Ryne Sandberg

Mention No. 23 to anyone only mildly familiar with Chicago professional sports heroes and they’ll no doubt focus on His Airness, Michael Jordan.

But within the confines of Chicagoland, particularly among diehard Cubs fans, No. 23 could just as easily refer to Ryne Sandberg, the Hall of Fame second baseman of the same jersey number.

Yet while Jordan swiftly gravitated to the front office after the last of his three retirements, eventually slipping into Bughatchi Uomo suits as a part owner of the NBA’s Chicago Bobcats, Sandberg was managing the Tennessee Smokies at AT&T Field on Saturday night.

“I like it, I love it,” said Sandberg, who hadn’t ridden a bus to a game since 1980 in the Eastern League before skippering the Class A Peoria Chiefs the past two seasons.

“I try to pick up something new every day, learn something new every day. I want to use this experience to gain experience so maybe one day I’ll have a shot at the major league level.”

He played 16 seasons at the major league level, winning the 1984 National League MVP award, making 10 All-Star Games, earning nine Gold Gloves and retiring with a .285 career batting average.

In one of the most poignant ironies in the Cubs’ long, star-crossed history, Sandberg’s final game at Wrigley Field on Sept. 21, 1997, was also the last time beloved Cubs broadcaster Harry Caray performed “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch. Caray died that offseason.

“The smartest thing I did when I retired, that next spring training I signed on with the organization,” Sandberg said. “For eight years after that I was a special instructor for spring training only in Arizona. For six weeks I’d wear the uniform, then that was it.”

Befitting a player who titled his autobiography “Second to Home,” Sandberg warmly says of that time: “I was able to help raise the kids and get five kids through high school and college.”

But by late autumn of 2006 he was hungry for something more than six weeks in the desert as a part-time coach and full-time Cubs legend. When your nickname is “Ryno,” you need to charge ahead rather than look behind.

“What’s fun,” Sandberg said, “is being tied to the same organization for my entire career.”

So he guided Peoria to the Midwest League title game his first season in the dugout, losing to the Lansing Lugnuts.

(Note: That last fact really has little to do with Sandberg, but there’s just something really cool about a sports team calling itself the Lugnuts.)

This fact does, however: Entering Saturday night’s action, Ryno also had the Smokies in first place in the Southern League’s North Division. The man apparently can manage the game as well as he once played it, when he became the first player to hit 40 home runs and steal 50 bases in the same season in 1985. Brady Anderson and Barry Bonds have since joined him, though both have been subsequently linked to steroids.

“It’s a shame,” Sandberg said when asked about steroids. “I don’t know what they’re thinking, using performance-enhancing drugs.

“First of all, a lot of them are illegal. Second, it’s immoral. Integrity is part of what it takes to get into the Hall of Fame. You’d think the penalties would get their attention, though it seems it hasn’t.”

Sandberg paused, then added, “It’s funny, when I was coming up you were told not to lift too much weight because it would make you muscle-bound.”

As for being bus-bound for as much as nine hours at a time as manager of the Smokies, Sandberg said, “We had some 10- and 14-hour bus rides when I was in the Eastern League in 1980. Buses are a lot nicer than they were 30 years ago. We have Internet access and movies. Very comfortable. I get to sit up front in the prime seat.”

Cubs fans should also note that Sandberg doesn’t believe the Curse of the Goat is the prime reason for the Cubbies’ postseason futility.

“There was supposedly a curse on Boston, too,” Ryno said. “Now they’ve won two world championships. We’ve just always had a piece or two missing. The Cubs have been knocking on the door the last couple of years. They’ll get there.”

Twenty-five years ago this summer, Sandberg turned in a performance that got the fans filing into Wrigley as they hadn’t in years. Known as the “Sandberg game,” he hit two homers off St. Louis Cardinals closer Bruce Sutter, the first in the ninth, the second overcoming a two-run deficit in the 10th inning. The Cubs won it in the 11th.

Shouted Caray that day, “There’s a drive, way back! Might be out of here! He did it again! He did it again! The game is tied! The game is tied! Holy Cow! Listen to the crowd: Everybody’s gone bananas!”

Some 25 years later Smokies radio announcer Mick Gillespie is working on a video about that game and that season.

“He’s a professional to a T,” Gillespie said of Sandberg. “He takes time to sign autographs every day, but he doesn’t let it interfere with his work. He tells me all the time, ‘I was in the major leagues for 16 years. That’s the way I want to do things now.’”

That’s also why he should become the Cubs’ next major league manager, the No. 23 legend who has stayed true to the same organization his entire career.