When it comes to Game 6, Paul Bako used to contemplate the what-ifs.
“It’s been a long time since I used to think about this,” Bako said. “For a while there, I just kind of think, ‘What the hell could we have done differently?’”
But what haunted the catcher about that NLCS game between the Chicago Cubs and Florida Marlins on Oct. 14, 2003, is different from what has troubled other people in the past 20 years.
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Because when you think about that accursed eighth inning, when everything went to hell for the home team at Wrigley Field, you probably don’t wonder why Mark Prior didn’t bury a breaking ball to Pudge Rodriguez, who singled on an 0-2 curveball to drive in the first run of the inning. You don’t argue with friends about why a first-pitch fastball to Derrek Lee, who tied the score with a double, wasn’t “a little further in, a little higher up.”
No, you think about Luis Castillo’s foul ball to the left-field seats, where an unwitting Steve Bartman was waiting. You think about Miguel Cabrera’s grounder that ate up shortstop Alex Gonzalez and turned the tide. You think about everything that could’ve gone wrong and did for the Cubs and how it hurt so very much.
But those events were out of Bako’s control. It’s those individual pitches he thought about for years.
“When you get to a certain level,” he said, “there are only a few people in the whole stadium that really know those granular details. And those are the differences that win or lose ballgames.”
A couple of pitches, a couple of inches, the spin of a groundball to shortstop. Little things that added up to an outsized result.
Yes, it’s the 20th anniversary of Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS, one of the most famous and most haunting playoff games of all time. It’s a pivotal moment in the history of the Cubs, right up there with Game 5 of the 1984 NLCS, the Black Cat game in 1969 and, of course, Game 7 of the World Series in 2016. It changed lives. Not only for the willing participants but for an unwilling one, too.
Until the end, the 2003 season was a special one for the Cubs, as I covered in this oral history, and the disappointment started a sea change for the organization.
Though the Cubs still had a Game 7 to salvage that playoff series, Game 6 is what everyone remembers. It’s the moment when everything went awry.
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The flubbed foul ball and Moises Alou’s freakout, the stunned reaction shots of Prior in the dugout and Bartman in the stands. How the raucous stadium turned solemn and quiet.
The feeling in the air of lost hope. No one who was there will ever forget it.
Cubs fan Steve Bartman interferes with outfielder Moises Alou on a foul ball hit by Luis Castillo in the eighth inning during Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS at Wrigley Field. (Elsa / Getty Images)Where were you when it happened? In the ballpark? At a bar? Your living room?
Kerry Wood was in the home dugout, daydreaming about starting the opener of the World Series and going through the New York Yankees lineup. Alfonso Soriano, Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Hideki Matsui … and then, all of a sudden, reality hit him.
“And I’m like, oh, s—,” he said. “I got Game 7, I don’t have Game 1.”
Wrigleyville overflowing
Twenty years ago, Chicago was primed to see the Cubs erase decades of failures, for a catharsis of a stadium and a fan base.
In Wrigleyville, the bars were charging for admission and choked for oxygen. The streets outside the stadium were closed off and over capacity with thousands of fans lined up elbow to elbow. They couldn’t watch the game or hear what was going on, but they were willing to stand outside for hours to be there for the party.
“I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: I’ve never been in any venue in my life that was like Game 6 that night,” former Fox broadcaster Thom Brennaman said. “The crowd in the stadium. Thousands in the streets outside the stadium. Police mounted on horses. The streets all around the ballpark closed off.”
“Chicago was crazy even when you’re not in the playoffs,” third baseman Aramis Ramírez said. “So when you’re in the playoffs, you can only imagine how it is.”
The Cubs came home from Miami with a 3-2 lead and Prior and Wood slated to start the next two games. But in Game 5 in Florida, young, brash Marlins starter Josh Beckett saved his team’s season by throwing a complete-game, two-hit shutout to extend the series.
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No one realized that was the turning point. And why would they?
“When you came home with Mark Prior, up 3-2, you think you’re gonna win it,” then-general manager Jim Hendry said.
Game 6 is remembered for two plays the Cubs, armed with 3-0 lead in the eighth inning, didn’t make: First, of course, there was Castillo’s fly ball to left field that drifted close enough to the seats in left field that poor Bartman got his fingers on it as Alou camped out underneath it.
And then, two batters and one run later, there was Cabrera’s grounder to Gonzalez that popped up out of his glove. It looked like an inning-ending double play. It should have gotten at least one out. It was the historical cousin to Leon Durham’s fielding error at first base in Game 5 of the 1984 NLCS.
“Alex Gonzalez may not have been the greatest shortstop as far as getting to balls and whatever, but I can tell you this: If he got his hands on it, it was an out,” said Eric Karros, who entered the game as a pinch hitter in the seventh and was playing first base in the eighth. “This dude was as clean as anybody as far as the routine play. So then when that happened, you’re kind of like, you gotta be s—-ing me.”
“We’re not here to beat him up,” Hendry said. “But if we make that play, we’re going to the bottom of the eighth up 3-0.”
In talking to the players, it’s funny how, almost to a man, they believe “everybody kind of forgets about the error” because of all the attention on the Bartman-Alou play. And yes, that play had the juicy curse angle, the human condition angle, the anguish of a fan base.
But most people, in Chicago at least, absolutely remember Gonzalez’s error as the most important play.
“It really magnifies and shows you the importance of every out,” Prior said. “And I think sometimes it gets lost in the course of the regular season. Because of the heightened scrutiny and the heightened focus by players in the playoffs, any little thing gets magnified. It only takes an error and a bloop and another single, and that one run might be it. It might be a 2-1 game. Playoff baseball is unique.”
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We also know Dusty Baker and pitching coach Larry Rothschild blew a chance to slow the game after either the Bartman or Gonzalez play. It’s easy to say now, but we were all saying it back then, too. Someone should have gone to the mound to talk to Prior. There’s a reason pitching coaches walk so slowly. Everyone needs time to breathe.
“Dusty has proven to be a very good manager, but even wonderful managers are prone to make a mistake every now and then,” longtime Cubs broadcaster Steve Stone said. “And it wasn’t all on Dusty. Larry Rothschild could have gone out there too.”
Blame it on Bartman
But would Alou have made the play anyway? How much did that incident cost the Cubs?
“The Bartman thing happened, and to be perfectly honest with you, there was like zero effect in our dugout,” Marlins outfielder Todd Hollandsworth said. “We didn’t have replay the way that we have it today, where you’d be watching it in your dugout. If you weren’t watching the play as it happened, you didn’t see it.”
“You never know,” Ramírez said. “We were leading 3-0. (Prior) ended up walking Luis Castillo, and the rest is history. In the big leagues, you can never give up outs.”
But reliever Kyle Farnsworth, as he often does, said it best.
“Steve, he did nothing wrong,” Farnsworth said. “It was in the stands, and he did what any other fan would have done. I think Moises catches that ball if no one’s there as well.”
What we do know is that Prior, after shutting down the Marlins through seven innings, was more hittable, and the visitors broke the game open with a parade of runs. After Mike Mordecai’s three-run double off Farnsworth, who replaced Prior, made it 7-3, Cubs fans were stunned into silence.
“The only thing I can hear, I’m not exaggerating, in the whole stadium were the Marlins’ voices from their dugout,” Bako said. “It was so quiet it was like (an) extended spring training game on a backfield.”
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Meanwhile, Bartman, that poor fan, had to be escorted out of the park. The footage in ESPN’s 2011 documentary “Catching Hell” showed the visceral, frightening reactions of Cubs fans against him.
From his booth, Brennaman saw Fox’s role in telecasting this story unfolding in real time. Later in the inning, he sounded almost conflicted about showing Bartman at all. Twenty years later, he explains why.
“We can see in the booth all of the stuff that’s going on with Bartman and the other fans. And I mean, you know, I’m hitting the talk-back button going, ‘Guys, we can’t put this guy on television anymore,’” Brennaman said. “‘We just can’t do it. The fans are dumping beers on him. They’re escorting him out. They’re throwing stuff at him.’ I mean, it was just out of control, completely out of control.”
Cubs fans were supposed to be the saving grace behind the team, but Steve Bartman found himself being cursed after Chicago’s late-inning collapse. (Scott Strazzantea / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)No one knew his name that night, but everyone saw what happened.
In Cubs lore, Sam Sianis’ goat was the talisman of the franchise’s curse. Now, it was a simple fan in a hat and turtleneck with headphones in. Cubs fans were supposed to be the engine behind this team, the long-suffering acolytes of day baseball and ivy-covered walls. Now one of them was getting blamed for the team’s collapse.
At the time, Jay Mariotti was the back-page star of the Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid columnist with a Farnsworth fastball. His razor-sharp lede for the next morning’s edition set the tone for some of the backlash against Bartman:
“Call it the Curse of the Idiot Fan, the Revenge of the Nerd, the Stupidity of the Goof in the Cub Cap and Headset Radio, a party pooper more outrageous and ridiculous than any billy goat or black cat.”
In the more staid Tribune, columnist Rick Morrissey referred to Bartman as “the aforementioned gentleman” and wrote: “Years from now, when the story is being told, it will start in the same way: ‘Once upon a time, there was a guy wearing a blue sweatshirt, a green turtleneck, headphones and a Cubs cap.’”
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After the game on TV, not-yet-disgraced Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich ripped Bartman, saying he wouldn’t get a pardon from him. (Blago wound up going to jail and had to be pardoned by President Trump.)
‘There’s 100,000 zombies’
That night, the streets were packed with devastated fans who had come for a party and wound up at a wake.
Brennaman and his crew were walking out through the Cubs’ offices to leave when they noticed a familiar face: Michael Jordan. The newly retired Jordan had latched on to the Cubs late that season. He partied with the team in Atlanta after it won the Divisional Series.
But now Jordan was refusing to leave Wrigley Field because he didn’t like the look of the crowd. Brennaman said they’d form a phalanx around him to get through the crowd and into their car.
“He’s like, ‘Dude, you haven’t been out there,’ meaning the corner right there at Clark and Addison. ‘There’s 100,000 zombies walking around. I’m not going out there,’” Brennaman said.
They left without him. Brennaman got back to his downtown hotel and met some friends at The Lodge, the Division Street dive bar that is popular with baseball people.
“It’s all Major League Baseball people there,” Brennaman said. “I walk all the way in the back, and sitting by himself is Josh Beckett. So I walked over to him, and I say, ‘Josh, you don’t know me from Adam, but dude. I’m a little surprised. You’re sitting at the bar full of Major League Baseball people when I heard you might be pitching out of the bullpen tomorrow night in Game 7.’ He’s 21 years old. He looks at me, and he says, ‘Let me tell you exactly what’s going to happen tomorrow night.’ He said, ‘I’m going to come in and stick it up their ass for about five innings, and we’re gonna win the game, and we’re going to win the World Series.’”
Meanwhile, Wood said he slept fine that night. He wasn’t going on short rest. This was his normal routine.
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As confident as Beckett was and as relaxed as Wood tried to be, Cubs fans were gnashing their teeth and crying in their beers. Even those not old enough to really remember 1984 felt like it was already over.
“There was definitely a different energy to Game 7 from the get-go,” Cubs pitcher Shawn Estes said.
In that game, Wood homered to help his cause, but it wasn’t enough, as the Marlins piled on runs against him in the fifth, sixth and seventh innings. True to his word, Beckett came in and threw four innings of relief. The Marlins won and beat the Yankees in the World Series.
Unforgettable
Chicago was in mourning. As the years went on, Game 6 carried an unhealthy emotional resonance. The Cubs weren’t the first team to blow a playoff series, but this felt different.
You had a famous team, a supposed curse, a goat, heartbreak, pain, sports. All the ingredients were there. The narrative was irresistible, and the name Bartman — why couldn’t he have been named Steve Jones? — became synonymous with fan interference, with bad luck. He never went into hiding, per se, still living in the north suburbs, but he refused to engage with the story. He never aged because no one ever saw him again in a public setting. Bartman, who immediately issued a heartfelt apology statement, has never agreed to an interview. But that just meant no one could forget him. That year, on Halloween, scores of guys dressed up as him in Chicago. All you needed was a Cubs hat, a turtleneck, glasses and headphones. Harry Caray’s restaurant group executive Grant DePorter bought the actual ball for $113,000 at an auction and blew it up in a publicity stunt.
Former ESPN writer Wayne Drehs made his name at the company with his 2005 feature story about his search for Bartman and the desire to understand his own fandom. ESPN made “Catching Hell” in 2011, and Comcast SportsNet Chicago did a documentary called “Five Outs” for the 10th anniversary of the season.
Cubs starting pitcher Matt Clement lives in Butler, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh, where he is a successful high school basketball coach. His big-league career is long over, so when someone asks him when he played, he has an easy answer.
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“Well, remember that play when the fan reached over? I was on that team,” he said.
Frank Murtha, a Chicago area lawyer, became Bartman’s spokesperson. Bartman declined to be interviewed for my oral history, just as he has for an untold number of projects, some of which offered a good deal of money.
Prior is now the pitching coach for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He got a World Series ring in 2020, and he has coached on the teams that were favored to win it all and did not, including the 2022 team that led baseball in regular-season wins and got bounced by the Padres. This season, the 100-win Dodgers were swept by the 84-win Arizona Diamondbacks in the divisional round.
“I think it reinforces that sometimes the playoffs, (it’s) just kind of a crapshoot at times and who’s playing well and … who’s got a little bit of luck on their side. And, you know, things happen,” Prior said.
But that didn’t mean there wasn’t lingering regret for the players. Twenty years later, they still wonder what it would have been like to take the Cubs to the World Series. For every Cubs team, that was the goal in spring training. This one got closer than most. That just made it hurt more.
“You wish that you were part of that team that did it for Chicago,” Wood said. “We all wanted to be on that team.”
When the Cubs went down 3-1 in the 2016 World Series, they essentially copied the Marlins’ script. Jon Lester, the team’s horse of a starter, won Game 5 at home and the weight was lifted. They went to Cleveland and won Game 6 and then went up big in Game 7. And when that lead was erased in an eighth-inning collapse, well, the rain came and gave the Cubs a chance to catch their breath. They took advantage. They were the aggressors. And they won it all. The talk of curses was over. A literal dark cloud helped clear the way for a new beginning.
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That night, I wondered what might have happened if the Cubs had gotten a delay in Game 6. Would it have changed everything? It’s a what-if to ponder in a different way than fastball location. But just the same, you can’t change the past. You can only learn from it.
(Photo of Moises Alou and Steve Bartman: John Biever / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)
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