It wasn’t long after Marc Daniels woke up on the morning of October 14, 2003, that he made a decision. He’d watched his Cubbies take a 3-2 lead in their NLCS showdown with the Marlins, and after an off-day, the series had shifted back to Wrigley Field.
He needed to be there.
“Mark Prior was throwing. It was Game 6,” Daniels said. “Prior had been dominant, so it felt like ‘Yep, we are finally going the World Series.’ And I wasn’t going to be able to afford World Series tickets, so this would be my only chance to see them in a playoff game this big. Didn’t know what tickets would cost, but I just thought, ‘Whatever they are now, they’re going to be way more if the Cubs are actually in the World Series.’ ”
Daniels, who was born in Peoria, Ill., but lived in St. Louis at the time, called his buddy Jon, who lived in Rockford, Ill. Jon was in. A plan was put in motion. Daniels’ understanding boss gave him the day off, so he grabbed his Cubs jersey and hopped in the car to make what’s normally a five-and-a-half hour drive to Chicago. It didn’t take him nearly that long.
Even if they didn’t get tickets, just being there would be unforgettable. Few ballparks in America feel like Wrigley, nestled in the neighborhood on the north side of Chicago.
“It was the perfect October night with the temps in the 50s, that crisp feeling in the air,” he said. “And you know how it is, back then especially, walking up to Wrigley. The closer you get, a few blocks away, you see more and more people and everyone's got their Cubs gear on. The feeling was just electric.”
Finding tickets wasn’t easy — it felt like half the city was there — but they eventually scored outfield field-box seats,. Daniels doesn’t remember exactly what they cost — did it matter? — but it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $350ish each. They didn’t get into the ballpark until after the first inning had already started, but their seats were outstanding, just a couple rows from the back of what was then Section 105
A soon-to-be-famous Cubs fan was in the section in front of them, just to the left, sitting in Section 4, Row 8, Seat 113.
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Al Leiter wasn’t exactly planning to be there. He was, after all, still an active major-league ballplayer; he’d gone 15-9 with a 3.99 ERA for the Mets in 2003, his age-37 season. The Mets lost 95 games that year, so his October was pretty much open. A phone call a few weeks before the NLCS changed his calendar.
“I was in my apartment in New York City,” he said. “We were living there full time when I was playing with the Mets, and my wife asked, ‘Who was that?’ I said it was Ed Goren, who runs Fox Sports and he asked me if I wanted to do the NLCS and she said, ‘What did you say?’ I said, ‘I said yes.’ And her next comment, she’s like, ‘What do you know about television?’ And I said, ‘Nothing.’ So I still can’t believe they let me in there for that series.”
Leiter was the bonus analyst on the broadcast behind Steve Lyons, with Thom Brenneman on the play-by-play. Leiter wasn’t sad when the Marlins won Game 5 to extend the series and send it back to Chicago.
“Wrigley is beyond special,” said Leiter, who has spent the past several years as a MLB Network analyst. “I thought that every time I went there.”
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On this night, Wrigley was beyond beyond special. The Cubs scored once in the first inning, on an RBI double by Sammy Sosa, and Prior spent the next several frames making that slight edge feel like a double-digit advantage. Another Cubs run in the sixth, and then the seventh, almost felt like unnecessary piling on.
“It was like a giant party. Everybody was drinking, having fun. Nobody has a care in the world,” Daniels said. “I've never been somewhere where everybody's just so connected. No matter who you're around. Whatever happens — there’s an out, there’s a hit — you’re just high-fiving everybody around you. It is just a party. Everybody's family. It was the most amazing experience ever, because you're about to witness the Cubs going to the World Series for the first time in forever.”
And to have a Chicago native lead the crowd in a rousing rendition of Take Me Out To The Ballgame seemed almost too perfect.
“At that point, there was no f—ing way we were losing a 3-0 lead, with Bernie Mac doing the seventh-inning stretch,” Daniels said with a laugh.
Even when Juan Pierre doubled with one out in the eighth, nobody was concerned. Prior didn’t let opponents string together multiple hits, and it wasn’t like Pierre, who had perfected the slap hit in his career, had crushed the pitch to the wall. It was a slapped liner that snuck between the foul line and the third baseman.
Luis Castillo was up. He worked the count full, then hit a foul ball. Then another. Then, he popped up another one down the left-field foul line. From the angle from his seat, Daniels couldn’t exactly see the play unfold. “We didn't understand the relevance right when it happened,” he said. “We saw the foul ball. We knew Alou didn't catch it. It looked like a fan caught it, and that’s all we could really tell.”
What he could see, very clearly, was fans with better angles on the play leave their seats and head toward where the foul ball landed. They were, pretty clearly, not happy. There were no replays at Wrigley Field back then. No jumbotron, no video at all. Everyone in Daniels’ section, as with every section without a clear sight line for a play at the wall, was wondering why in the world everyone else seemed to be so mad.
“Cell phones back then, especially with that many people in one place, you were not getting great service,” Daniels said. “But one of the guys behind us, his friend got through to him and told him what happened. So then it was like a giant game of telephone spreading through the stadium.”
Ivan Rodriguez followed with an RBI single. And that’s when something happened that everyone at Wrigley saw clearly: Alex Gonzalez booted a potential inning-ending double-play grounder off the bat of Miguel Cabrera, loading the bases and sending everyone in the stadium into a sense of shock.
“From that moment, there was not a person in that stadium who thought that the Cubs were going to hold on and win, unless they were a Marlins fan. No Cubs fan there thought they were going to win,” Daniels said. “Gonzalez was sure-handed, man. That guy doesn't boot stuff. But in that situation, after what just happened, if he boots it, you knew the game was over. You didn’t want to believe it, but you knew it.”
On the very next pitch, Derrek Lee laced a double into left, scoring two runs to knot the game, 3-3. Manager Dusty Baker came out to make a pitching change.
“After Gonzalez booted the ball, the stadium just went quiet,” Daniels said. "It went from a party to like someone just literally died. Like, no words. I don't think anybody really spoke words until the break between the innings. And that's when it turned.”
MORE: Four reasons why the Cubs' 2003 collapse was not Steve Bartman's fault
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Leiter remembers the 180-degree turn in the historic stadium after the Marlins tied the game.
“You mean how the noise level went down to zero?” he said with a laugh. “The complete lack of noise? You had generations of diehard, unbelievably devoted fans that were there who were with grandparents and the parents and the grandkids and they are two innings, less than six outs away from going to the World Series, that hadn't happened in forever. That whole euphoric, dramatic atmosphere went to literally zero.”
That was quite the baptism-by-fire for a rookie analyst. As Brenneman and Lyons handled most of the talking that inning, Leiter watched the replays along with the rest of America, but mostly he watched where Castillo’s ball hit Steve Bartman's hand in the front row.
“I remember I was fixated on that spot,” he said. “I saw beers being thrown and stuff the kid was getting thrown at him and guys were yelling. I tapped Tommy said ‘Hey, man, don't go back there, because this kid is in trouble.’ It was bad, to say the least. I felt for him. And I did see that there was going to be a problem.”
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The score just kept getting worse for the Cubs, of course. Kyle Farnsworth entered, issued the intentional pass called from the dugout, then allowed a sacrifice fly and a bases-clearing double by Mike Mordecai. He was replaced by Mike Remlinger, and an RBI single by Pierre made the score 8-3. It might as well have been 88-3 at that point.
With the intensity and anger reaching a breaking point. stadium security escorted Bartman and his friends up the aisle — in Daniels’ direction — and out of the stands.
“We couldn't see who it was. We just saw, a ton of security guards, fending off a lot of pissed-off fans,” Daniels said. “I didn't know what he looked like at the time because I couldn't see him from where I was, but you could tell from what was going on. They were trying to get him out of there.”
Meanwhile, the between-innings break quickly went from surreal to scary.
“I went back to use the restroom. Wrigley had those trough urinals and in there, you know, male testosterone,” Daniels said. “I heard so many people saying, ‘I know they took that guy away but if I find him I'll f—ing kill him right now.’ And other people saying, ‘Dude, I’ll come help you. Let's go find him.’ Just the mentality was, if we can find this person, he's the reason we lost the game. And you have enough people thinking that, it gets scary. I mean, I love the Cubs but even I was nervous because, seriously, if 10 or 15 of those guys find him before anybody can intervene, they might have actually killed him.”
The Gonzalez error was the true turning point for the Cubs, but because of Alou's vehement reaction to Bartman preventing him from catching the ball, it was the fan that immediately became the goat.
"We were a team built on curses. We knew that,” Daniels said. “So when you're built on curses and something like that happens, and you have someone like Alou that does what they do? He has just set this guy up.
“Think about it. If you're on the other side of the stadium. can you really tell where that ball is at? Nope. Can you see Alou’s reaction? Yep. If you see a fielder react like that, you’re going to assume that ball should have been an easy catch for him. That’s what drove it home.”
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To the surprise of exactly zero Cubs fans, the home team didn’t score in the eighth or ninth. Didn’t even get a runner on base. Game 7 had its moments — especially Kerry Wood’s home run — but the Marlins won, 9-6. They’d go on to shock the Yankees in the World Series, claiming the franchise’s second title.
Navigating the broadcast for Leiter, the rest of Game 6 and into Game 7, was interesting. They didn’t want to keep showing Bartman, but it was what everyone was talking about — especially the day of Game 7 — so they couldn’t ignore it.
“I think the story for me was like, I guess it's just not meant to be,” Leiter said. “The Cubs are four or five outs away from going to their first World Series in however many years, and then something fluky and crazy like that happens, and it blows up into an eight-run inning.
“And Game 7, because of what had happened, it always felt like, it didn't matter if they were leading. They weren't gonna win.”
Leiter only had one other analyst assignment for Fox Sports during his time as an active ballplayer, the very next October, when the Red Sox and Yankees met in 2004’s pretty memorable ALCS.
“Seriously, two iconic series,” Leiter said, laughing. “Crazy.”
MORE: Full 2023 postseason bracket, schedule
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Even now, 20 years later, the level of detail Daniels recalled and the emotion in his voice is pretty incredible. Experiences like that, with the intensity of the highs and the lows, never really leave you.
“The crazy thing is it literally went from a party where we all love each other, this is the most amazing thing ever,” he said. “We’re all part of this together! We’re going to be part of the group that gets to see the Cubs go to the World Series for the first time in nearly 60 years! All these curses have been lifted. We've got Prior and Wood going into the World Series and we’re going to get it. Then it goes to, ‘This one person has taken everything away from us in a split second, and we're all going to get him. That's literally what it felt like.”
Daniels eventually moved to suburban Chicago, and regularly went back to Wrigley. Well, during the regular season. He lived there in 2015 and 2016, but only watched the October contests on TV.
“I refused to go to a single playoff game,” he said. “We could have found tickets, plenty of times. I was like, ‘Nope.’ I refused, from the beginning to the end, because of the Bartman game,"
He paused. "And I bet you could find a lot of people that are in the same boat.”
