Lessons learned: A 2003 Cub reflects on the 2015 team

I was traded by the Rangers to the Cubs at the deadline in 2003. Rangers general manager John Hart broke the news by saying, "I traded you back to your old team." This time, instead of the rising 1991 Cubs' first-round pick, I would arrive at Wrigley Field as the "vs.-lefty" platoon in the outfield, spelling Kenny Lofton, pinch hitting, pinch running and coming in for defense once in a while for Moises Alou.

 

We scrapped and platooned our way to the postseason behind a stellar rotation and a left-right balance of veteran position players. Goodwin, O'Leary, Grudzielanek, Womack, Lofton, Karros, Simon. We all had the egos of starters and had to learn through manager Dusty Baker about what we had to do to win with all of our experience overlapping.

 

We all know how that season ended in the National League Championship Series.

 

There are times when the close of that season is a ghost from the past, hauntingly reminding me that I was so close to baseball's royal class, the elite few who had the honor of wearing a ring. It is seen as the gold standard that separates good from great in my sport, regardless of your individual performance.

 

It was also about the closeness to rewriting history, erasing curses, honoring those who came before us. Nothing like victory to frame what it truly means to wear a uniform. To wear time itself on your back woven by the hands by legends — Santo, Banks, Williams, Jenkins, Sandberg and a host of others.

 

I was at an Athletes Against Drugs event where Mark DeRosa spoke about the disappointment of how the 2008 season ended after the Cubs' 97-win season. To DeRosa, it was bigger than being favored and losing. It was about not being able to play out his dream of hugging Ron Santo to thank him after they won.

 

Figures as large as Santo remind us that it is important to look at the bigger picture of a 2003 season. It may be found in digesting that 12 years ago, Kyle Schwarber was 10 and Kris Bryant was 11.

 

Keep in mind that the span of 12 years in a baseball career is both the beginning and the end. It is Schwarber going from rookie sensation to grizzled veteran playing it out, perhaps, in Boston. It is Bryant still making an impact but trying to figure out how he can finish his career in Chicago once his second mega-contract has expired. Youth is not eternal to a baseball player, at least not in any chronological sense.

 

Twelve years retires Jon Lester, it witnesses the blooming and setting of Javier Baez, the finalization of a new Wrigley Field where the child born last year will be rooting fiercely for his Cubs team, looking at his smartphone from the bleachers with a Chicago hot dog in the other hand as a near teenager.

 

It is part of the strange thing that happens when you leave baseball. It was eloquently explained by my friend and former teammate, Jimmy Rollins: "When you are playing, you are young. When you stop, you are old." Now 12 years means something other than the span between postseason wins for the Cubs to me. In the 12 years since watching the Marlins celebrate their Game 7 victory in 2003, I met my wife, I "met" my three children who amazingly have known only an African-American president, NASA even did a fly-by of Pluto. While we are happily stuck in our youth for the duration of our career, the Earth keeps spinning, history is being written, and suddenly postcareer, you are forced to jump on a spinning globe, flat-footed.

 

A baseball organization sees it differently: 12 years is a generation, maybe two, marked indelibly in the consciousness through championships or through the closeness to being a champion. The 2015 Cubs had 101 wins, accumulated on the accelerated maturity of young players who were not just learning but having an immediate impact. The right man managed them at the right time, with a beautiful blend of resources, depth and time on their side. A rare trifecta in this great game of baseball.

 

But in Chicago, it matters how it ends. There is pain in abrupt loss, the euphoria of defeating the greatest rival the Cubs have known in St. Louis nearly negated by the ensuing sweep by the Mets.

 

Yet there is also pain in being "2003 close," being in the driver's seat, up three games to one, tasked only to finish the inevitable and win Game 6 or 7 in the friendliest confines sports knows, with Mark Prior and Kerry Wood to start, two arms that emitted comets on the mound.

 

We tend to forget the journey in such painful moments. We do not want to hear that we learned a lesson, that we are being tested, that patience is a virtue, that time heals all. But then I think about what I learned from being a parent. The patience, the lessons, the time, the tests are necessities, tools that bring rewards full circle when I least expect it, when I did not know I needed it, maybe when I did not even want it. Then my son sympathetically walks a scared classmate into class on the first day of school, my daughter responsibly reminds my wife that no one gave her brother the rest of his medicine, my other daughter leans on my shoulder with a level of trust that could be described only as divine.

 

For now, I am not just a member of the 2003 team, but I am also a husband and a parent, titles I did not have when I sat in my apartment in sheer exhaustion after Game 7.

 

That instinct tells me that we can learn a lot from the 2015 Cubs. Their lack of experience did not spill into disrespect, petulance or reckless immaturity. They learned quickly, they adjusted quickly, they excelled at new positions. It was hard for me to move to right field in 2003 even after being a center fielder for my entire career, yet Bryant, Schwarber, Addison Russell, Starlin Castro all took on new positions in a pennant race. Extremely difficult.

 

Regardless, time will come with no guarantees of repeat performance. It is the inevitability of the arrow it follows. Yet with that reality, we can frame it, we can remember and we can understand that we all ride that arrow together from different places and times on its flight path. Youth has the power to rewrite the past with the future by riding that arc with great optimism, fresh eyes and an open heart.

 

I say this because my kids (7, 6, and 3) were watching this playoff season. My 6-year-old daughter was so happy that she danced the night away when the Cubs eliminated the Cardinals. It was nothing I said; I had not fully indoctrinated her to love one team or another quite yet. She knows she was born in Chicago, but she probably could not even name a player. Still she felt it, and even if it is another 12 years before she can dance for the Cubs again, I hope to let her know at her high school graduation that the 2015 Cubs took me back to one of the greatest times I have had in the game, when I enjoyed the first, last and only postseason in my career with the 2003 Cubs. More importantly, I would tell her the 2003 season, no matter what she learns of curses, disappointment, horror and devastation, made me a better father before I was one.