May the Past be Prolog—Cubs Win the 1908 World Series

Cubs haters, most of whom are devotees of Chicago’s junior team, take unending delight in pointing out that the National League team has not won a World Series since 1908, 107 years ago.  Not that Cub fans are not excruciatingly aware of the long dry spell.  But we are a devoted and patient bunch given equally to eternal optimism and resignation.  Hey, it’s not like we never got close.  Besides we agree with the late Jack Brickhouse that “any team can have a bad century.”  And most of us are too damned nice to remind Sox fans that while we have not won in a while, at least our boys never actually threw the World Series and nearly destroyed baseball.  And anyway teasing about the drought is easier to swallow than hearing more crap about the ridiculous Curse of the Goat.

Ah, but this year the sweet smell of ultimate victory is once again in the air.  Manager Joe Maddon has taken a down-on-its-luck-team with a smattering of promising young players, and turned it into the well rounded contender that finished the 2016 regular season with the third best record in all Baseball—better than the leader of every other division in both leagues.  They have already dispatched one team ahead of them in the super-competitive National League Central, the Pittsburg Pirates and now seem have done the same to perennial NL power house the St. Louis Cardinals who had a 100 win season.  Now it is on to the NL Championship Series and quite likely another birth in the Fall Classic.

We can now dare to dream anyway.  And we can draw inspiration from those long-ago Cubs who last won it all on October 14, 1908.

That 1908 team also had its roots as a frisky young team, albeit one which had matured into a dominating team that looked to become a dynasty.  After sitting atop the National League for most of the professional league’s early years as the Chicago White Stockings, the team had a run of hard years and ran through a variety of informal monikers including the Colts and the Orphans. 

Back in 1902 new owner James Hart had begun to assemble a talented young team around their infielders and pitching.  The Daily News took to calling the Orphans the Cubs because of their youthfulness.  In 1905 the anchor of the famous double-play combo Tinkers to Evans to Chance, Frank Chance, took over as player manager and threw the renaissance into high gear with more acquisitions, especially the dominating pitcher Mordecai “Three Finger “Brown.  In 1907 the team officially adopted the nickname Cubs and won the World Series.  The Cubs won four pennants and two World Series titles over a five-year span.

Game 3 at the West Side Grounds did fill the stands, but was not the sell out ownership had hopped.  Note the nearly empty spaces marked out for on-field seating marked out by lines along the left and right field stands and in foul territory between the bases.

They claimed their first championship that year.  In 1908 they were back and confident.  It turned out to be a legendary season.  The Cubs took the National League lead on June 30 when Mordechai Brown blanked the Pittsburg Pirates.  The Pirates were nipping at the Cub’s heels the rest of the season.  On September 26, Ed Reulbach became the only pitcher in Major League Baseball history to pitch two shutouts on the same day completing both ends of a doubleheader against the Brooklyn Dodgers and walking away with 5–0 and 3–0 victories.

Just like this year’s NL Central, by August three teams were dominating the National League leaving the others far behind in their dust and running neck-an-neck in piling up victories. 

Late in the season the Cubs and New York Giants were tied for first place when they played each other on September 23, just three days before the Reulbach twin bill, they met at the Polo Grounds.  The game was a 1-1 tie in the bottom of the 9th inning with two outs and one man on base when Fred Merkel, the youngest player in the League and in the starting line-up for the first time, came to bat.  He singled and the runner at first advanced to third.  Shortstop Al Bridewell was up next and connected with a presumed single that sent the man on third racing to the plate.  Merkel, believing the game was won, began trotting off the field without touching second base or tagging up on first.  Johnny Evers realized the mistake and got an outfielder to toss the ball into second as delirious fans swarmed the field.  Umpires were unsure if the ball used was the actual ball—some thought it had been tossed into the stands by a Giant’s player or one that had been tossed in from the Cubs dugout.  But unable to clear the field of fans and with darkness closing in, they decreed Merkel out and called the game over as a tie. 

Merkel’s Boner would have fateful consequences for the Giants.  The season ended with the two teams in a tie with identical 98-55 records and the Pirates one game behind.  They were forced to meet for a one game playoff at the Polo Ground on October 8.  The Cubs won 4-2 and advanced to meet the Detroit Tigers, American League Champions.

This was a rematch, the first in World Series History.  The teams had met in 1907 when the Tigers, led by the vicious but supremely talented Ty Cobb, regarded by many as the greatest all-around player in MLB history despite his character flaws, had under performed.  After a first game 3-3 tie in 12 innings which was called because of darkness, the Cubs went on to sweep the next four games.

In 1908 the Tigers, like the Cubs, were in a tight, dramatic pennant race to the very end.  They finished the regular season just half a game in front of the Cleveland Naps—the teams had identical win records but Detroit played and lost one game fewer. 

Despite the obvious drama of a rematch between the two best teams in baseball, the Championship Series was something of an anti-climax.  The post season series between league champions was still in its relative infancy.  The first games had been held in 1903 and the following year the American League had boycotted the contest.  Many fans still considered the Series a gimmick to enrich the owners, who were less popular then than they are now.  Winning a League Pennant was more prestigious in the eyes of many.

Attendance for the games at the Cubs’ dilapidated West Side Grounds and Detroit’s Bennet Park was the lowest in the history of the Series.  There was miserable weather in Detroit and a massive ticket scalping scandal in Chicago, which some suspected Cubs ownership was complicit in.  Some newspapers had called for a fan boycott of the Chicago games.  Evidently it worked because attendance to Series games was a miserable.  The final game was played to a more than half-empty house in front of only 6,210 fans.  Contrast that with the huge crowds in and around Wrigley Field last night when the team advanced to the NLCS.

Player/managers Frank Chance and Hugh Jennings meet with the two umpires assigned to a game at the West Side Grounds.

Cobb and the Tigers were in better form this year, but the results were not much different.  Cubs pitching dominated most games.  And in the dead ball era when balls were hit out of stadiums less frequently than a blue moon, the Cubs excelled at small ball—slapping singles, taking walks, forcing errors, and stealing bases. 

In the first game on October 10 at Bennett Park, the Cubs came from behind in the 9th inning with six straight one-out singles scoring 5 runs for a final victory of 10-6.

The second game at the West Side Grounds was a scoreless pitching duel into the 8th when Joe Tinker’s rare two-run homer launched a six-run Cub outburst.  The Tigers were able to spoil a shutout for pitcher Orval Overall by pushing one run across. The Cubs pulled ahead two games on a 6-1 final score.

Back on the West Side, the Tigers finally got back in the series on the strength of an offensive outburst by Cobb—the best post-season game he would ever have.  He hit three singles and a double in five at bats and stole two bases with his famous sharpened spikes slashing high.  He was finally thrown out trying to steal home in the 9th.  The Cubs went down 8-3.

Back at Bennett Park Mordechai Brown through a complete game shutout and the Cubs took game four 3-0.e

Not to be out done on Monday, October 14 Overall pitched his own shut out.  It was the first game in Series history in which neither team committed an error.  The Cubs won 2-0 and walked away World Champions for the second consecutive year.

A little gloating was in order as in this souvenir post card from the previous year.

They had completely dominated their AL rivals out-scoring them a total of 24 to 15 runs and out hitting them 48-33.  Besides dominating pitching from Brown and Overall, the Cubs were nearly flawless in the field with only two error’s to Detroit’s nine.

It was not quite the end of the Cub’s dominance.  They would go on to play in the Series in 1910, 1918, 1929, 1932, 1935, 1938, and 1945 but come up short every time.  Their last appearance in 1945 when both clubs fielded wartime teams of cripples, the walking wounded, 4-Fs, old-timers, and kids as yet unfamiliar with razors, was also against the Tigers.

Loyal Cub fans, among whom I am proud to include myself, now wait eagerly to return to the Fall Classic and win it all.

 

Better Than a Perfect Game

A stunned Kerry Wood is embraced by Mark Grace after win.

I let an important anniversary slip by yesterday.  It was 15 years ago on May 6, 1998 that twenty year old baby faced Kerry Wood hurled one of the most impressive games in baseball history and became a Chicago Cubs legend.  And it wasn’t even a no-hitter.

No hitters are impressive, but a dozen or so are thrown every year.  Even the golden charm of the elusive perfect game (no one reaches base on a hit, walk, or hit batter, a man reaching on a fielding error does not count against the pitcher) has been thrown 23 times in all of Major League history, and 21 times in the Modern Era (since 1900.)

By contrast twenty batters have been retired on strikes by a single pitcher in a 9 inning game only three times.  The now disgraced Roger Clemens of the Boston Red Sox tossed two of them.  Them the other was pitched by Wood on a sunny Wednesday afternoon at Wrigley Field against the Houston Astros.  Despite allowing two base runners on a single and a hit batsman, most baseball historians consider it the most dominating performance by a pitcher in history.

Comparing it to Clemens’s two 20 K games, in 1986 he allowed a home run to the Mariners’ Gorman Thomas and ten years later he gave up five hits to the Tigers and needed 151 pitches to close out the game.  Wood only needed 122 pitches in his one-hit game.

I remember the game well, although I only saw parts of it is stops and starts.  It was my last year as a night shift custodian at Briragate School in Cary, Illinois.  I caught about the first three innings of the 1:20 start at home before walking the mile and a half to the train station in Crystal Lake.  In Cary I bopped into the Tracks tavern for a quick beer and about an inning and a half before I had to shank it to school.  I heard the final results on the pocket radio I carried as I worked, but didn’t see the mammoth celebration until I got home after midnight and caught tape on the late, late news.

Like most fans, I was immediately in love with Kid K as the media dubbed him.  He went on to have a stellar season until his hard throwing and an unusual delivery started causing him pain late in the season.  He sat out the last month.  Still, he went 13-6 in the regular season easily winning the National League Rookie of the Year.  He returned to make one playoff appearance against the Atlanta Braves but was obviously working in pain and lost.

Fans thought that Woods would be the future of the franchise, the dominating pitcher around whom to build a franchise that would finally win the World Series.

But the following spring he aggravated the injury in training camp and had to undergo Tommy John surgery on his pitching elbow and missed the entire season.

Woods struggled in his comeback year of 2000, earning only a journeyman’s 8-7 record and going on and off the Disabled list (DL).

He seemed to rebound in 2001 with a 12-6 and 3.36 ERA. The following season, he finished 12–11 with a 3.67 ERA, but did not miss a start all year long, setting career highs with 213.6 innings pitched and 33 starts. He rang up 217 strikeouts in both seasons.

Wood was a fan and press favorite, willing to face the music with reporters even after bad outings.  He was active in the community and accessible, living in Old Town and mixing easily with fans.  He made many charitable appearances and founded a popular a celebrity bowling tournament, Kerry Wood’s Strike Zone, which also featured a silent auction that raised over two million dollars.

In 2003, Wood continued to improve, setting career highs with 266 strikeouts, in a 14–11 record, a 3.20 ERA, and two shutouts.  His lightning fastball led in the majors among starters, averaging 95.4 miles per hour. Despite the control problems common to power pitchers resulting in  100 walks and surrendered 24 home runs, both career highs, he was selected as a National League All-Star and helped lead the Cubs to the playoffs as one half of Chicago Heat along Mark Prior.

Wood earned two wins in the Divisional Series against the Braves and was the starter in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series, which the Cubs won in extra innings. The Cubs lost in seven games to the eventual World Series champion Florida Marlins. In the decisive Game 7, Wood hit the first home run by a pitcher in an NLCS game since another Cub, Rick Sutcliffe, did so in Game 1 in 1984. However, the Marlins won the game 9-6 and Wood was the losing pitcher.

Repeated injuries marred Woods career. In 2004 he went 9-8 and missed more than two months with a torn triceps.  Shoulder surgery ended his 2005 campaign and multiple injuries, including a freak slip getting out of therapeutic hot tub sidelined him for most of 2006.

With his hefty contract up the next year, Woods elected to take a salary cut and agreed to go into the bullpen in order to stay in Chicago rather than be traded.  Even staying healthy enough to remain in the bullpen was a challenge.  He rehabbed in the minors most of the year and was not called up until August 1, 2007.  He was used very sparingly mostly as a single inning set up pitcher and generally not allowed to throw on consecutive days.  But he was an effective role player appearing in 22 games and posting a 1-1 record with a solid 3.33 ERA.  In the drive for another NL Central Championship he poste 8 holds and one win. 

Although he filed for free agency I was clear that he wanted to stay with the Cubs and turned down better offers for a one year $2 million plus deal.

With former closer Ryan Dempster promoted to starter, Wood competed for and won the job of closer in 2008.  He started off strong, with dominant heat and improved control.  He posted 34 saves in 39 opportunities, 82 strike-outs and was selected to the 2008 MLB All-Star Game as a relief pitcher.

But later in July the wheels came off with a deceptively simple on a finger of his pitching hand, a minor injury compared to those he had endured.  But the blister stubbornly refused to heal.  That was it for the Cubs, who acquired another reliever.  They announced that he would not be resigned.

2009 found Woods in anther league with the Cleveland Indians.  Cubs fans gave him a standing ovation when he came into town with the team in June.  But once again he was plagued by injuries, first a back spasm and then another round of an un-healing finger blister. 

The Indians dealt him to the New York Yankees on July 31, 2010 where he turned things around.  He went 2-0 with a 0.69 ERA in 24 games, including 21 straight scoreless appearances.  In the post season he had a miserly 2.25 ERA appearing in 7 games.

But the Yanks ultimately lost in a seven game American League Championship Series against the Texas Rangers.  Despite his contributions, the deep pocket Yankees declined to sign him for another year, preferring to invest in a healthier pitcher.

Wood returned to Chicago for the 2011 season, turning down more lucrative offers to play for “only” $1.5 million to stay in the city where he had made a home with his wife and family.  He was not consistent and still had time off for injuries, but his performance that year was enough to convince the club to resign him for 2012 at double the salary.

But there was trouble in spring training.  Old injuries were acting up.  Woods decided on his own that it was time to go.  On May 18, 2014 just a little more than 14 years after that stellar game, he walked to the mound and struck out one batter, Dayán Viciedo of the Chicago White Sox.  That was it.  His six year old son ran on the field to his father’s arms.  The stadium stood and cheers.  Woods told reporters, “I had fun, I had a blast. I wouldn’t trade anything in.”

So Kerry Wood never became the pillar of a dynasty.  Too bad.  Life sucks.  Being a Cub or a Cubs fan is hard.

But he still had a remarkable record despite all of the injuries.   In addition to co-holding the strike out record with Clemens, Wood was also the fastest to reach 1,000 strikeouts in MLB history in appearances—134 games—and—in innings pitched—853.