Piniella visit sweet for local school

For Connor Cummings, the fortunes of the Chicago Cubs are a serious matter.

So serious, in fact, that when the fourth-grader from Churchill School in Glen Ellyn misses a game because it runs past his bedtime, his mom's instructions are to leave a post-it note on his bedroom door so he can check the score first thing in the morning.

So it was no small thing when he won a Jewel/Osco contest winning the chance to "Take Lou to School."

"I feel good ... and excited," he said while waiting for Cubs manager Lou Piniella to arrive Friday morning. "I want to ask him which team he played for was his favorite."

Showing up promptly at 9:30 a.m., Piniella took immediate notice of everyone's fashion sense: "Everyone's got their Cubs outfits on," he said with a big smile.

Indeed, Connor and his twin sister Katie were decked out in matching Cubs jerseys, both signed by Cubs pitcher Sean Marshall. "Sean needs to work on his handwriting," Piniella joked.

Connor's favorite player is Alfonso Soriano, while Katie is partial to Derrek Lee.

Both twins love sports -- Connor plays three different positions and Katie plays softball and basketball -- and when Connor told Piniella his favorite position was pitcher, the Cubs skipper asked him if he threw strikes. "Sometimes," Connor admitted with a grin.

After Piniella promised Connor and his family a day at Wrigley Field in the coming season, he stopped in to visit with Connor's classmates in Dawn Payne's fourth-grade class.

He took all sorts of questions from the class. Why did he quit playing baseball: "I got too old."

Did he believe in the curse of the "Billy Goat?" "I don't believe in curses."

Did he like Chicago or Florida (his off-season home) better? "In the summer I like it here."

Finally someone asked him which team that he played for was his favorite. "The New York Yankees," he said.

He told the fourth-graders that he had a dream of playing major league ball when he was their age and said they could achieve their dreams. "But you have to work at it," he said.

After his visit with Connor's class, Piniella was the guest of honor at a school assembly, where he asked Cubs trivia questions and rewarded correct answers with Cubs travel bags. While Connor wasn't called on to answer a question, he said confidently, "I knew all of them."

"This is like going back to my roots," Piniella said. "These kids are the Cub fans of the future."

For Connor, a sports buff from the time he was 5 years old, his passion for the Cubs comes directly from his parents, Mark and Kelly Cummings.

"I grew up going to Cub games," said Kelly, whose family lived near Wrigley Field. Mark grew up in Peoria where "half the people were Cub fans and half Cardinals."

Mark Cummings spoke with awe of his son's ability to absorb sports statistics, recalling the day when he recited the score of every Bears game during the recent Super Bowl season.

And if his parents aren't a big enough influence, his grandmother, Kathy Harbison, makes sure Connor avails himself of every opportunity to indulge his passion.

She keeps entering him in contests -- like the one that brought Sweet Lou to Churchill -- and he's been lucky enough to win some of them.

One produced a night in a Comcast skybox at Wrigley; another got him the honor of serving as a Cubs batboy, where Ryan Theriot tossed him a Cubs shirt and he got to take home a piece of Sean Marshall's broken bat.

And Connor's knowledge of baseball isn't limited to statistics. He's familiar with the nuances of the game, such as how Piniella got the nickname, Sweet Lou.

"Because of his sweet swing," Connor said. "And the other reason is his temper."