Santo gave Chicago his heart

Cubs legend with passion and with no apologies

My brother Peter, one of two Cubs fans in our baseball-divided family, called to leave a one-word message on a cold morning that was about to get even colder.

"Santo," he said, and I knew.

Many of you most likely received a call just like it, or made one yourself, and said the name just like my brother said it. Santo.

In Chicago, Ron Santo is a name that is all about heart. He wasn't the prettiest baseball player at third base, or the smoothest broadcaster. He wasn't tricky or slick. Sometimes he'd groan in the booth, or cheer, and sophisticated baseball snobs derisively called him a homer because he was such a fan.

Such baseball snobs often treat the game — and all sport — as if it were a bone-dry cathedral built on cold logic, reason and statistics. But if it is a church of sorts, then the fans know it is built on passion and tears.

So, Santo put his heart out there honestly and without reservation every day for decades, on the field and behind that microphone. And by putting his heart out there, he risked it, and Chicago understood and loved him for it.

The calls went out on Friday morning, baseball fans tolling the news that he was gone. Perhaps your heart broke a little, for Chicago and the Cubs and for baseball, and maybe for your own youth, too, if you were lucky enough to see the man play ball.

He'd stand at the plate in the days before batting gloves, stooping to pick up a handful or two of dirt. He'd rub his hands with it, rubbing them past the wrists, to dry them of sweat. Then he'd pick up his bat and stare into the cold eyes of pitchers with names like Gibson, Ryan, Koufax and Drysdale.

Baseball is a game of numbers, and Santo's numbers put him right up there at the top of the game. He was a dangerous hitter in the years of the high pitcher's mound, when dominant pitching was more important to the Lords of Baseball than the pharmaceutically enhanced muscles they embraced years later.

The fact that Santo isn't in the Hall of Fame — after a career of five consecutive Gold Gloves, nine All Star appearances and 342 home runs — is an indictment of baseball. Sure, they'll rush to enshrine him now that he has passed away, and further damn themselves for their selfishness.

Yet whatever the Lords of the Game know or don't know, we fans knew. Most of us out in White Sox country on the South Side and in the south suburbs liked him too.

When we were kids — even us Sox fans — we'd go up to the plate at our own fields and pick up the dirt and wash our hands and stare at the pitcher and do a Santo.

"It's that feeling he gave me when he played," my brother said. "Ronnie's uniform was dirty. He'd get the ball and make the play. He did what he had to do."

And that included playing with diabetes and keeping his mouth shut about it until later, when he realized that he could help kids and others suffering from the disease just by talking about it. What was even more impressive is that he did it all without complaint, without seeking any sympathy.

Later, I turned on WGN radio as ace broadcaster Dave Kaplan — another great Cubs fan with one of the biggest Cubs hearts around — was talking about giving Santo a ride home after a Cubs victory.

Santo had gone through that first amputation, and the early prosthetic was causing him problems. There was some bleeding. So, he removed the fake leg and propped it in the car as Kaplan drove.

Dave told him how he'd worn Santo's No. 10 as a Little Leaguer, then looked at the prosthetic and told Santo how sorry he was.

"What are you complaining about?" Santo said. "We won the game, didn't we?"

An entire generation knew Santo from his work in the Cubs broadcast booth on WGN radio as the color man, the analyst, the fan.

But he was a player first, and though he finished his career with the White Sox, he was always a Cub, with 14 years at Wrigley. And he played like he announced.

For those of you who weren't here to understand, back when Santo played in the late 1960s, the city was going to hell. There were riots and protests and more riots and fires. Violence and anger, racial and political, were the lyrics of summer in Chicago.

Then 1969 happened, and for most of that magical season, the Cubs were in first place and the wild enthusiasm helped heal things. And every game would start with the late Jack Brickhouse's immortal phrase, "Santo, Kessinger, Beckert and Banks, the infield third to first."

After every home victory, Santo would jog toward the clubhouse jumping and kicking his heels for joy.

"I'll never forget how he kicked his heels," Peter said. "The feeling he had when he did it. That feeling he gave us."

And that's how many of us want to remember him, on a baseball field. Jumping for joy, heels clicking like a kid, that great heart pumping.

jskass@tribune.com

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