By Bob Markus

When things go wrong, as Humphrey Bogart noted in The Maltese Falcon, "somebody's got to take the fall." In the case of the Chicago Cubs, the fall guy turned out to be hitting coach Gerald Perry. Nothing too unusual about that. When teams with high expectations don't perform, it's usually either the hitting or pitching coach who pays the price, inevitably followed by the manager. In this case the manager, Lou Piniella, is virtually sack proof, having led the Cubs to division championships in each of his two seasons at the helm. Going into this season the Cubs were the consensus choice--along with the New York Mets--to be the National league representative in the world series. How anyone could be so presumptive, at least as far as the Cubs are concerned, is a mystery that Sam Spade himself couldn't solve. With apologies to W.H. Longfellow, hardly a man is now alive who remembers the Cubs of '45, the last Cubs team to reach the world series.

One of the reasons this was supposed to be that mythical "next year" Cubs fans have yearned for for more than a century was an offense that had scored the most runs in the National league a year ago--under the aegis of Gerald Perry. Now they were supposed to be even more potent since general manager Jim Hendry had signed Milton Bradley to a free agency contract. Bradley, who carries more baggage than a hotel bell hop, was coming off a season where he'd hit .321 and a career high 22 home runs. To make room for Bradley, Hendry had traded the versatile Mark DeRosa, who had 21 homers, also a career high, and played three infield positions plus the outfield for the Cubs. He also drove in four runs during the Cubs colossal choke job in the division championship series against the Dodgers. That was four more than the combined number of the Cubs four biggest sluggers--Aramis Ramirez, Derrek Lee, Alfonso Soriano, and Geovany Soto. The two moves, whether related or not, have turned out to be a massive mistake and if it had not been for Hendry's previous record of solid moves in building the team into a contender, it might have been his head that rolled instead of Perry's.

Perry was replaced by Von Joshua, who had performed a similar role for the crosstown White Sox from 1998-2001. More recently, Joshua had been the Cubs minor league hitting instructor, where he had tutored some of the current players like Ryan Theriot and Mike Fontenot. Both, while expressing regret at Perry's dismissal, said they felt comfortable with Joshua and gave him credit for some of their success. Of course, just how important a hitting coach is on a major league team is a matter of conjecture. Certainly they are changed more frequently than Imelda Marcos changed her shoes.

Very few men have made much of an imprint on the game in the role of hitting instructor. Probably the most famous was Charlie Lau, who first made his mark with the Kansas City Royals, where George Brett gave him much of the credit for Brett's becoming a Hall of Fame hitter. Lau's underlying principle was to hit the ball to all fields. Brett reached the 30 mark in home runs only once in his long career, despite possessing enormous power. I once saw him hit a ball almost to the roof of Yankee Stadium. Lau later came to the White Sox during a period when I was covering the team on a daily basis. After a while I could see Lau's influence in the way a hitter swung the bat, with a level stroke, releasing the top hand at impact. Lau himself was only a .255 lifetime batter in 11 major league seasons.

That is fairly typical of hitting instructors. Perr was a .265 hitter over 13 seasons with 59 total home runs. Merv Rettenmund, a well-regarded hitting coach, had just 66 career homers. Tommy McCraw, a classy first baseman for the White Sox when I first covered him was a lifetime .246 hitter with 75 home runs, never more than 11 in one season. Yet, he, too, became a highly regarded batting instructor.

One man who broke the mold, to an extent, was Lew Fonseca, who had a lifetime average of .316 and led the American league in 1929 with a .369 average for the Cleveland Indians. But he, too, was a spray hitter with only 31 lifetime homers, although he did knock in 103 runs in his breakout season of '29. Fonseca was one of the most interesting men I ever met. Born in San Francisco, he vividly recalled the 1906 earth quake. He was a pioneer in the use of film in baseball, the first producer of world series and All-Star game films and among the first to use film study as a batting instructor. He was still coaching Cubs hitters at the age of 82, Rick Monday and Bill Madlock among them. And they listened to him, too.

When he was managing the Washington Senators, Ted Williams was his own hitting coach, but nobody could coach the ability to follow the ball to impact with the bat, nor did Williams have a surfeit of patience. Joe DiMaggio was a spring training instructor for the Oakland A's when I first met him and he was one of the first to spot Reggie Jackson's enormous potential. Whether or not he ever actually coached Jackson, I don't know. "I don't help anyone unless they ask me," he told me. That, I came to understand, was DiMaggio's abiding principal. When I wondered aloud what he was doing in an Oakland uniform instead of the Yankee pinstripes he answered succinctly: "They never asked me."