Ryne Sandberg, 1984, and the changing way of finding fame and respect in America

The day before Ryne Sandberg died, Jane Forbes Clark, the director of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, quoted him in her remarks during this year’s induction ceremony. Before celebrating Dick Allen, Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia, Dave Parker, and Billy Wagner last Sunday, Clark read an excerpt from Sandberg’s acceptance speech from his Hall induction in 2005.

“The reason I am here, they tell me, is that I played the game a certain way, that I played the game the way it was supposed to be played,” Sandberg said. “I don’t know about that, but I do know this: I had too much respect for the game to play it any other way. And if there is a single reason I am here today, it is because of one word: ‘respect.’”

That respect, as Sandberg defined it, manifested itself in more ways than in just his 282 home runs, his 10 straight All-Star Game appearances, his nine Gold Gloves at second base, and his 1984 National League MVP award. It was obvious in the manner in which he carried himself on the field.

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It wasn’t just that Sandberg wasn’t especially demonstrative, that he wouldn’t dare do anything that might be interpreted as taunting or showing up an opponent. It was that — neither during his 15 seasons playing for the Chicago Cubs nor the 278 games he managed for the Phillies, the team that in 1982 made the terrible decision to trade him to the Cubs in the first place — he rarely showed any emotion of any kind.

That stoicism, even in the face of his own excellence, was Sandberg’s trademark. He was admired for it, as he should have been, and in the days since his death Monday night at 65, 19 months after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, the remembrances of him and his humility have raised a fascinating question: Could he have been the same superstar today that he was throughout the 1980s and ’90s? I don’t mean, Would he have been as great a baseball player now as he was then? I mean, Would as many people have known him to be such a great baseball player?

The question gets to the heart of the radical changes in sports, celebrity, media, and media consumption over the last four decades.

The seminal moment of Sandberg’s MVP season — and, really, his entire career — took place on June 23, 1984. The Cubs beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 12-11, in 11 innings at Wrigley Field that Saturday afternoon, with Bob Costas and Tony Kubek calling the game for a national TV audience on NBC’s Game of the Week, and Sandberg made it an all-timer. With the Cubs down a run, he led off the bottom of the ninth inning with a home run off Cardinals closer Bruce Sutter, himself an eventual Hall of Famer. Then, he hit another game-tying home run off Sutter in the bottom of the 10th, this one a two-run shot with two outs.

It came to be known as the Sandberg Game, and nothing was the same afterward.

“From that moment on, I mean, it was like an explosion of interest in him,” former major league general manager Ned Colletti, who was working in the Cubs’ media relations department at the time, told the Athletic last week. “He was a reluctant hero. He did whatever we asked him to do, but it wasn’t like he was seeking it out. ‘Hit me a thousand ground balls, I’d rather do that than stand in front of a microphone.’ …

“I mean no exaggeration by this: I don’t know if one game has ever changed a career as much as that game did.”

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Back then, moments like that had the power to reshape pro athletes’ careers and the public’s perception of them. Cubs-Cardinals wasn’t one of a dozen major league games available for viewing anywhere in the country on various apps or channels or networks. It was the game, the only one that baseball fans could watch on that Saturday, and the scarcity of accessible sports back then made his clutch performance all the more powerful and influential.

Sandberg was a deserving MVP that season. The Cubs won the NL East, and his play and statistics (a .314 batting average, a league-high 19 triples and 114 runs scored, an .887 OPS) were terrific. Would he have received 22 of the possible 24 first-place votes for the award without that game, though? Probably not.

These days, a ballplayer doing something similar to what Sandberg did that afternoon at Wrigley would have experienced the white-hot attention of the nation for a hot minute. A video of his exploits would have gone viral on social media, then faded quickly from society’s collective memory.

More to the point, the guy likely would have reacted with some kind of ostentatious gesture to celebrate himself. He would have done this not necessarily because he was a hot dog or a selfish jerk, but because in our never-ceasing storm of content, nobody breaks through and attracts everyone’s attention unless they’re trying to break through and attract everyone’s attention (unless you’re playing kissy-face at a Coldplay concert, of course). It’s so easy even for excellence to get lost amid all the noise.

Ryne Sandberg didn’t have to play that game in 1984. Before the eyes of all of America’s baseball fans, he tied a big game with a big home run, then tied it again with a bigger one, then trotted around the bases with his head down and without saying a word. Everyone saw it. Everyone remembered it. Everyone respected him for it.