Mike Quade Unfazed by 'Enormity' of Cubs' Championship Challenge

MESA, Ariz. -- Mike Quade is trying his hardest not to see the obvious. Now that he is immersed in the detail of things like making sure players don't slam into each other catching popups, which was on the agenda Wednesday, he can let all that other stuff go.

You know, the fact that he's now running one of the iconic teams in American sports, with a championship drought at 102 years and counting.

Quade, who grew up in the Chicago area and has worked in the Cubs system since 2003, knew about all of that before the club named him manager in November, following a successful six-week audition at the end of last season.

But the 53-year-old, four-times-fired baseball lifer knows that thinking about the "enormity" -- his word -- of the task is exactly the wrong way to do it.

"I try to compartmentalize," he said. "Managing the players and the game is one part of the puzzle, whether you are in Oakland or Chicago or Houston or Kansas City or New York. That's the good part. That's the most fun for me, the baseball aspect. Managing is managing. Baseball is baseball."

Whether Quade can succeed where more than a century's worth of Cubs managers have failed remains to be seen. For now, just two weeks into his first spring training running a big-league team, Quade (pronounced KWA-dee) is still enjoying the honeymoon. His brother kidded him that he's getting sick of reading so many nice things about him.

"Just wait till we lose five in a row," assured Quade, who has been through the baseball ringer long enough to be quite familiar with the reality of his situation.

He was drafted as an outfielder out of the University of New Orleans in 1979. As he found out just a few months ago, though, the scout who recommended him did so because he felt Quade would someday make a good manager, and he might have a good influence on the players around him during his minor-league career in the meantime.

Turns out, Lenny Yochim was right. As a player, Quade looked like a pretty good manager. His unspectacular playing career ended after five seasons, peaking at Double-A. He began managing in the minors in 1985, and that didn't go so well either, initially. He got fired by the Pirates after two years at Single-A.

"That was the first time I'd been fired at anything in my life," he said. "I was devastated. Do I go to jail? Go home? I was truly devastated, and then I had very good baseball people explain to me what goes on in this game, and then I became more resilient."

Quade would get fired by three more organizations over the next couple decades, which certainly doesn't make him remarkable among his peers. A working manager, at any level, is simply a manager between firings.

"You learn a lot from losing jobs," Quade said. "You learn from the adversity and the rest of it."

All that time, Quade had bounced between the minors and coaching jobs in the majors. He hadn't really sniffed a big-league manager job. When Lou Piniella abruptly retired last August, most of the baseball world was stunned that Quade was the man pegged to run the club for the rest of the season.

"I learned more about myself in those six weeks than maybe I learned throughout my baseball career at any level," Quade said.

"Nobody even knows who I am, and there's a good chance, if things don't go well, I may never get another opportunity. This was a heckuva moment for me, one way or the other."
-- Mike Quade on taking over as Cubs interim manager He admits now that he was anxious. It made him uneasy to get a job over friend Alan Trammell, who had been the Cubs bench coach and a former big-league manager. He also realized that this was his audition to keep the job in 2011.

"It was daunting for a lot of reasons," Quade said. "Nobody even knows who I am, and there's a good chance, if things don't go well, I may never get another opportunity. This was a heckuva moment for me, one way or the other."

Quade quickly got comfortable, though, and decided that he had to just be himself, rather than trying to fit into whatever profile he imagined would help him earn the job. Quade made some changes to the lineup, and he turned up the dial on the Cubs' aggression on the basepaths. There were the typical disagreements with players on the way he chose to use them, but Quade handled them in such a way that he won their respect. Ryan Dempster, who was not happy to be pulled from a 0-0 game early in Quade's tenure, was one of the most vocal players to come out in support of Quade.

The public comments no doubt helped Cubs Nation stomach the fact that someone other than icon Ryne Sandberg, the heir apparent, could run the team. Quade's 24-13 record was also a strong case at the top of his resume.

"Obviously, there is a special place in Chicago fans' hearts for Ryne," Quade said, "but when the season ended last year, I had as good of an audition as I could have had. The rest was out of my hands. I respectfully entertained the possibility that myself or a wonderful group of candidates would get the job, and I went fishing for a while."

A few weeks later, Quade got a two-year contract with an option for a third. Sandberg left the organization to manage the Phillies' Triple-A team. For Quade, it was the opportunity of a lifetime, but also a difficult spot. His job is to get the Cubs to do something they haven't done since 1908. If he doesn't, he'll be more than just another in a long line of managers who failed. He'll be, fair or not, the guy whose hiring pushed Sandberg out of the organization.

But all of that is just the kind of thing that Quade can't think about now.

"I hope I can stay true to the idea of doing it my way, taking every day as a new day, and making communication the backbone of trying to get the most out of the club," he said. "Time will tell."