst teams. One positive aspect of the Cubs' June and July was the performance of Brian McRae. At the end of May, the Cubs' new centerfielder was hitting .260 with a .307 OBP, unacceptable for a leadoff man. However, between June 1 and August 5, McRae hit .294 with a .358 OBP - just the kind of performance the Cubs were hoping for.
The Cubs continued to see-saw between respectability and awfulness until mid-September. After losing to the Pirates on September 21 to drop to 65-69, they seemed headed for another sub-.500 record. However, they beat Pittsburgh in the next two games and on September 24 against the Pirates, catcher Scott Servais tied it with a two-out RBI single in the ninth and McRae won it in the tenth by smashing a Dan Miceli pitch into the rightfield bleachers. The next day, Frank Castillo started against the Cardinals at Wrigley. Castillo was a 26 year-old righthander who had had a promising campaign for the Cubs in 1992, finishing with a 3.46 ERA in 205 innings, but hadn't done much in the intervening years. He stood at 10-10 going into his start against the Cardinals. He was brilliant, shutting down the Redbirds with no hits through eight, while the Cubs built a 7-0 lead. Castillo got the first two batters in the ninth and was one pitch away from immortality when St. Louis' Bernard Gilkey tripled to center on a 2-2 offering. Castillo retired the next batter to finish a complete-game shutout. After Chuck Rainey and Jose Guzman, he became the third Cubs pitcher to lose a no-hitter with one out to go since the team's last no-hitter in 1972 (in which Milt Pappas lost a perfect game with one out to go by issuing a walk).
The win got the Cubs back to .500 at 69-69. They followed it up with two more wins to go to 71-69, just two wins away from clinching a winning season. On September 28, they won a slugfest 12-11 against the Astros on ninth-inning RBI singles by Scott Bullett and backup catcher Mark Parent. The next day, they went into the ninth trailing 3-0, but four singles and two walks yielded three runs to send the game to extras, where Luis Gonzalez's tenth-inning, bases-loaded single won it, clinching only the Cubs' fourth winning seasons since 1972. The finished at 73-71, in third place, 12 games behind the Reds.
The winning season was highlighted by some fine individual performances. Navarro finished at 14-6 with a 3.28 ERA in 200 innings, a heartening return to the form of his early promising seasons in Milwaukee. Grace had what would arguably remain the best season of his career, hitting .326 with 51 doubles in a short season. Dunston also had a fine year, hitting .296, a career high at the time. McRae ended up at .288, with a .348 OBP and scored 92 runs.
But the real story in Chicago was Sammy Sosa. Sosa cemented his superstar status with a 36 homer, 119 RBI season. Both figures were second in the league to Colorado's Dante Bichette, but Bichette hit 31 of his 40 homers and drove in 84 of his 123 RBIs in the rarified air of Denver, while Sosa's spilts were much more even: 19 homers and 62 RBIs at Wrigley; 17 and 57 in road games. Sosa finished 8th in the NL MVP voting and won his first Silver Slugger award. He was now one of the elite power hitters in the game.
There wasn't a lot behind the team's marquee players, though. Their catching was a mess, with nobody playing more than 52 games at the position. Third base was also a problem. On June 16, the Cubs unloaded Mike Morgan, a huge disappointment after his great 1992 season, and two minor leaguers to the Cardinals, in exchange for Todd Zeile, who had had seasons of 17 home runs and 103 RBIs in 1993 and 19 and 75 in 1994. However, Zeile didn't want to come to Chicago and played poorly, hitting just .227 with 9 home runs in the Windy City. The incumbent third baseman, Steve Buchele, was released on July 6, after posting a .189 batting average through that date.
Besides Navarro and Castillo, the Cubs didn't have much on the pitching side. Jim Bullinger and Kevin Foster both won more than they lost, but with ERAs over 4.00. Tracshel, the Cubs' best starter in 1994, had a terrible season at 7-13 with a 5.15 ERA in 160 innings. Randy Myers did save 38 games, but with a 3.88 ERA that was not particularly good for a closer. A couple of middle relievers (Mike Perez, Larry Casian) had decent seasons, but with light workloads, as Riggleman relied heavily on his starters. Five pitchers threw 150 or more innings, thus qualifying for the ERA title, a true rarity. The division champion Reds, for example, had only two pitchers who qualified for the ERA championship. The Cubs finished eighth of twelve teams in ERA.
Still, coming off a .433 seasons, a .507 season had to be seen as a success. Hopefully, the Cubs were on the rise.
1995 Cubs Batting Leaders: R - Mark Grace, 97; H - Grace, 180; HR - Sammy Sosa, 36; RBI - Sosa, 119; BA - Grace, .326; OBP - Grace, .395; SP - Grace, .516
1994 Cubs Pitching Leaders: G - Mike Perez, 68; IP - Jaime Navarro, 200; W - Navarro, 14; SO - Kevin Foster, 146; ERA - Frank Castillo, 3.21; SV - Randy Myers, 38
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