Craig Counsell was leaving a meeting with Chicago Cubs prospects when he heard it.
“On the way out the door, one of the kids goes, ‘Chicken runs at midnight,’” Counsell said. “I mean, just like out of the blue.”
Counsell, the new manager of the Cubs, is the chicken. And he once successfully ran at midnight, well before these prospects were born. That phrase has followed him from Miami to Arizona to Milwaukee and now to Chicago.
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“I love to tell players that story and not just because I’m in it,” Counsell said. “It’s just a great story.”
Now, in baseball, there are great stories everywhere you look. Bawdy stories, funny stories, stories of triumph, stories of failure.
Scouts tell stories in minor-league ballparks. Players tell them to each other in the clubhouse. Tales, both tall and real, unfurl in press boxes, dining rooms, hotel bars, the batting cage, the dugout. With the languid pace of the season — starting in the winter in Arizona and Florida and finishing in the chill of the fall — there is plenty of time to spin a gripping yarn.
Few have been better at telling baseball stories than a man named Rich Donnelly, a longtime coach in the minors and big leagues, best known for his close relationship with Hall of Fame manager Jim Leyland.
Most of Donnelly’s stories are the classic baseball fare, the kind that make you laugh until your sides ache, but the one that has lasted the longest is the one that’s closest to his heart. It’s about his daughter Amy and Counsell. It’s about baseball and family and regret and hope and belief.
“Twenty-five years later, it still resonates with a lot of people,” Donnelly said. “And it resonates with me every day. Every day.”
In the early 1990s, Donnelly was a third-base coach for the Pittsburgh Pirates. On a car ride after Game 5 of the 1992 NLCS, Amy, who lived with her mother in Texas, asked him what he was yelling to base runners with his hands cupped around his face. Amy, who was 18, came up with a nonsensical phrase that sounded like some sort of secret code: “The chicken runs at midnight.”
The family laughed and laughed, which was needed. Amy was sick. Really sick. She was undergoing radiation treatments in Texas for a malignant tumor in her brain. But she loved that Pirates team and she loved her dad.
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The Pirates lost that NLCS in heart-wrenching fashion, and that January, the Donnelly family, which was split between Texas and Ohio, lost Amy. After she passed away, they had the phrase engraved on her tombstone. And the years following, the grieving family kept the saying on their lips and in their minds.
With the Pirates spiraling, Donnelly followed Leyland to Miami, where they’d coach the now free-spending Marlins starting in 1997.
In need of a defensively sound second baseman that season, Florida traded for Counsell, a little-known minor leaguer with the Rockies that a Marlins coach had become enamored with. Counsell soon started to produce and quickly became a favorite of Donnelly’s sons Tim and Mike, who worked as clubhouse assistants that summer. Rich would constantly find them at his locker.
They called Counsell “The Chicken” because of his unorthodox, elbow-flapping batting stance. But they never told him they called him that because they were worried he’d be offended. It was another family joke.
Fast forward to the World Series. It was Counsell, by now an integral part of a star-studded lineup, who tied Game 7 with a sacrifice fly and it was Counsell who came up in the bottom of the 11th against Cleveland pitcher Charles Nagy. He reached on an error, made his way to Donnelly coaching third base, and it was Counsell who scored the winning run to make the Marlins World Series champions.
As the team celebrated on the field, young Tim Donnelly raced out to hug his father and told him of what he saw from the far end of the dugout — a clock showing it was just after 12 as Counsell raced home. The Chicken actually ran at midnight. Rich fell to his knees and he couldn’t stop crying. He was sure it was a message from Amy. He didn’t know what it meant, not yet, but it was clearly a message.
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“It was like a miracle,” he said. “And I am not a miracle believer.”
It spread, slowly at first, but in 1999, the Lifetime network did a short TV feature about it. By the 2000 season, Donnelly was coaching on the Rockies and Counsell was with the Diamondbacks, and they connected in spring training. Counsell was kind of confused by his role in this tale. When he got the full picture from Donnelly, he was enthralled.
“I was blown away,” Counsell said. “I’m really just lucky to be a character in the story. Just a small part of it. It’s a great story about family in baseball.”
The two would later connect in Milwaukee, where Rich coached and Counsell played, and over the years, Donnelly would talk about “The Chicken Runs at Midnight” to baseball players, to church groups, to radio hosts, to anyone who would listen, really. He felt that was Amy’s wish. He grew more religious, he tried to better himself and his relationships with family. He and the writer Tom Friend collaborated on a book about it that was published in 2018. There’s talk about making a movie.
“I enjoy doing it,” Donnelly said. “And hopefully we can help some people out along the way.”
Counsell, a Catholic kid who went to Notre Dame, doesn’t consider himself a religious man, but he likes the story for what it is and he, too, retells it often.
“If the Lord had to pick out a kid to be the focal point of the story, he couldn’t have picked a better guy than Counse,” Donnelly said.
When baseball had its player’s choice nickname jerseys in 2017, Counsell honored the Donnellys by wearing “The Chicken” on his back, even though no one actually called him that. (His playing nickname was Rudy, for obvious reasons.) Donnelly was floored by the move, which he didn’t know was coming.
“Every time I see Counse, I think crazily that there’s a part of Amy in that game that he’s managing,” Donnelly said. “And I root like hell for him.”
Everywhere Counsell goes, it seems, he has people rooting like hell for him. In Chicago, it’s the Parkins family, which is dealing with a very similar loss as the Donnellys. But it’s a more recent one that also is affecting Counsell.
“When this hire happened, I got texts from my childhood neighbor, who I haven’t seen in 20 years, who remembered, ‘Hey, your guy got hired as the manager,'” said Danny Parkins, an afternoon host on 670 The Score.
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Just months after losing his father to dementia, Parkins lost his older brother Brad to glioblastoma on Easter. Brad Parkins, who passed away at 53, grew up in Whitefish Bay, Wis. (he and Danny, who grew up on the North Shore of Chicago, share the same father). One of Brad Parkins’ closest friends growing up was Craig Counsell, whose dad worked for the Brewers.
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“We were the best of friends,” Counsell said.
Brad and Craig met in elementary school and remained close as Counsell became famous. Brad traveled with friends to both of Counsell’s World Series victories as a player, even starting a Diamondbacks chant on a team bus in 2001 after they fell down 3-2 to the Yankees. At the end of his playing days, Counsell agreed to help out Brad’s kid brother Danny, who was starting a radio show at New Trier High.
“I was his first interview ever,” Counsell said. “And now Danny’s a big deal in Chicago, and he’s working for the network that broadcasts Cubs baseball games. So there’s a connection there.”
Parkins, who has been on the air in Chicago since 2017, never made a big deal of their relationship on air because of Counsell’s private nature. Until Counsell was hired by the team.
With two young kids, a new house in the suburbs, a full-time job and assorted side hustles, Parkins worked through his pain of losing his father and brother in a six-month span. He went to therapy. He soldiered on, obsessing about the Bears quarterback situation and other hopeless endeavors.
The news of Counsell’s hiring shook him up in a way he was still processing back when we talked at the introductory news conference in November. On air, Danny had mentioned the possibility when Counsell’s deal ended in Milwaukee, noting the reasons why it would work, but he didn’t think it would actually happen. The Cubs had a manager in David Ross, after all.
And then, suddenly, without any forewarning, Counsell got a huge deal to manage the Cubs. Brad and Craig’s Brewers fans couldn’t believe it. Danny couldn’t believe it. How was this happening? Why was this happening?
“A few of his friends are like, ‘Is Brad pulling strings up there just to f— with us?’” Danny said.
Much like Counsell, Danny isn’t religious. He doesn’t believe in fate. He’s the guy yelling on the radio about cold numbers and logic.
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But it doesn’t matter if this is divine providence or an earthly coincidence. Craig Counsell is in Chicago and that is enough to make Danny Parkins emotional.
Brad was a Milwaukee sports fan, a Packers die-hard, but he was a Craig Counsell fan. He had his bachelor party in Wrigleyville and lived in suburban Hinsdale with his wife and two teenage children. He would’ve loved this wonderful situation.
“I’m thinking of Brad a lot, always,” Danny said. “But there hasn’t been a thing that’s happened since he’s passed that I’ve wanted to talk to him more than about this because he would have f—ing loved it. And we would have just experienced it together. So it’s sad, but it’s amazing.”
Counsell said he still thinks about how hard Brad fought during a three-year battle. And he takes comfort in knowing that this new job, which alienated him from his hometown fans, now connects him to Brad’s family. A little bit of Brad Parkins lives on through Counsell, just like with Amy Donnelly.
“I wish he was alive,” Counsell said. “But it makes me think about him often and I love that part of it.”
(Top photo: Matt Dirksen / Chicago Cubs / Getty Images)