Cubs manager Craig Counsell sits in the dugout before the season opener against the Rangers in Arlington, Texas.
Gareth Patterson/AP Photos
ARLINGTON, Texas — Before his very first regular-season game as manager of the Chicago Cubs, Craig Counsell straightened his new uniform and stood in front of a mirror. His heart skipped a beat. A lump caught in his throat. A tear came to his eye and …
Oh, forget it.
Look, some writerly narratives are meant to die a quick and painful death.
“Yeah, that’s not me,” Counsell said in the visitor’s dugout at Globe Life Field. “I hate to say it, but that’s just not me. That’s just not how I’m wired. I love the game. I love trying to put it together. I love trying to help a group of guys win. This is our group of guys, man, and I’m fired up to go into a season — a journey — with them. But sentimental feelings? I’m not good at them.”
What is he good at? Let’s remember how Cubs president Jed Hoyer put it after inking Counsell to a five-year, $40 million contract, blowing a hole in baseball’s managerial-compensation ceiling:
“Pretty much the whole job.”
OK, that works.
Joe Maddon was such a gifted storyteller, he made you think and made you feel things. David Ross could be so warm and fuzzy — and real — his emotions never seemed to live far from the surface. Counsell is, it seems, a different kind of cat than either former manager. A bit more measured. A bit more stoic. That’s cool; now we know.
Here’s something else that sets Counsell apart from his predecessors: How this season — this five-year experiment — goes is very much on him. At least in terms of public perception, it will be.
Maddon was a rock-star manager, especially when he first arrived on the North Side, but he was just one part of a wonderful, winning package Theo Epstein was delivering to long-suffering Cubs fans. Ross was a first-timer, hired with the expectation that he would implement the directives and wishes of his bosses. But Counsell has swapped shades of blue to usher the Cubs into a new era. With all due respect to pitcher Kyle Hendricks, the last remaining member of the club’s first World Series-winning team in 108 years, 2016 might as well be eons ago.
Counsell inherited a comparatively tiny drought, but Cubs fans will expect it to end on his watch just the same. There’s pressure that comes with his reputation, his contract and an enormous, emotionally invested fan base, and it isn’t going anywhere.
The Cubs aren’t supposed to be among the top World Series contenders quite yet, though. They aren’t even a consensus favorite in their division. One of those doesn’t seem to exist.
“I will tell you I don’t really care what the consensus is or what prognosticators say,” Counsell said. “We’re going to try to win the Central. We’re going to try to get to October is what we’re going to try to do … [and] winning the Central is the best way to do it.”
Besides, said the veteran of many a battle for the top of the National League Central, “I don’t think anybody’s been right for years.”
Right off the bat, Counsell’s Cubs were dealt a potentially damaging blow when starting pitcher Justin Steele went down in agony, holding the area of his left hamstring, after fielding a bunt in the fifth inning. Counsell — who talked before the game about how healthy the team was — paced grimly in the dugout, head down, as he often does when he’s thinking, processing. Perhaps this Steele episode will give us a better sense early on of what the new skipper is made of.
“He gets it,” shortstop Dansby Swanson said. “He’s really great. I think he’s going to be so good at piecing it all together for us.”
It’s why Hoyer kneecapped Ross to go get Counsell, after all. That and, perhaps, the chance for Hoyer to escape Epstein’s long shadow once and for all.
Has Counsell had even a whisper of a second thought about leaving his hometown of Milwaukee after all those terrific years?
He shook his head side to side at that one.
“[This] has been fun, been challenging, been uncomfortable in the way you want something to be,” he said. “I think it brings out the best in yourself when you have to be on point and you know there’s a new group that hasn’t heard what you’ve had to say, hadn’t heard the way you want something done. So you’ve got to be better, and I like that feeling. I think it’s a good feeling, and it’s a big part of why I’m here.”
A wisenheimer reminded him an hour before the game that it wasn’t too late — there was still time to say to hell with the new job and go get a beer and watch the NCAA Tournament.
“It’s a good time to have some fun, start the journey and start the roller-coaster ride,” he said.
The man is ready.
“I’m in a good place,” he said. “I’m in a good place.”