#5: TAKE FIVE…PLEASE!
| ALL-TIME #5 ROSTER: | |
| Player | Years |
| Johnny Moore | 1932 |
| Riggs Stephenson | 1933–34 |
| Tuck Stainback | 1935–36 |
| Billy Jurges | 1937–38 |
| Dick Bartell | 1939 |
| Billy Rogell | 1940 |
| Bill Myers | 1941 |
| Clyde McCullough | 1941–42 |
| Johnny Moore | 1945 |
| Hank Schenz | 1947–49 |
| Bob Ramazzotti | 1949–53 |
| Bruce Edwards | 1954 |
| Vern Morgan | 1955 |
| Frank Kellert | 1956 |
| Bobby Del Greco | 1957 |
| Frank Ernaga | 1957 |
| Tony Taylor | 1958–60 |
| Lou Boudreau (manager) | 1960 |
| Jimmie Schaffer | 1963–64 |
| Whitey Lockman (coach) | 1966 |
| Joey Amalfitano (coach) | 1967–71, 1978–80 |
| (manager) | 1981 |
| Q.V. Lowe (coach) | 1972 |
| Adrian Garrett | 1974 |
| Irv Noren (coach) | 1975 |
| Randy Hundley | 1976 |
| Al Dark (coach) | 1977 |
| Gordy MacKenzie (coach) | 1982 |
| Ruben Amaro (coach) | 1983–86 |
| Jim Snyder (coach) | 1987 |
| Chuck Cottier (coach) | 1988–91, 1994 |
| Jim Lefebvre (manager) | 1992–93 |
| Jim Riggleman (manager) | 1995–99 |
| Rene Lachemann (coach) | 2000–02 |
| (interim manager) | 2002 |
| Tom Goodwin | 2003 |
| Tony Womack | 2003 |
| Michael Barrett | 2004 |
| Nomar Garciaparra | 2004–05 |
| Ronny Cedeno | 2006–08 |
| Jake Fox | 2009 |
| Sam Fuld | 2010 |
| Reed Johnson | 2011–12 |
| Josh Vitters | 2012 |
| Jamie Quirk (coach) | 2013 |
| Welington Castillo | 2014–15 |
| Quintin Berry | 2015 |
The Cubs’ first #5, Johnny Moore, became a regular in 1932 after three years of playing sparingly. He hit .305 and knocked in 64 runs while patrolling the outfield that season, but he didn’t get in the lineup the first day the Cubs wore uniform numbers. As the usual fifth-place hitter, he was assigned #5. But on June 30, Vince Barton, wearing #49, started in right field and hit fifth. It may have signaled the beginning of the end for Moore as a Cub. After the season the Cubs shipped him to Cincinnati with three other players for Babe Herman. At the end of the 1945 season, the forty-three-year-old Moore made a brief seven-game reappearance with the Cubs wearing #5, after eight years out of the majors,
Billy Jurges (1937–38) liked to be where the action was. The fiery shortstop was shot during the 1932 season by a distraught female fan (like in The Natural, only twenty years before Bernard Malamud’s novel and more than fifty years before the film), yet he came back in time to help the Cubs take the pennant and hit .364 in the World Series. On July 30, 1935, the Bronx-born Jurges picked a fight with rookie catcher Walter Stephenson of North Carolina about who won the Civil War, but that didn’t stop him from helping the Cubs reel off winning streaks of 11 and 21 games in the second half as they grabbed the ’35 flag. And in 1938…well, no bones were broken that year, but we’re still talking three Cubs pennants with a shortstop not named Joe Tinker! So that winter the club traded him to the New York Giants in a lousy six-player deal. Jurges returned to Chicago as a player-coach in 1946, wearing #45. He retired the following year and later went into managing. The most significant part of his two-year tenure as Boston’s skipper was Pumpsie Green’s debut in 1959, making the Red Sox the last team to integrate by twelve years.
Many of the rest of the #5s were fringe players or those who had had better years with other teams. Clyde McCullough caught for the 1945 NL champion Cubs—becoming the first player to appear in a World Series without playing in that regular season (he had a good excuse: World War II service)—but in the Series McCullough wore #9, not the original #5 he’d worn in 1941 and 1942. A number of extraneous players—Hank Schenz (1947–49), Bob Ramazzotti (1949–53), Bruce Edwards (1954), Vern Morgan (1955), Frank Kellert (1956), Bobby Del Greco, (1957), and Frank Ernaga (1957)—sported #5 without ever having much impact on even the bad Cubs teams of the 1950s. The best of the lot was Ramazzotti, and he wasn’t very good; his best season was 1952, when he hit .284 and had three stolen bases in 50 games.
Tony Taylor (1958–60) could have reversed this trend, but he became another casualty of GM John Holland’s failure to understand that young players, particularly those with a little bit of speed (Taylor stole 23 bases as Chicago’s regular second baseman in 1959, ranking third in the NL), were becoming valuable in baseball at that time. Holland traded Taylor to the Phillies on May 13, 1960 for Ed Bouchee, a first baseman who couldn’t run (zero steals in ’59) but who had hit 15 home runs, and pitcher Don Cardwell. Though Cardwell made a splash by throwing a no-hitter in his first Cubs start (becoming the first player ever to do so in his debut with a team), he won only 30 games in three years in a Cubs uniform, while Taylor became a fine second baseman for over a decade, winding up with more than 2,000 career hits.
After Jimmie Schaffer, a backup catcher, wore #5 in 1963 and 1964, it became almost exclusively used by coaches and managers for the next four decades. Between 1964 and 2002, only Adrian Garrett (1974) and Randy Hundley (1976) wore it as players, and neither one of them had a particular affinity for #5.Garrett also wore #23, #25, and #28 in various Cub stints in the early ’70s and Hundley had been much more famous as #9 in his first go-around as a Cub, taking #5 on his somewhat-less-than triumphant return in 1976 (3-for-18) because starting catcher Steve Swisher, an unlikely All-Star that year, already had #9.
Hall of Famer Lou Boudreau (1960), a Chicago-area native who had played and managed the Cleveland Indians to a World Series title in 1948, was safely ensconced in the Cubs radio booth when upper management decided to make a change in managers. They sent Charlie Grimm to do Boudreau’s WGN radio job and moved the “Good Kid” to the dugout. Neither move was of any use—Grimm was horrid on the air and Boudreau, in his last managerial gig, went 54–83. The next season, Boudreau returned to the broadcast booth, where he would remain until 1987.
Three fulltime managers (Joey Amalfitano, 1979–81; Jim Lefebvre, 1992–93, and Jim Riggleman, 1995–99) and one interim one (Rene Lachemann, who filled in for one game after Don Baylor was fired in 2002) wore #5; Amalfitano headed some of the worst Cubs teams in history, going 66–116. In 1992 Lefebvre became the first manager since Leo Durocher in 1971 to manage a Cubs team to a winning record in a non-playoff season, guiding the club to an 84–78 mark; he finished his Cubs managerial career exactly at .500 by reversing that record the following year. Riggleman had two winning seasons and a playoff berth in 1998 in his five seasons, but also had two 90-plus loss years and his Cubs managerial winning percentage was .472 (374–419).
After Lachemann departed, #5, at last, returned to the player ranks. Two different speedsters, Tom Goodwin (who led the 2003 Cubs in steals with 19 despite playing in only 87 games) and Tony Womack (Goodwin switched to #24 when Womack was acquired) wore it for the 2003 NL Central champions.
The best player to wear #5 for the Cubs was likely Nomar Garciaparra (2004–05), but sadly, Nomar’s All-Star days were behind him when GM Jim Hendry acquired him in a four-team deal at the trading deadline, July 31, 2004. Nomar appeared in his first game at Wrigley Field on August 1 to a standing ovation—wearing #8, since catcher Michael Barrett had been sporting #5 that year. Shortly afterward, Barrett offered #5—which Nomar had worn throughout his career in Boston—to the new Cubs shortstop, and he accepted. Garciaparra suffered a serious groin injury and missed about half the 2005 season; when he departed, another shortstop, Ronny Cedeno, took over #5, after wearing #11 in a brief call-up at the end of 2005 while Nomar was still on the team. Since Cedeno’s departure, #5 has returned to miscellany, being worn by infielder/catcher Jake Fox (2009), outfielders Sam Fuld (2010) and Reed Johnson (2010–11), third baseman Josh Vitters (2012), and another catcher, Welington Castillo (2014–15).
There’s something about #5 and “Q.” Three Cubs with a name starting with that unique letter have donned #5: coaches Q.V. Lowe (1972) and Jamie Quirk (2013) plus outfielder Quintin Berry (2015). Whatever it is about Q and #5, it doesn’t last long in Chicago—all three were soon on their way somewhere else.
Nomar Garciaparra was a big-name, short-term fix at shortstop.
MOST OBSCURE CUB TO WEAR #5: Quintin Berry might not be obscure now, as he played for the Cubs in September 2015. But the fleet outfielder, acquired specifically to pinch-run, appeared in just eight games and had only one plate appearance (he struck out). And after stealing 30 bases without being caught in his big-league career (25 in the regular season, five in the postseason), Berry was thrown out on his very first attempt as a Cub, in the ninth inning of a 4–3 loss to the Cardinals. Perhaps it’s best that he remain in obscurity.
GUY YOU NEVER THOUGHT OF AS A CUB WHO WORE #5: Billy Rogell (1940), who was the starting shortstop for two pennant-winning Detroit Tiger teams in 1934 and 1935 (and who hit .292 for Detroit in the ’35 World Series against the Cubs), was acquired, as the Cubs sometimes did in those days, when he was thirty-five and long past being productive on the field. He hit .136 in 33 games in 1940 before his release. Meanwhile, the man the Cubs sent to Detroit for Rogell, Dick “Rowdy Richard” Bartell, another obscure #5 who played only one season for the Cubs (1939), finished 12th in AL MVP voting in 1940 and was the starting shortstop for another Detroit World Series team.
Cubs Unis, Part II: Then Depression Set In
The Cubs enjoyed a prosperous period during the Great Depression. The Cubs won four pennants from 1929–38, taking the flag every three seasons like clockwork. Then the clock broke.
Here are the fashion highlights of a period that started out swell and eventually swelled shut.
1937: Zip Up—The Cubs were the first team to wear a zipper on a major league uniform, though they went back to buttons during World War II. The last team to go with zippers down the front was the Phillies in the 1980s.
1940: Three Stripes, You’re Out—The Cubs brought the sleeveless vest look into the big leagues. It lasted a couple of years. The Cubs also went with three stripes on the socks and three on the sleeve of the sweatshirts on several varying home and road uniforms during the years World War II raged in Europe. The stripes remained on their pants and arms as the Cubs made it to the 1945 World Series. Then they disappeared.
1957: We Are the Cubs—The Cubs enjoyed little success in this decade and in ’57, the club felt the need to explain exactly who they were. The ’57 road uniform spelled out “Chicago Cubs,” the last time the Cubs felt the need to specify on their uniform exactly which Chicago team they were (they’d also done so in 1917, the year the White Sox wound up winning the World Series), and the last time any team put both its city and nickname on a uni. The ’57 Cubs drew heavily on lines: pinstripes on the home uniform, white lines on the hats, and blue and white stripes on their stirrups as opposed to blue and red (they dropped the striped stirrups and caps for good the next year).
1962: Face It—The ’62 Cubs marked the first 100-loss team in franchise history and the nadir of the College of Coaches. It also introduced the “bear face” emblem that was, in various forms, on the home jersey every year through 1996 (with the exception of 1976, when it was trumped by the baseball centennial patch worn that year by every major league team).
1969: Count It—It was the best Cubs season since the war and the harshest finish yet. The Cubs tried something different with their numbers for the first time since 1932, placing them on the front of the road uniforms—something they have never done on the home duds. In 1972, after going to a pullover jersey, they would center the number below “Chicago” before switching the numbers back to the lower left front in ’73.
1976: Baby Got Blue—The Cubs got funkadelic in 1976, breaking out powder blue road uniforms. Two years later, at the height of the disco rage, the Cubs kicked it up a notch with baby blue striped road threads, termed “pajamas” by some. The vertical stripes made even Herman Franks look thin and cool (well, almost).