100 Things Cubs Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (14 page)

39. Baseball’s First Modern Dynasty—And the Cubs’ Only One

It’s hard to imagine but the Cubs were once synonymous with the World Series. Not for missing it but for making it.

In the first three seasons the World Series was played—1903, 1905, and 1906—six different teams won pennants and there was a new world champion each year. After that, the Cubs took over like no team ever had before and laid the groundwork for future baseball dynasties to come.

With an everyday lineup and starting rotation that was young and set in stone, the Cubs averaged 106 wins between 1906 and 1910, winning the National League pennant four times. They were the first team to ever appear in the World Series in consecutive seasons and in three straight seasons. And with titles in 1907 and 1908, the Cubs were the first team to repeat as World Series champs.

It was no coincidence that the dynasty began with the elevation of Frank Chance to manager during the 1905 season. Dubbed “Peerless Leader” in the press, Chance was a 29-year-old first baseman when he began his first season as player-manager in 1906.

Chance’s fabled double-play partners
—shortstop Joe Tinker and second baseman Johnny Evers—were hardly the only stars. Catcher Johnny Kling, third baseman Harry Steinfeldt, and outfielders Frank Schulte and Jimmy Sheckard would all be part of the nucleus for the next five seasons.

And the starting rotation? The stuff that dreams are made of. Chance didn’t have to think much about who to put out there with Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, Ed Reulbach, and Jack Pfeister on his staff. If that wasn’t enough, on June 2, 1906, the Cubs traded Bob Wicker to Cincinnati for 25-year-old Orval Overall. Wicker was a former 20-game winner who finished out the 1906 season and then never pitched in the big leagues again. Overall, who had lost 23 games in 1905, twice became a 20-game winner during the dynasty years.

Except for the 1908 season that famously came down to the wire, the pennant-winning teams of the Cubs dynasty didn’t face any real competition. The 1906 club, which has the highest winning percentage of any team since 1900, went 116–36 and finished 20 games ahead of the New York Giants. The 1907 club won the NL by 17 games, and in 1910 they outpaced the Giants by 13 games.

It was not always smooth sailing. Tinker and Evers were in a constant state of war with each other, Kling left the team in 1909 to try his hand at billiards before returning the following seasons, and during the 1908 season Sheckard nearly blinded rookie Heinie Zimmerman by hitting him in the head with a bottle of ammonia during a fight.

Sure, they had clubhouse spats but so did players like Ron Santo and Carlos Zambrano from time to time without anywhere near the same success. What the 1906–10 Cubs teams did best was win, more than any other lineups in the history of the franchise.

Ed Reulbach’s Back-to-Back Shutouts—On the Same Day

Some records are made to be broken but not this one. It’s unthinkable that another pitcher will throw two shutouts in the same day let alone be given the opportunity to try.

On September 26, 1908, just three days after the famous Merkle’s Boner game, Cubs pitcher Ed Reulbach took the mound in Game 1 against Brooklyn, then known as the Superbas but later as the Dodgers. Reulbach finished up a 5–0 five-hit shutout in 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Feeling pretty good, Reulbach asked Cubs manager Frank Chance if he could go again. And so in the nightcap, he went out and this time pitched a three-hitter, needing just 75 minutes this time to beat the Superbas 3–0.

That’s an impressive feat to be sure, but the Superbas weren’t exactly world beaters. They finished with a 53–101 record and in the
Chicago Tribune
’s September 27, 1908, game notes it appears they may not have been taking the final games of the season too seriously:

“[Brooklyn manager Patsy] Donovan is trying out a new first baseman from Wesleyan college, who says his name is Smith. He comes out to practice in a bathing suit, so in case he fails to make good he can swim back home.”

40. Leo the Lip

There was very little that was lovable about ornery, irascible Leo Durocher, whose disdain for losing was so great he once famously declared, “Nice guys finish last.”

But by the time Cubs owner Phil Wrigley signed off on Durocher becoming manager following the 1965 season, lovable had been tried and losing was as ingrained at Clark and Addison as Wrigley Field. A dramatic change was needed for a franchise that had averaged a mere 7,727 fans per game the year before Durocher’s arrival.

It’s not accurate to say Wrigley let Durocher “manage” the Cubs. Wrigley, whose College of Coaches idea had failed miserably and was finally being set aside, didn’t like titles. In a prepared statement, Wrigley said no title had been given. Or so he thought.

“I just gave myself a title: manager, not head coach,” Durocher declared during a raucous news conference in the Pink Poodle, the Cubs’ press lounge.

There’s no tidy way to describe Durocher’s wild, tumultuous and ultimately futile 6½-year reign as the Cubs manager. There were growing pains, controversy both on and off the field, and one epic failure. There was also more winning than the Cubs had seen in a generation. In the 19 seasons before Durocher, the Cubs finished above .500 exactly once. In the 11 full seasons after he was fired midway through the 1972 season, they never finished with a winning record.

Manager Leo Durocher in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1971. (AP Photo/Robert H. Houston )

Durocher not only led the Cubs to five straight winning seasons—he gave them the kind of consistent, if not stable, leadership that they haven’t enjoyed since. He’s one of four men to manage at least 1,000 games in a Cubs uniform, something high-profile hires like Don Baylor, Dusty Baker, and Lou Piniella couldn’t accomplish.

Durocher is synonymous with the great collapse of 1969, and some lay much of the blame at his feet for refusing to give his regulars a day off during the hot summer months. They also point to a bizarre incident during the heat of the pennant race that illustrated his enigmatic character.

On July 26, Durocher told coach Pete Reiser to take over the club after three innings because he was feeling ill. The following day Durocher called in sick again. But he wasn’t sick at all—he had decided to charter a plane and go up to Camp Ojibwa in Eagle River, Wisconsin, to surprise his stepson during parents’ weekend.

Chicago Today
columnist Jim Enright got wind of the visit, and the story took off. Wrigley wondered out loud in the
Tribune
how it looked for the manager to desert the team in the middle of a pennant race. “My concern is that some of the players, who have been busting their boilers to win the pennant, might wonder if their manager is equally dedicated,” Wrigley said.

In his 1975 autobiography,
Nice Guys Finish Last
, Durocher wrote that Wrigley should have fired him, and according to some Durocher was fired for a couple of hours. But after a brief meeting, Wrigley’s non-confrontational personality asserted itself and he decided to let Durocher keep his job.

This surely pleased Cubs fans, who adored Durocher and many gave him credit for the team’s resurgence. On Opening Day in 1968, the
Tribune
wrote, “Manager Leo Durocher got such a deafening, standing ovation that the public address man, WGN’s Roy Leonard, had to delay the introductions of the rest of the Cubs for a few moments.”

Durocher’s arrival with the Cubs coincided with the tail end of Ernie Banks’ career, and several times Durocher tried to trade Banks but couldn’t get Wrigley to allow it. Their relationship never improved much, but at least it didn’t devolve like Durocher’s relationship with Ron Santo.

Santo was entering his prime in 1966 and his hatred of losing rivaled that of Durocher, who praised the Cubs third baseman up and down when he was hired. Slowly, however, it became harder for the two fiery personalities to co-exist, and in 1971 it all blew up.

During a team meeting in late August, Durocher and several players—including Santo, Joe Pepitone, and Milt Pappas—got into a shouting match. At one point, Durocher accused Santo of asking for his own Ron Santo Day that was being held at Wrigley Field the following week.

Santo erupted at the suggestion and had to be restrained from going after Durocher, who was also upset from the exchange with the players and nearly resigned that day. A movement to “Dump Durocher” became a cause in the Cubs’ clubhouse and led Wrigley to place a full-page ad in the
Tribune
supporting his manager.

“Leo is the team manager and the ‘Dump Durocher Clique’ might as well give up,” the ad said in part. “He is running the team and if some of the players do not like it and lie down on the job, during the off-season we will see what we can do to find them happier homes.”

Durocher survived the end of the season, and Wrigley made another announcement in November that Durocher would return for the 1972 season. But with Banks retired and much of the nucleus aging or traded off, the Cubs fell 10 games behind by the All-Star break. On July 24, 1972, Wrigley finally fired Durocher.

“In those early days, he was a son of a bitch,” Cubs broadcaster Jack Brickhouse told author Rick Talley in
The Cubs of ’69
. “But he was a sharp son of a bitch. But by the time he was finished in Chicago, he was just an old son of a bitch.”

The Durocher era was over, and for the next dozen years so were the Cubs.

41. Visit Cap Anson’s Grave

In the immediate days after Adrian Constantine “Cap” Anson passed away in 1922, baseball writers and executives bent over backward to pay homage to the first Mr. Cub.

The
Chicago Tribune
’s E.S. Sheridan, a former sports editor who also covered Anson during his heyday in the 1880s, wrote,
“Anson brought to professional baseball four great qualities of personal character that helped to make the profession what it is. He had integrity, sobriety, personal purity, and dignity—the last named quality almost to the point of arrogance.”

Anson was so revered in Chicago that a Near Northwest Side street, Anson Place, still bears his name. Off the field, he neither drank nor smoked and on it he was a brilliant hitter and strategist. Anson was the first major leaguer to reach 3,000 hits and still holds Cubs career records for most hits, runs, doubles, and RBIs.

Anson joined the Cubs, then known as the White Stockings, in the off-season before their first National League game was played on April 25, 1876, and was in the lineup that day against Louisville, going 1-for-4. Three years later he was named player-manager, a dual role he held until his contract wasn’t renewed following the 1897 season. He was 45.

According to Glenn Stout’s
The Cubs
, Anson is credited by some with inventing the hit-and-run and was among the first to use hand signals, platoon players, and pitching rotations, plus he conducted a team-sponsored spring training. In his eulogy, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis said of Anson, “I never knew him to do anything that would not bring respect and admiration.”

It wasn’t until years later that the unseemly side of Anson was deemed
okay to write about and examine. Anson, who played for the Cubs from 1876 to 1897, was also a racist whose actions some believe played a leading role in ushering in baseball’s despicable color barrier. The incident most often mentioned took place on July 19, 1887, when the White Stockings went to Newark, New Jersey, to play an exhibition game. Newark’s best player was an African American pitcher named George Stovey, who was scheduled to start the exhibition.

Anson reportedly refused to play if Stovey took the field, Stout wrote, and the Newark team subsequently gave in to his demands. The Cubs played the exhibition while Stovey sat out due to an unexplained “sickness.” Anson’s actions and those of many others resulted in a color barrier being drawn that would continue unabated until 1947, eight years after Anson was elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame.

A granite monument with two crossed baseball bats was erected after Anson’s death and still presides over his grave at Oak Woods cemetery, located on the city’s South Side at 1035 East 67
th
Street. The cemetery is open for visitation weekdays from 8:30
am
until 4:15
p
m
.

While there you can also visit the graves of many prominent Chicagoans, including that of Harold Washington and Eugene Sawyer, Chicago’s first two African American mayors.

The Father of the National League

Just down the street from Wrigley Field is Graceland Cemetery, the final resting place of William A. Hulbert, the Cubs’ first owner and a towering figure in baseball history who is credited as the Father of the National League. Hulbert also has one of the most interesting gravestones you’ll ever see.

In 1876, Hulbert led the charge to bring together baseball clubs from the Midwest and the East coast into one league. According to Glenn Stout’s book,
The Cubs
, Hulbert recognized the need to have a member of one of the East coast clubs become league president.

So rather than assume the position himself, he convinced Morgan Bulkeley, owner of the Hartford club, to become the first NL president. The league prospered and after a year Hulbert assumed the presidency until his untimely death in 1882 from a heart attack at the age of 49.

To find Hulbert’s gravestone just look for the one shaped like a baseball. Carved on either side are the names of the cities in the NL at the time of his death: Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, Boston, Providence, Worcester, and Troy.