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.

October 12, 1907: The Cubs Win In the Snow

Opposing managers Frank Chance (left) and Hughie Jennings.

It hadn't started snowing yet, but a sweater was a good idea.

October 12, 1907: The Chicago Cubs win the World Series. Having lost it the year before to the crosstown White Sox, this is sweet redemption for them.

It wasn't quite revenge, as the opponents were the Detroit Tigers. But it was a dish served cold. There was no choice: Temperature-wise, this was the coldest World Series ever.

Game 1 was played at the West Side Grounds in Chicago, and no winner could be found: It went 12 innings before the umpires called it due to darkness. There was some retroactive appropriateness to this: The Cubs were the last team in the major leagues to put lights up at their home stadium, in 1988; while the Tigers were the last team in the American League to do so, in 1948.

This was the 1st World Series game for Tigers superstar Ty Cobb, 2 months shy of his 21st birthday. "Wild" Bill Donovan of the Tigers struck out 12 batters, matching the Series record set by Ed Walsh of the White Sox the year before. That record stood until 1929, when Howard Ehmke of the Philadelphia Athletics struck out 13 Cubs. The record was raised to 14, by Carl Erskine of the 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers; 15, by Sandy Koufax of the 1963 Los Angeles Dodgers; and the current mark of 17, by Bob Gibson of the 1968 St. Louis Cardinals.

Game 2 was also played in Chicago. For the 1st, and perhaps only, time in World Series history, the "hidden-ball trick" is successfully tried. In Game 2 at the West Side Grounds, Detroit Tigers 3rd baseman Bill Coughlin tags out Cub center fielder Jimmy Slagle, who is leading off the base.

It didn't help the Tigers much. Their 2nd baseman Herman "Germany" Schaefer was caught stealing, and Tiger manager Hughie Jennings, the star shortstop of the 1890s Baltimore Orioles dynasty, argued the call, becoming the 1st manager to be thrown out of a World Series game, by umpire Hank O'Day. The Cubs won, 3-1. Game 3 was also played in Chicago. With considerably less controversy, the Cubs won again, 5-1.

The Series shifted to Bennett Park in Detroit for Game 4. A triple by Cobb led to the Tigers' 1st run, but it turned out to be the only run, as the Cubs won, 6-1. And in a chilly Game 5, with snow falling, and the lowest attendance in World Series history, only 7,370 fans, Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown pitched a 7-hit shutout to outpitch George Mullin, and the Cubs won, 2-0.

Frank Chance, the Cubs' manager and 1st baseman known as "The Peerless Leader," was only 30 years old. He remains the youngest manager ever to win the World Series.

There would not be snow at a World Series game again for 90 years, until Game 4 in 1997, in Cleveland. That Series had the greatest extremes of temperature: While the 3 games in Cleveland were cold, the 4 games in the Miami suburbs were hot.

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October 12, 1907 was a Saturday. Among the notable college football games played that day were these:

* Army beat Trinity College of Connecticut, 12-0 on The Plain on the U.S. Military Academy grounds in West Point, New York.

* Navy and Vanderbilt played to a tie, 6-6 at Worden Field on the Naval Academy grounds in Annapolis, Maryland.

* The Carlisle Indian School beat Syracuse, 14-6 at Archbold Stadium in Syracuse, New York.

* Rutgers lost to Lehigh, 16-6 at Neilson Field in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

* Princeton beat Villanova, 45-5 at University Field in Princeton, New Jersey.

* The Western University of Pennsylvania beat their neighbors, Carnegie Tech, 6-0 at Exposition Park in Pittsburgh. In 1908, WUP became the University of Pittsburgh. In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, and became Carnegie-Mellon University.

* In what would later become a major rivalry, the University of Michigan beat Michigan State Agricultural College, 46-0 at Ferry Field in Ann Arbor. MSAC became Michigan Agricultural College in 1909, Michigan State College in 1925, and Michigan State University in 1955.

* In what was already a major rivalry, Texas and Texas A&M played to a tie, 0-0 at Gaston Park, the Texas League baseball park in Dallas.

And in English soccer, Woolwich Arsenal, the South-East London team that would later become Arsenal F.C., the North London team I support, went to Birmingham in the West Midlands, and beat Aston Villa, 1-0 at Villa Park.

June 12, 1902: The 1st MLB Game Called Due to a Tornado

Bennett Park

June 12, 1902: The Baltimore Orioles are leading the Detroit Tigers, 9-3 after 7 innings at Bennett Park in Detroit. But it had been windy all game, and there were reports of a tornado nearby. The umpires met with the managers, Frank Dwyer of Detroit and John McGraw of Baltimore, and agreed to stop the game.

It was the 1st time a game in what would eventually be called Major League Baseball was stopped due to a tornado warning. Through June 12, 2022, it remains the only one.

The winning pitcher was Harry Howell, no relation to the Hockey Hall-of-Famer of the same name. The Orioles scored 6 runs in the top of the 2nd inning, and coasted from there.

A few days after this, a metaphorical tornado hit the Orioles: McGraw bolted them for the New York Giants of the National League, leading to the American League eliminating the Baltimore franchise after the season, and establishing its own franchise in New York, which would become the Yankees.

Bennett Park was torn down after the 1911 season. The field was realigned, and a new ballpark opened on the site in 1912, named Navin Field after the team's new owner, Frank Navin. He died shortly after the Tigers won the 1935 World Series. For the 1938 season, new owner Walter Briggs had the park completely double-decked, and renamed it Briggs Stadium. In 1961, new owner John Fetzer renamed it Tiger Stadium.

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June 12, 1902 was a Thursday. The next day, a Friday the 13th, in Baltimore, a 7-year-old boy was taken from his parents a mile away to St. Mary's Industrial School, a Catholic-run part vocational school, part reform school. His name was George Herman Ruth Jr. He would eventually become known as Babe Ruth. A tornado is a force of nature, much stronger than Ruth turned out to be. But not by much.

These other baseball games were played on June 12:

* The New York Giants beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 6-1 at the Polo Grounds.

* The Brooklyn Superbas lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates, 5-0 at Washington Park in Brooklyn. The Superbas became the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1911.

* The Boston Beaneaters beat the Chicago Orphans, 3-1 at the South End Grounds in Boston. The Beaneaters went through some name changes before becoming the Braves in 1912. The Chicago team, formerly known as the White Stockings and, for their youth, as the Colts, had long been led by 1st baseman and manager Adrian Constantine Anson. He was known as "Cap," for "Captain," until he got older, and became known as "Pop." He retired after the 1897 season, and the team became known as the "Orphans," because "they missed their Pop." They were renamed the Chicago Cubs in 1903.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 12-3 at National League Park (later Baker Bowl) in Philadelphia.

* The Cleveland Bronchos beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 5-4 at League Park in Cleveland. The next season, the Bronchos renamed themselves for their best hitter and 2nd baseman, and even named him their manager: Napoleon "Nap" Lajoie. He went 0-for-2 with a walk in this game. They became the Cleveland Naps in 1903, the Cleveland Indians in 1915, and the Cleveland Guardians in 2022.

* The Chicago White Stockings beat the Boston Americans, 5-2 at South Side Park in Chicago. The White Stockings became the White Sox in 1904. The Americans became the Red Sox in 1908.

* And the Washington Senators beat the St. Louis Browns, 9-8 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.

This was also the day the 1st automat opened. I have a separate entry for that event.