October 14, 1908: Any Team Can Have a Bad Century

October 14, 1908: The Chicago Cubs win the World Series. This had happened just 368 days earlier. It would not happen again for another 39,466 days.

The Cubs may have been the defending Champions, but they had a rough time getting back to the World Series. Led by the poetic infield of shortstop Joe Tinker, 2nd baseman Johnny Evers, and 1st baseman and manager Frank Chance, they battled the New York Giants and the Pittsburgh Pirates to the last day of the season -- and beyond.

Because of what became known as the Fred Merkle Game on September 23, the Cubs and Giants finished tied for 1st, and the Pirates were 1 game back. On October 8, the Merkle Game was replayed, the Cubs beat the Giants, 4-2, to win the National League Pennant.

Their opponents were the Detroit Tigers, they, too, had a 3-way race that took the American League Pennant to the final day. Led by Ty Cobb, the Tigers finished just half a game ahead of the Cleveland Naps (the pre-Indians and pre-Guardians were named for their manager and 2nd baseman, Napoleon Lajoie), and a game and a half ahead of the Chicago White Sox.

Game 1 of the World Series was played at Bennett Park in Detroit on October 10. The Cubs led 5-1 going to the bottom of the 7th, the Tigers took a 6-5 lead into the 9th, then the Cubs scored 5 in the 9th to win, 10-6. Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown was the winning pitcher.

The Cubs won Game 2, 6-1. The Series shifted to Chicago for Game 3, and the Tigers won it, 8-3 at the West Side Grounds. Brown pitched a 4-hit shutout in Game 4, and the Cubs won, 3-0. Back in Detroit, the Cubs scored a run in the top of the 1st in Game 5, and that was all that Orval Overall, the winning pitcher in Game 2, would need. The Cubs got another run in the 5th, and the final score was 2-0.

The Cubs would win the Pennant again in 1910, 1918, 1929, 1932, 1935, 1938 and 1945 -- but lost all 7 World Series. They didn't make the postseason again until 1984, including late-season collapses in 1969 and 1977, with a whole lot of mediocrity in between. Their greatest broadcaster, Jack Brickhouse, was quoted as saying, "Any team can have a bad century."

It got worse. They had a shocking collapse in the 1984 NL Championship Series. They lost the NLCS in far less dramatic fashion in 1989. They had an inspiring run to the Playoffs in 1998, but got swept in the NL Division Series. In 2003, they won the NLDS, their 1st win in any postseason series since the 1908 World Series, but had their most shocking loss of all in the NLCS. In 2007 and 2008, for the 1st time in 100 years, they reached the postseason in back-to-back years, but lost in the NLDS both times.

In the 1989 film Back to the Future Part II, the Cubs were shown winning the 2015 World Series, against a team from Miami with an alligator logo, obviously in the American League. It was a joke, because the Cubs never won the World Series. They never even won the Pennant. It seemed like a wild guess about the future, played for laughs.

It became less funny in 1991, when Miami was awarded an expansion team, to begin play in 1993, and to originally be known as the Florida Marlins, for the National League, making Cubs vs. Miami in the World Series impossible. It became considerably less funny in 2003, when a Cub collapse gave the Marlins the Pennant. And it became less funny still in the actual 2015, when the Cubs did make it to the NLCS, but lost to the New York Mets, the same team that had victimized them in 1969, though there was some payback in 1984.

Somehow, in 2016, they bounced back, winning 103 games to take the NL Central Division, then beating the San Francisco Giants in the NLDS, and then beating the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS, to win their 1st Pennant since 1945. Or, as songwriter Steve Goodman, a Cubs fan who died during their ill-fated run to the 1984 Playoffs, put it...

You know the law of averages says

anything will happen that can.

But the last time the Cubs won a National League Pennant

was the year we dropped the bomb on Japan.  

Finally, on November 2, 2016, in Game 7 of that year's World Series, the Cubs became World Champions again.

UPDATE: The Cubs have a team Hall of Fame. Inducted from their 1906-10 dynasty have been Tinker, Evers, Chance, outfielder Frank "Wildfire" Schulte, 3rd baseman Henry "Heinie" Zimmerman, and pitchers Brown, Overall and Ed Reulbach.

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October 14, 1908 was a Wednesday. This was the only score on this historic day: Football was in midweek, professional basketball barely existed, and it was too early for a new hockey season to begin.