Ryne Sandberg death anniversary
I am sure one year ago today, on July 28, 2025, Chicago Cubs fans lost a name that pretty much every one of them grew up worshipping in some form or another. Ryne Sandberg died at home, surrounded by family, after a two-year fight with prostate cancer. He was 65 years old.
Sandberg was born in Spokane, Washington, in September 1959, named by his parents after New York Yankees pitcher Ryne Duren, which is a fun little detail most fans probably never knew. He wasn’t purely a baseball kid growing up either; he was actually good enough at football to earn Parade Magazine All-America honors as a quarterback in high school. Baseball won out anyway, and the Philadelphia Phillies drafted him, though he only ever played one season there before a trade sent him to Chicago in 1982, a deal Cubs fans have spent decades being thankful for.
Once he got to Wrigley Field, Sandberg turned into arguably the best all-around second baseman of his generation. Over fifteen seasons with the Cubs, he hit .285 for his career, socked 282 home runs, stole 344 bases, and made ten straight All-Star teams from 1984 through 1993. He picked up nine Gold Gloves and seven Silver Sluggers along the way, plus the National League MVP award in 1984, the same year he delivered the performance that basically defined his legacy.
That game, against the Cardinals on June 23, 1984, is still just called “The Sandberg Game” by anyone who was watching. Down late, he hit a home run off Bruce Sutter, one of the best closers in the league at the time, to tie things up. The Cardinals scored again in extra innings, and Sandberg simply did it a second time, another homer off Sutter, forcing the Cubs to a 12-11 win. “This is something that might be a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” he said at the time, and for most players it would have been. For Sandberg it just became one highlight in a career full of them. keep reading for information.
He entered the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005, and Wrigley Field later honored him with a statue, one of only five Cubs players to get that treatment. After retiring as a player, he stayed in the game as a manager, spending two and a half seasons leading the Philadelphia Phillies before stepping down.
His final years weren’t easy. Sandberg went public with his prostate cancer diagnosis in January 2024, went through chemotherapy and radiation, and even announced that August that he was cancer-free. That didn’t last. By December he shared that the cancer had returned and spread, and he spent his remaining months, in his own words, focused on making the most of every day with his family.
Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts called him a hero to an entire generation of Chicago fans when the news broke, and honestly, that’s not an exaggeration for anyone who watched Wrigley Field during the 1980s and ’90s.
A year later, that number 23 still hangs in the rafters, and “The Sandberg Game” still gets replayed every time a Cubs broadcast needs to remind viewers what a truly great player looks like under pressure.