The All-Chicago World Series of 1906 (Part 2)

For the first four games of the 1906 World Series, the White Sox “Hitless Wonders” were true to form, with just 11 hits in 113 at-bats for an average of .097—yet the upstarts had given the heavily favored Cubs all they could handle. In the latter respect only, the remaining games of the Series would be no different.
     A throng of 23,257 filled every nook and cranny of the West Side Grounds for Game 5. Thousands more were outside, the Tribune noted, “packed on adjoining roofs, clinging to telegraph poles and wires like monkeys, or fretting behind locked gates and trying to gain from the incessant yelling some idea of how the tide of battle was going within.”

FIELDER JONES

Ed Walsh was back on the mound for the Sox, just two days after his complete-game shutout in Game 3, and Ed Reulbach went for the Cubs. Both pitchers had trouble in the first inning. Reulbach was touched for a run on three hits before he wriggled out of a bases-loaded jam. Walsh allowed his first runs of the Series, through no fault of his own, when errors by Frank Isbell and Jiggs Donahue led to three tallies by the Cubs.
     Cubs fans were ecstatic, figuring that the three runs would be sufficient to subdue the Sox, who’d scored only six times in the first four games. But suddenly the South Siders’ popgun attack erupted. When Isbell and George Davis rapped back-to-back doubles to lead off the third, Reulbach was through. The Sox weren’t. Jack Pfiester came on for the Cubs and retired the side, but not before Isbell and Davis scored. In the fourth, Pfiester got only one man out before he too was sent to the showers. By the time Orval Overall finally got the third out, the score was 7-3, and it was the Sox fans who had something to shout about.
     The Cubs scored once in the fourth and twice in the sixth, again on miscues by the Sox infielders (who committed an astounding six errors among them). Doc White relieved a tiring Walsh in the seventh and yielded just one scratch single over the final three innings to preserve Big Ed’s second win of the Series. The final score was 8-6; it could have been 8-0 if not for what the Tribune called “the rankest exhibition of fielding a team of champions ever gave in public.”

     With the vaunted Cubs now at the brink of elimination, their ace Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown returned for Game 6 on two days’ rest. And despite his own rather lengthy stint just the day before, White started for the Sox. Like most managers in those days, neither Frank Chance of the Cubs nor Fielder Jones of the Sox was shy about using his best pitchers to, and often past, the point of exhaustion.
     A crowd of 19,249 packed South Side Park to see whether the Sox could pull off their miracle. The answer was not long in coming. Trailing 1-0 in the bottom of the first, the Sox had two on and one out when Davis banged a long fly to right. The Cubs’ Frank Schulte drifted back, circled, and then stumbled as the ball fell safely behind him for a double. The Cubs claimed that a policeman placed on the field for crowd control had purposefully kicked Schulte in the pants as he reached for the ball, but their pleas fell on deaf ears, and the game was tied. Shortly thereafter, Donahue doubled to left, scoring two more runs. He wouldn’t have batted if Davis’s ball had been caught. “Three runs scored where there should have been none,” Charles Dryden wrote in the Tribune, “and more disaster followed.”
     When Brown easily retired the first two Sox hitters in the second, it seemed that he had settled down, as Dryden wrote, and “might yet finish the game in his usual form.” But then he unraveled completely. Eddie Hahn singled, Jones walked, and Isbell singled to load the bases. Cubs shortstop Joe Tinker leaped and almost made a sensational catch of a line drive by Davis, but the ball ticked off his glove as two runs scored. George Rohe then singled, loading the bases again. With this, Overall replaced Brown. He promptly yielded a single to Donahue and a walk to Patsy Dougherty for two more runs before retiring Billy Sullivan, who had the dubious distinction of making two outs in the inning.
     The White Sox’ stunning two-out rally produced seven successive base runners and four runs. It also put the game out of reach. “Realizing only the most unexpected events could rob their heroes of the hard fought for honors,” the Tribune reported, “the thousands whose sympathies were with the Sox turned the affair into a jubilee of noise. The waving banners, the tin horns, the dinner bells, the megaphones, the counting of the score in unison—all were suggestive of a gridiron contest. Nothing like it ever before was seen on a baseball diamond.”
     For the first time in the Series, the home team won. The final score was 8-3. Against the Cubs pitching staff whose collective earned-run average of 1.76 in the regular season remains the best of all time, the Hitless Wonders had exploded for 16 runs on 26 hits in the two games that decided the world championship. Their triumph still ranks among the greatest upsets in World Series history.
     Owner Charles Comiskey handed Jones a check for $15,000 and told him to split it evenly among the White Sox; this was in addition to the $25,052 they were to share from the gate receipts. Jones and the players, naturally, regarded the extra $15,000 as a bonus from their grateful boss. They didn’t learn until later, and much to their chagrin, that it was really intended as an advance against their 1907 salaries.

Part 2 of 2.

"We Are the Ship, All Else the Sea"

This past weekend, every player in Major League Baseball wore a patch on his uniform to commemorate the centennial of the Negro National League's founding. The league was the brainchild of Andrew "Rube" Foster, who by 1920 had already enjoyed a long and spectacular career as a pitcher, manager, and club owner.                                        

                          

RUBE FOSTER (in suit) AND THE 1919 AMERICAN GIANTS.

     Foster was easily the finest black pitcher before Satchel Paige, and perhaps the best, black or white, of his day. Cubs manager Frank Chance called him “the most finished product I have ever seen in the pitcher’s box.”

     Foster was a master of the psychological aspects of pitching. “The real test comes when you are pitching with men on bases,” he explained. “Do not worry. Try to appear jolly and unconcerned. I have smiled often with the bases full with two strikes and three balls on the batter. This seems to unnerve them. In other instances, where the batter appears anxious to hit, waste a little time on him, and when you think he realizes his position and everybody is yelling at him to hit it out, waste a few balls and try his nerve. The majority of times you will win out by drawing him into hitting at a wide one.”

     Foster was already the most famous black player in baseball when he started up his own club, the Chicago American Giants, in 1910. He leased South Side Park, an 8,000-seat edifice at 39th and Wentworth, from John Schorling, a saloonkeeper and the son-in-law of Charles Comiskey (whose White Sox were just moving into their palatial new home at 35th and Shields). For years, Comiskey would reap tidy profits from black baseball while stressing the need to keep the major leagues all-white.   

     Foster's new team was a juggernaut. “He put on all the plays and he had the type of men that could do just what he wanted them to do,” Buck O’Neil said. “Can you imagine a ballclub with eight or nine Rickey Hendersons? This was the Chicago American Giants in 1911, 1912."

     The American Giants played few games in Chicago. Instead, they traveled throughout the Midwest, West, and even the South, going to places where few black teams had dared to play. They dressed in the most stylish suits, rode the rails in a private Pullman car, and became black America’s team. In every dusty town they went through, the African-American community greeted Foster as a hero. 

     “I shall never forget the first time I saw Rube Foster,” said Dave Malarcher of Louisiana. “I never saw such a well-equipped ballclub in my whole life. I was astounded. Every day they came out in a different set of beautiful uniforms, all kinds of bats and balls, all the best of equipment.” If one of the local players showed especially well against his club, Foster was liable to sign him up on the spot; this was the equivalent of winning the lottery for a young black man living in the Deep South at the time. Malarcher himself was among the players who experienced this miracle.

     The Giants went 123-6 in 1910. They were the dominant force in black baseball throughout the teens, although they were challenged for supremacy by clubs such as the Indianapolis ABC’s, Detroit Stars, and St. Louis Giants. These stronger clubs tended to play each other only rarely, because games against white semi-pro and industrial teams generally drew better crowds than all-black contests. Taking note of this, the Chicago Defender complained that it would not be surprising if the American Giants soon “depended on the other race altogether.” But the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South into northern cities during and immediately after World War I changed all that. Suddenly there were hundreds of thousands of new fans available for black baseball.     

     Throughout 1919, Foster loudly campaigned for a league that would serve this burgeoning pool of potential fans, stop the merry-go-round of players jumping from club to club for a few extra dollars, and eliminate or at least reduce the presence of white investors in the black game.      

     The Negro National League was founded in February 1920 in Kansas City. In addition to the American Giants, the league included the Chicago Giants, Cincinnati Cuban Giants, Dayton Marcos, Detroit Stars, Indianapolis ABC’s, Kansas City Monarchs, and St. Louis Giants. Its letterhead proclaimed “A.R. Foster” as Chairman of the Board of Directors and as Chairman of the league’s governing body, the National Association of Colored Professional Base Ball Clubs. It also carried, in a swirling script, the motto “We Are the Ship, All Else the Sea.”

     The NNL’s first game was played on May 2, 1920, with Indianapolis beating the American Giants 4-2. Each of the eight teams was supposed to have a permanent home ballpark and was scheduled to play 100 games, but these plans soon went awry. The Cincinnati Cuban Giants never did line up a suitable ballpark, so they played all their games on the road. Some teams skipped league games on Saturdays and Sundays in favor of more lucrative dates with local white clubs. “Foster spent long hours in his office,” Mark Ribowsky wrote in his history of the Negro Leagues, “seeking to solve every problem in the operation. When teams ran out of money and were stranded on the road, Rube would wire them enough to get home. When teams were on the verge of going bankrupt, Rube would send a payroll advance to keep them afloat. Still trying to pump up weak clubs, he continued to rearrange player rosters.”     

     It was rocky going at first, but the Negro National League survived and even flourished. The eight teams drew a total of 616,000 fans the first year, and each made a profit. Foster did not take a salary to run the league, but an entity called the Western Booking Agency, of which he was sole owner, collected 10 percent of all gate receipts; this meant an $11,000 windfall for Rube in 1920, and considerably more in later years. 

     Foster stayed on as manager of the American Giants for the first two years of the NNL’s existence. In the absence of a balanced schedule or official record keeping, and with newspaper coverage of the league spotty at best, no one could say for sure which team had won the first NNL pennant. When the league office declared that the American Giants had, no one complained.

When Cubs vs. Sox Really Counted, Part 2

    

FIELDER JONES

     For the first four games of the 1906 World Series, the White Sox “Hitless Wonders” were true to form, with just 11 hits in 113 at-bats for an average of .097—yet the upstarts had given the heavily favored Cubs all they could handle. In the latter respect only, the remaining games of the Series would be no different.
     A throng of 23,257 filled every nook and cranny of the West Side Grounds for Game 5. Thousands more were outside, the Tribune noted, “packed on adjoining roofs, clinging to telegraph poles and wires like monkeys, or fretting behind locked gates and trying to gain from the incessant yelling some idea of how the tide of battle was going within.”
     Ed Walsh was back on the mound for the Sox, just two days after his complete-game shutout in Game 3, and Ed Reulbach went for the Cubs. Both pitchers had trouble in the first inning. Reulbach was touched for a run on three hits before he wriggled out of a bases-loaded jam. Walsh allowed his first runs of the Series, through no fault of his own, when errors by Frank Isbell and Jiggs Donahue led to three tallies by the Cubs.
     Cubs fans were ecstatic, figuring that the three runs would be sufficient to subdue the Sox, who’d scored only six times in the first four games. But suddenly the South Siders’ popgun attack erupted. When Isbell and George Davis rapped back-to-back doubles to lead off the third, Reulbach was through. The Sox weren’t. Jack Pfiester came on for the Cubs and retired the side, but not before Isbell and Davis scored. In the fourth, Pfiester got only one man out before he too was sent to the showers. By the time Orval Overall finally got the third out, the score was 7-3, and it was the Sox fans who had something to shout about.
     The Cubs scored once in the fourth and twice in the sixth, again on miscues by the Sox infielders (who committed an astounding six errors among them). Doc White relieved a tiring Walsh in the seventh and yielded just one scratch single over the final three innings to preserve Big Ed’s second win of the Series. The final score was 8-6; it could have been 8-0 if not for what the Tribune called “the rankest exhibition of fielding a team of champions ever gave in public.”

     With the vaunted Cubs now at the brink of elimination, their ace Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown returned for Game 6 on two days’ rest. And despite his own rather lengthy stint just the day before, White started for the Sox. Like most managers in those days, neither Frank Chance of the Cubs nor Fielder Jones of the Sox was shy about using his best pitchers to, and often past, the point of exhaustion.
     A crowd of 19,249 packed South Side Park to see whether the Sox could pull off their miracle. The answer was not long in coming. Trailing 1-0 in the bottom of the first, the Sox had two on and one out when Davis banged a long fly to right. The Cubs’ Frank Schulte drifted back, circled, and then stumbled as the ball fell safely behind him for a double. The Cubs claimed that a policeman placed on the field for crowd control had purposefully kicked Schulte in the pants as he reached for the ball, but their pleas fell on deaf ears, and the game was tied. Shortly thereafter, Donahue doubled to left, scoring two more runs. He wouldn’t have batted if Davis’s ball had been caught. “Three runs scored where there should have been none,” Charles Dryden wrote in the Tribune, “and more disaster followed.”
     When Brown easily retired the first two Sox hitters in the second, it seemed that he had settled down, as Dryden wrote, and “might yet finish the game in his usual form.” But then he unraveled completely. Eddie Hahn singled, Jones walked, and Isbell singled to load the bases. Cubs shortstop Joe Tinker leaped and almost made a sensational catch of a line drive by Davis, but the ball ticked off his glove as two runs scored. George Rohe then singled, loading the bases again. With this, Overall replaced Brown. He promptly yielded a single to Donahue and a walk to Patsy Dougherty for two more runs before retiring Billy Sullivan, who had the dubious distinction of making two outs in the inning.
     The White Sox’ stunning two-out rally produced seven successive base runners and four runs. It also put the game out of reach. “Realizing only the most unexpected events could rob their heroes of the hard fought for honors,” the Tribune reported, “the thousands whose sympathies were with the Sox turned the affair into a jubilee of noise. The waving banners, the tin horns, the dinner bells, the megaphones, the counting of the score in unison—all were suggestive of a gridiron contest. Nothing like it ever before was seen on a baseball diamond.”
     For the first time in the Series, the home team won. The final score was 8-3. Against the Cubs pitching staff whose collective earned-run average of 1.76 remains the best of all time, the Hitless Wonders had exploded for 16 runs on 26 hits in the two games that decided the world championship. Their triumph still ranks among the greatest upsets in World Series history.
     Owner Charles Comiskey handed Jones a check for $15,000 and told him to split it evenly among the White Sox; this was in addition to the $25,052 they were to share from the gate receipts. Jones and the players, naturally, regarded the extra $15,000 as a gift from their grateful boss. They didn’t learn until later, and much to their chagrin, that it was really intended as an advance against their 1907 salaries.

Part 2 of 2.

Excerpted from Heydays: Great Stories in Chicago Sports
(c) by Christopher Tabbert