Wayne Nordhagen

Here's Wayne Nordhagen in old Comiskey Park on a sunny day in 1980.  Perhaps this was the same day I saw him play against Kansas City from my seat in the upper deck behind third base.  Merely by coincidence, my dad and I happened to be in Chicago the same weekend the Royals were in town.  He carved out some time for baseball, and we headed to the South Side for the games on Saturday and Sunday.  Though I had been to Comiskey the year before, I had never seen the Royals play in person and was brimming with excitement.

The weather in Chicago on Sunday, August 3rd, 1980 was beautiful.  Our front-row upper deck seats provided a great vantage point of everything Comiskey - from the expansive playing field to the exploding scoreboard to Harry Caray broadcasting in the announcer's booth.  So close to the action, I have to agree with those who maintain Comiskey's upper deck offered the best seats in the house.

Looking back at the play-by-play 37 years later, it was indeed a good game.  At the time I remember becoming frustrated with the opportunities squandered by the Royals, such as in the 3rd inning when KC loaded the bases with one out but only managed to bring one runner home.  Or in the 4th, with one run across and two on and none out, the Royals going down in order with three anemic pop outs to the infield.  And in the 5th, after Hal McRae homered to tie the game 3-3, a George Brett single was promptly followed by a ground ball double-play to end the inning.

The play that sticks out in my memory, however, occurred in the top of the 6th.  Willie Aikens led off the inning with a deep drive to right field that I knew was destined for the lower deck and a 4-3 KC lead.  When the ball ricocheted off the wall, it was a huge letdown.  When Wayne Nordhagen fielded the ball cleanly and threw a strike to shortstop Todd Cruz to gun Aikens down at second, I was in disbelief.  In just a matter of seconds, the Royals, in my mind, had gone from leading 4-3 as the ball arced high in the sky, to having a runner in scoring position with nobody out after witnessing the ball rebound off the wall, to having the bases empty with one out after 2nd base umpire Larry McCoy's right arm shot in the air, signifying the runner was out.

Nordhagen was having his best season in baseball in 1980.  He was finally a regular in the Chicago lineup and responded by hitting .277 and leading the team in home runs.  In the strike-shortened '81 season Nordhagen hit .308 platooning in right field with the up-and-coming Harold Baines.  Unfortunately for the 33-year-old from Thief River Falls, Minnesota, the handwriting was on the wall in the spring of 1982.  Baines represented the future and would see more playing time.  When Baines did rest, White Sox manager Tony LaRussa made clear his intention of utilizing first baseman Tom Paciorek, acquired in a trade over the winter, in right field.

Nordhagen expressed his desire to be traded if the Sox planned to use him exclusively as a pinch-hitter.  "That's for later in my career," he told the Chicago Tribune early in spring training.  Regardless of whose uniform he would wear in '82, Nordhagen beamed with confidence.  "I'm going to have a good year.  That's fact.  It's a matter of getting playing time."  A month later the team shipped Nordhagen to Toronto for Aurelio Rodriguez.  He would be involved in a dizzying array of transactions that season but never received the playing time he sought.  Signed as a free agent by the Cubs before the 1983 season, Nordhagen would see only 35 at-bats with the city's North Side rival before being given his release on June 9th.  Fifteen months after telling the Tribune, "I'll never be content until I get on a team where I'm given a shot every day," his baseball career was over.

After Nordhagen, in clear violation of the natural order of the universe, threw out Aikens at second on what should have been - even for the lumbering Aikens - an easy double, the KC bats went dormant, save for a harmless two-out single by Aikens in the eighth.  Perhaps energized by his play in right, Nordhagen would provide the winning margin for the Sox, homering in his final two at-bats to propel his teammates to a 5-3 victory.

I just might have seen Wayne Nordhagen at his best that sunny Chicago day.  A professional through and through, he belonged in right field.  But what happens when your best is no longer good enough?  Do you demand a trade?  Do you become a free agent?  As a last-ditch effort to make peace with yourself, do you lower your expectations?

The book on Nordhagen was that he was slow and couldn't consistently hit right-handed pitching. For all his optimism in the spring of '82, Nordhagen's words betrayed his acceptance of an impending reality:  "I've had a good career, but I'll always feel I've been cheated somewhere along the line."  I admire Nordhagen's honesty.  Expressing those sentiments publicly often invites a deluge of stinging criticism from all fronts.  But if we're really honest with ourselves, who among us can say we've never felt the same way?