By Richard J. Noyes
When they won four pennants and two World Series between 1906 and 1910 the Chicago Cubs, famed for the double-play flair of Tinker to Evers to Chance, were a perennial National League powerhouse. When the Cubs beat Detroit in 1908, it was their second straight World Series victory over the Tigers (and they have waited over a century for another). These successes are more notable given that the participants in the most famous double play combination in baseball history didn’t get along and barely spoke to each other. And Frank Chance was also the manager, not much handholding back then.
Due to an outlandish adventure, a late September 1908 game with the New York Giants was called due to darkness and ended in a tie. Except for a “bonehead” play by utility man Fred Merkle the Giants would have won. With a runner on third and Merkle on first with two outs in the bottom of the 9th inning the batter singled in the winning run, but Merkle forgot to tag second base. Frank Chance stood on second and hollered for the ball. A Giants’ player saw what was happening and threw the ball into the stands. The Cubs retrieved the ball (or got another one), and the umpire called the force-out nullifying the run.
With destiny taking completely over, the Cubs and Giants finished the season a few weeks later tied for the National League lead. The Cubs won the replayed game 4-2 at the Polo Grounds and got into the 1908 World Series. Fred Merkle never got over his blunder, and it haunted him the rest of his life.
Orval Overall and Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, two memorable names out of baseball’s distant past, won two games each in the 1908 World Series. Brown lost part of his right index finger and injured other fingers in childhood accidents, and the result was a grip that gave his sinker a late dip that elevated him to a Hall-of-Fame career.
AFTER A LONG DROUGHT the Cubs resurged in 1929 and were contenders for the next 10 years. They won the National League pennant at precisely spaced, three-year intervals: 1929, 1932, 1935 and 1938. And were runner-ups to the Yankees for the best record in the big leagues during the 1930’s. Despite these successes, the Cubs were a four-time World Series also-ran.
The Cubs lost the World Series again in 1945 to the Detroit Tigers and haven’t gotten into one since. Prospects were bright in 1969, 1984, 1989, 1998, 2003, 2007 and 2008 but the Cubs came up short in all these chances for the big prize. Like the stock market, the Cubs climb a wall of worry; but unlike many long-term investors the club hasn’t gotten a big payoff in over 100 years.
The Cubbies’ faithful grapple for a clue to this seemingly endless injustice; Chicago lore suggests that the Cubs labor under a curse brought on by a Greek tavern owner. Legend has it that William “Billy Goat” Sianis tried to get his goat into Wrigley Field for the 1945 Series and was refused. He laid down a curse on the Cubs by saying that they would never get into a World Series again. Later, in a futile effort to break the curse, a goat was brought into Wrigley Field, but all that got was a few laughs. And the vignettes that follow deliver a few more.
CONNIE, HACK, BABE AND GABBY. Connie Mack became manager of the Philadelphia Athletics in 1901. The “Tall Tactician” was a dignified, scorecard-waving leader in a business suit who won five World Championships and built two dynasties with four pennants in five years from 1910 to 1914 and three in a row from 1929 to 1931.
Mack was just beyond the midpoint of his enduring managerial career when the Athletics met the pre-curse Cubs in the 1929 World Series. The A’s went up two games to one, but the Cubs led game four 8-0 and seemed a sure bet to even the Series. In what became a threadbare Cubs’ script that often borders on farce (the sun got between two fly balls and Hack Wilson’s glove), the A’s rallied hard, scored 10 runs in the seventh inning and won the game, and went on to win the title. Connie Mack managed the Philadelphia Athletics until his retirement at the age of 88 in 1950. He holds the mark for most wins (3,776) by a skipper.
Cubs’ slugger Hack Wilson’s 159 RBI’s contributed mightily to the 1929 National League championship and presaged what he accomplished the following season. Wilson was a five-six fireplug with lightning bat speed and a love for the bottle. It was said he was a “lowball hitter and a highball drinker.” After one all-nighter a teammate asked Hack how he could drink so much and still hit. Wilson said, “When I see three baseballs I swing at the middle one.” A winner of four home run titles while with the Cubs, his 1930 season still inspires awe - 191 RBI (the all-time major league record), 56 home runs (a National League record for 68 years) and a .356 batting average. Alcohol shortened his career and led to his death at age 48.
“For years, it was impossible for me to look at any round outfielder who could hit a long ball without deciding I had found myself another Hack Wilson.” -Bill Veeck
PACKING HEAT IN THE WINDY CITY. Midway through the 1932 season shortstop Bill Jurges was shot twice in a Chicago hotel room by a jilted girlfriend with a less-than-perfect aim. The wounds were fixed, and Jurges rejoined the team a few weeks later. The Cubs won the National League pennant, but the shooting was not a good World Series omen.
In 1949, ex-Cub Eddie Waitkus visited Chicago with his new team, the Philadelphia Phillies. He was shot and seriously injured in the Edgewater Beach hotel by an unhinged female stalker who became obsessed with Waitkus during his time with the Cubs. He survived to play again. It is generally believed that the book and film The Natural was loosely based on the Jurges and Waitkus shootings.
Getting back to 1932, The New York Yankees swept the Cubs in the World Series (minus Hack Wilson who had been traded to the Brooklyn Dodgers). Among a barrage of Yankee hits, Babe Ruth’s “called shot” made the series memorable. In the fifth inning of game three Ruth pointed to the center-field bleachers. On the next pitch he launched a mammoth home run in that direction. The Babe was getting a riding from the Cubs’ bench, and some say he gestured toward the dugout. However, film of the incident appears to show Ruth pointing toward the outfield. Posterity likes that version better.
TIGERS’ REVENGE. In 1935, the Cubs met the Detroit Tigers for the first time since they beat them consecutively in the World Series of 1907 and 1908. Led by the hitting of Pete Fox, Charlie Gehringer, and Mickey Cochrane, who singled and scored the winning run in the ninth inning of game six, the Tigers won the Series four games to two.
The highlight of the 1935 Cubs’ season was future Hall-of-Fame catcher Gabby Hartnett’s “Homer in the Gloamin’.” The Cubs and Pittsburgh Pirates battled for the pennant in the final days of the season when player/manager Hartnett beat the Pirates with a two-out, 0-2 count home run onto Waveland Avenue in the gathering Wrigley Field darkness as the game was about to be called. The Cubs went on to win the pennant on the most famous home run in their history, but, in a repeat of 1932, the New York Yankees swept them in the World Series.
CLAWED AGAIN. The 1945 World Series began less than two months after the end of World War Two. Organized baseball’s ability to survive had become increasingly precarious through each succeeding year of the war as the pool of able-bodied players steadily depleted. Since the Cubs and Tigers had the deepest pools, it was no surprise that both teams led their leagues.
The sizzling hitting of perennial all-star third baseman“Smiling Stan” Hack (he was also the Cubs’ hitting star of the 1938 World Series loss to the Yankees) and the pitching of Hank Borowy (who was acquired in mid-season from the Yankees) propelled the Cubs into game seven. Then, in a losing wager, they pitched Borowy on one day’s rest; he was chased, and the Cubs lost another World Series. Their search for the big prize was 100-years old in 2008. (Has any other team, in any major sport, gone 100 years without winning a title?)
The overall quality of play in the 1945 World Series was spotty, with the two teams committing a bunch of errors of commission and omission. In one of these miscues, the over-40-years Cub Jack Hostetler tripped and fell rounding third base costing the Cubs a key run. In those pre-television days, admired New York sportswriter Bill Corum made the most incisive summation on radio, “We’ve had everything in this series but a wedding at home plate.” Corum’s remark was likely an indictment of bush league play. Before the war and for several years after, weddings at home plate were commonplace in the minor leagues.
Hank Wyse won 22 games for the Cubs in 1945, often on only two days rest. This regimen took its toll on his arm. In 1946 he had elbow problems and went to see a doctor. When Wyse returned to the clubhouse a teammate asked him what the doctor found in his elbow. Wyse said, “bottlecaps.”
LIPPY AND THE MET’S HEX. After a 24-year drought, Chicago cruised toward the 1969 National League playoffs. The Cubs had solid starters with Ferguson Jenkins (the only member of the 3,000-strikeout club to have surrendered fewer than 1,000 walks), Bill Hands and Ken Holtzman. And with slugging outfielder Billy Williams and the solid infield play and hitting of Ernie Banks and Ron Santo, the Cubs were nine and a half games up on the New York Mets in mid-August. Then the Cubs began to melt like ice cream in the bleachers.
For many Cubs’ fans, daytime baseball was a new villain in the narrative of Cubs’ curses. In 1969, Wrigley Field was still without lights, and the Cubs were the last team in baseball to play only day games at home. Manager Leo Durocher had a well-established reputation for preferring a set lineup composed of experienced veterans, and he had little patience for grooming rookies. As a result, and with limited exceptions, Durocher played the same eight-man lineup of war-horses, day in and day out, throughout an enervating Chicago summer. The consequence of this strategy was an exhausted starting lineup that had nothing left to give down the stretch. Things got even more painful in September when the “Amazing Mets,” who finished last in the National League in 1968, won ten straight. The Cubs lost eight in a row and finished the season eight games back. In one of these losses at Shea Stadium, a black cat ran in front of the Cubs’ dugout and right by Ron Santo waiting in the on-deck circle. If 1969 wasn’t the worst late-season disintegration, it ranks down there among classic baseball flops.
The 1966-1970 Cubs may be the only team to play together that long, with three future Hall of Fame players, Banks, Jenkins, Williams, plus Ron Santo who should be in the Hall, and never win a pennant.
CALIFORNIA DREAMING. In 1984, Cubs’ second baseman and future Hall-of-Famer Ryne Sandberg was the National League MVP. His inspired play and Rick Sutcliffe’s masterful pitching helped the Cubs finish first in the East (39 years after their World Series loss to the Tigers). Only a few pitchers have won 20 games in a season while pitching for two different teams. Rick Sutcliffe is one of them. He came to the Cubs during the 1984 campaign with a 4-5 record and made it a career year by going 16-1 and winning the National League Cy Young Award as a unanimous selection.
The Cubs’ playoff opponent was the Western Champion San Diego Padres led by Tony Gwynn who hit .351 to win the first of eight batting titles. The Cubs won the first two games at home, and the final three games were in San Diego. All the Cubs had to do was win one more and they would capture the National League pennant. They surely wouldn’t lose three straight, would they?
Their second best chance came in game four, but the Padres’ Steve Garvey spoiled the Cubs’ hopes with a walk-off home run in the last of the ninth inning. The image of Garvey circling the bases with his brawny right arm held high looms large in the Cubs’ collection of bad dreams.
In their best chance, the Cubs led in the seventh inning of game five, but were overtaken by a San Diego rally in which the key event was an unusual Chicago error committed by the typically sure-handed first baseman, Leon Durham. The inning appeared to have come to a harmless conclusion when a routine ground ball that should have been the inning’s third out was hit directly to Durham. When Durham bent down to pick up the baseball, it mysteriously skidded off his glove and rolled into the outfield, and it was Katie bar the door from there. And what turned out to be the reason for the error? It seems that Durham had been drinking Gatorade in the dugout and some of it spilled onto his glove. Because Durham had been less than fully attentive while wiping it off, a residue remained, and when that dried it left a sticky surface. When the routine ground ball came in contact with that sticky place, it unexpectedly skidded off Durham’s glove, resulting in the fatal error. Why didn’t the stickiness help retain the baseball. Hey, it’s the Cubs, also known to many of their fans as “The Lovable Losers.” A string of hits followed, and the Cubs didn’t get into the playoffs again until 1989.
THE BOYS OF ZIMMER. Paced by 19-game winner Greg Maddux, the Cubs won the National League Eastern division in 1989 and met the San Francisco Giants for the pennant. The Cubs, known as “The Boys of Zimmer,” so-named for manager Don Zimmer, split the first two games in Chicago. The Cubs led by a run in the seventh inning of game three in San Francisco when the Giants got a runner on. Cubs’ pitcher Rick Sutcliffe went to 2-0 on the next batter, and Zimmer lifted him. (Sutcliffe was in the final year of his successful career and taking lots of time between pitches. When asked why later, Sutcliffe said he was waiting for the pain to leave his shoulder.) Reliever Les Lancaster wasn’t told, or didn’t understand, or something that the count was 2-0, thought it was 3-0, and delivered a cookie to the Giants’ Robby Thompson who cowtailed it for a game-winning home run. The Giants went on to win the next two games and the pennant, and the Cubs waited nine years for their next chance.
1998. The Cubs and San Francisco Giants (led by future Cubs’ manager Dusty Baker and National League Manager of the Year in 1998) ended the regular season with identical records and met in a one-game playoff game for the National League wild-card berth that the Cubs won. The Atlanta Braves then swept them in the first playoff round. Former Cub (why did they ever let him go?) Gregg Maddux won game three.
“The last time the Cubs won a World Series was in 1908. The last time they were in one was in 1945. Hey, any team can have a bad century.” -Tom Trebelhorn, 1990’s Cubs’ manager, who was fired soon after he said it. (Longtime Cubs’ announcer Jack Brickhouse is credited for coining “Any team can have a bad century.”)
SCAPE, RATHER THAN BILLY, GOAT. The Cubs most promising chance for a crown since the 1945 World Series and the 1969, 1984, 1989, and 1998 season-ending disappointments came in 2003. They upset the Braves (avenging the 1998 playoff sweep) in the National League Division Series to win their first post-season series since 1908.
In the 6th game of the NLCS, the Cubs led the Florida Marlins three games to two. Cubs’ star Mark Prior pitched into the 8th inning with a 3-0 lead. Was this the year? Was the curse finally lifted?
After a leadoff double, the Marlins caught a break. A high fly near the left-field stands might have saved the inning. The ball went foul into the stands and was deflected by a fan. The fan didn’t reach out over the field. He did what anyone else would have done. He went for a souvenir. What the fan didn’t see was Cubs’ left fielder Moises Alou leaping with his glove high above and inside the railing. Alou might have made the catch if the fan hadn’t interfered, but the fan’s attempt didn’t cause the Cubs subsequent implosion (although the hateful abuse poured down upon the poor devil showed that the crowd wanted a scapegoat). The reprieved batter walked. A single scored a run. Prior looked perturbed. The next Marlins’ hitter grounded to short, and the usually sure-handed Alex Gonzalez booted what looked like an inning-ending double play.
“When troubles come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” -William Shakespeare
Then future Cub Derrek Lee tied the score with a two-run double, and Prior was finally lifted. Manager Dusty Baker brought in reliever Kyle Farnsworth who didn’t have much time to get loose, eventually gave up a three-run double, and the Cubs lost what turned into a one-sided game.
The hugely talented Kerry Wood started game seven for the Cubs and didn’t have it that day. Led by their dominating right-hander Josh Beckett, the upstart Marlins went on to beat the Yankees in the World Series. (2003 was the year when the fans’ amusement with Cubs’ failures turned to frustration.)
THE DEFENSE RESTS. The score was 1-1 after six innings in game one of the 2007 best-of-five Division-Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Cubs’ ace Carlos Zambrano had given only a few hits on 85 pitches. Because they couldn’t do much with him, the Diamondbacks were delighted when manager Lou Piniella lifted Zambrano, presumably to rest him for a game four. Arizona homered off the reliever in the seventh and added another run to seal the win. There never was a game four.
SORCERESS. In 2008, the Cubs made their first back-back trip to the post-season since 1910; the Cubs and White Sox got into the playoffs during the same year for the first time since the 1906 World Series; and both teams lost in the opening round.
Expectations were moderate for the White Sox and lofty for the Cubs who topped the National League with 97 wins. They met the Los Angeles Dodgers, newly led by ex-Yankee manager Joe Torres and slugger Manny Ramirez who hit .396 for L.A. following a blockbuster, mid-season trade from the Red Sox. The Dodgers dispatched the Cubs Buenos Dias, Buenas Tardes, Buenas Noches.
The Hundred Years’ War rages on as the vaporous curse further envelops the Friendly Confines; a nostrum requires that She of the Evil Eye expunge the malediction by sacrificing a goat and black cat on the sacred plot between the mound and home plate.
(Credit by permission from National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY and Library of Canada for sources in original story excerpted and abridged from Guts in the Clutch.)
Richard J. Noyes, former Associate Director, Center for Advanced Engineering Study, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a consultant to public and private sector organizations.
Noyes is the co-author with Pamela J. Robertson of Larceny of Love, a provocative print and eBook novel that traces the interwoven careers of three men in jeopardy and the unforgettable women in their lives. http://larcenyoflove.com/
“Whenever dramatic storytelling about people you like is created around business, sports and film, I'm a happy reader. I'm sure you will be as well.” –Kevin Marcus
Another recent print and eBook by Richard Noyes and Pamela Robertson: Guts in the Clutch: 77 Legendary Triumphs, Heartbreaks, and Wild Finishes in 12 Sports, with a Foreword by Drew Olson of ESPN. http://gutsintheclutch.com/
“The best compilation of fascinating sports stories I have read.” -David Houle, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning producer of documentaries on Hank Aaron and the Harlem Globetrotters.
