Cubs' Manager Still Calls Portland Home

PORTLAND - Tom Trebelhorn is running late. The motion-detector light at his house has gone on the blink. Twenty seconds on, 20 seconds off. Even if he could stand it, he figures it would drive the neighbors up the walls.

Good thing there's not a backlog of lawns that need to be cut and edged today, or trees that need to be limbed. Does Tommy Lasorda have these problems, too?

But to Trebelhorn, these are not problems. He might be the new manager of the Chicago Cubs, but these are the things that he does. These are pieces of his life; this is who he is.

In some ways, Trebelhorn, 45, has gone a long way from the street-hockey games he still plays in southeast Portland. In some ways, he hasn't left at all.

He still lives in the gray, stucco-finished house in which he grew up with two older brothers. He now is divorced, and three of his sons - Rob, Jeff and Chris, ages 18 to 24 - live with him. A fourth, Nick, 5, lives with his mother. In one concession to change, there also is a residence in Scottsdale, Ariz., close to baseball's winter action and the spring home of the Cubs.

He still plays the piano, just as he did as a youngster in this house. "Can play about anything I want to play, but I'm not too good playing by ear," he says. "If I have the music, I can generally hack out about anything. Mostly I like older stuff - Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern."

Baseball has been a part of Trebelhorn's life for as long as he can recall. He toured the minor leagues from Bend to Batavia, from Boise to Burlington to Birmingham, and he had his dreams.

But he never came close to dreams of this magnitude back in seventh grade.

"I used to go watch Cleveland High School play at Powell Park, and think it would be a dream come true if some day I could put on a green and white uniform and play for that team," he said.

Trebelhorn played for Cleveland, all right, then went on to catch for Portland State for four years. He "could catch it all right, and throw it so-so," and expected to be drafted after batting .340 in his senior year.

And he was, but not quite how he had pictured it would be. Hawaii of the Pacific Coast League was trying to go independent at the time and had been awarded some supplemental picks in the draft. The Islanders drafted Trebelhorn and assigned him to their farm team in Bend, Ore.

He stayed with baseball a long time and in a lot of places. But he always came back to Portland when the summer was done, first to work on an advanced degree at Portland State, then to teach in Portland.

There were a couple of times he seriously considered giving up baseball and making teaching a lifetime vocation. Years spent riding minor-league buses can cause such thoughts.

Always, though, when he came to a crossroads something would happen that made baseball the right thing to do.

He finally summered in Portland in 1978 when he was a coach with the Portland Beavers of the PCL, the team that once was too big for his dreams when he would go watch it play.

Trebelhorn started the 1986 season as third-base coach for the Milwaukee Brewers and then took over as interim manager for the final nine games of the season after George Bamberger resigned.

The Brewers brought Trebelhorn back as manager the next season, then for four seasons after that. His career record with the team was 422-397, but his contract was not renewed after the 1991 season.

He spent the next two years as a coach with the Cubs, then was named manager of the Chicago team Oct. 13.

In 1987, Trebelhorn's first as manager of the Brewers, Sports Illustrated and Baseball America named him manager of the year. Still, it wasn't quite like this.

"People are far more intrigued by the fact that I'm managing the Cubs than they were that I was managing the Brewers," he said.

"I never made it as a player, but this will be my 10th year in the big leagues (as a coach and a manager). I'm still amazed by that."

Trebelhorn doesn't get a lot of time in Portland these days, and it could be even less in the future. "But I like living here," he said. "I think the quality of life is exceptional. It's a good place to be, and I like being able to drive across town in 20 minutes."