Dallas Green may have been a pretty good judge of talent (he brought Maddux, Palmeiro, Sandberg, Dawson, Grace, Smith, Moyer, Dunston, Suttcliffe, et al to the team), and he may have been gotten the Cubs as close to the World Series as anyone else has, but he was also known for his prickly personality—not exactly the kind of personality you look for in a general manager. As a matter of fact, he had a ruthless streak. When he fired Billy Connors, a former Cubs pitcher and a widely respected pitching coach (after the 1986 season), he did it while Connors was in the hospital recovering from hip replacement surgery. According to the book “Cubs Journal”, Green pulled up to the hospital, left the car running, went up to Connors’ room and fired him, and then came back down to his car and drove away. Dallas Green resigned just over a year later, on October 29, 1987. He might have been difficult to deal with, but there’s no question that Green was one of the best general managers in Cubs history. In his post baseball life, Dallas suffered an unspeakable tragedy. His granddaughter was one of the victims in the shooting spree that also injured congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
