By Steve Rhodes
One in an occasional series tracking the movements of former Cubs.
1. Tuffy Rhodes.
“Tuffy Rhodes could be tough to figure out,” Jason Coskrey writes for the Japan Times.
Sometimes, he’d flash a big smile and crack jokes. Catch him in a good mood, and you might forget you weren’t actually an old friend. Other times, Rhodes gave off an aura that said it’d be best to find whatever you were looking for somewhere else.
If he’d homered in a loss, he would shoo away reporters and tell them “home runs don’t matter when you lose.” If his team had won, nothing was off limits, even if he’d had a bad game.
Rhodes wasn’t a robot. He rose with wins and sunk with losses. He was many things, but most of all, he was human.
Despite what the majority of voting members of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame may try to tell you, he also deserves to be enshrined there with other Japanese baseball greats.
Another Hall of Fame announcement came and went [last month] without Rhodes’ name in bold, black katakana characters on the top half of the page. Instead, Rhodes was in his usual place (and typeface) about halfway down the list of candidates.
Somehow fitting. In some ways, he’s the ultimate ex-Cub, a flash, a bust, a success elsewhere and yet, in the end, unvalidated.
Posted on February 18, 2020