Laurent Pernot - Before the Ivy: The Cubs Golden Age in Pre-Wrigley Chicago

BEFORE THE IVY

LAURENT PERNOT

University of Illinois Press
URBANA, CHICAGO, AND SPRINGFIELD

2015 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
P 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Frontispiece: The White Stockings championship
squad of the mid-1880S. (Authors collection)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pernot, Laurent.
Before the ivy: the Cubs golden age in
pre-Wrigley Chicago / Laurent Pernot.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-252-08028-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-252-09665-5 (e-book)
1. Chicago Cubs (Baseball team)History.
2. Wrigley Field (Chicago, Ill.)History.
I. Title.
GV875.C6P47 2015
796.357640977311dc23 2014011264

To my grandfather Marcel Thiebaud,
who gave me my love of history,
and to Al Broten, who taught me about baseball
and whose only flaw was to be a Sox fan.

To my sons, may they stay true to their passions.

More than a century after their last victory in the World Series, the Chicago Cubs best chance at renewed glory may be a Field of Dreamslike lesson with their predecessors on the West Side of Chicago at Polk and Wood, where one can still stand over part of the old outfield.

Before the ballpark that would become Wrigley Field and be symbolized by its ivy, Chicago was home to a combination of league builders, sports entrepreneurs, and Hall of Famers with no equals before and few since.

Prior to its move to the North Side in 1916, the team appeared in four of the first seven World Series, winning two. The Cubs have appeared in just six of the more than one hundred World Series played since, and won just one postseason series, in 2003.

Until the Seattle Mariners tied the record in 2001, the 1906 West Side Cubs were sole owners of the all-time mark for most wins in one season, with 116 in 1906. They still boast the best winning percentage ever, as they reached the mark in just 152 games, compared to Seattles 162. The skippers with the three highest winning percentages in team history are Albert Spalding, Adrian Cap Anson, and Frank Chance, none of whom ever managed at Wrigley Field. The legendary Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance triple-play combination never plied its trade on the North Side.

No Cub has recorded more hits, singles, doubles, or RBIs over a Cubs career than Anson. Mordecai Three Finger Brown still holds the single-season team records in earned run average (1.04) and all-time record for shutouts (48). Frank Chance remains the only Cubs player to steal four hundred bases. Al Spalding still reigns as the pitcher with the best win-loss record in the history of baseball (.795). Other preWrigley Field Cubs still own single-season team records for wins and strikeouts by a pitcher, on-base percentage, batting average, triples, walks, and stolen bases.

Most team histories begin in 1876 with the newly created National Leagueand the teams victory of the first-ever NL pennantbut the teams roots go all the way back to the late 1860s. The early 1870swhen the thenWhite Stockings played downtown and then on the South Sidebrought many successes, though the Chicago nine was denied two championship titles early in that decade, one owing to league infighting and the other to the Great Chicago Fire.

The dozen years beginning in 1880 was the greatest period in team history, with eleven top-three finishes and five pennants won in ballparks located on the site of todays Andrew Jackson Language Academy, at Congress and Loomis, and where Millennium Park presently sits. The team then spent most of the 1890s and early 1900s way out of contention, under such names as Colts, Orphans, and Remnants.

The lowest point in team history up to that point came in 1901, when the Remnants limped to a .381 winning percentage. That record low would hold for more than fifty years and remains the fifth-worst on the clubs all-time list, with the most recent lower point being the .377 outcome in 2012.

As the team rebuilt with young players, the name Cubs began to take hold, although the Chicago Tribune tried unsuccessfully to popularize the moniker Spuds in reference to the teams Irish owner. Fans should take heart: Within two years of their disastrous 1901 campaign, the team had a winning record and by 1906 went to the World Series on the heels of a .763 season. Though they lost that duel to the White Sox, the Cubs would win the next two against the Tigers. After a few more years of close contention, and an unsuccessful World Series run in 1910, the team ran into athletic and financial trouble and moved north after the 1915 season. (A decade-by-decade overview of team results appears in the appendix.)

Beyond titles and feats on the field, nineteenth-century Chicago played a key role in the professionalization of baseball, modern sports journalism, and the ascendancy of management over players, as orchestrated by Chicagoan William Hulbert, father of the National League and owner of its Chicago franchise, and Rockford-area native Al Spalding, of pitching, managing, and sports-empire fame. The race and class issues the broader country was facing found their way onto the field as well, the sport reflecting societys broader struggles.

It turns out that history does repeat itself in some regards, as for a brief spell in the early 1870s, a Chicago Tribune official presided over the Chicago Base Ball Association, and controversies between team owners and rooftop owners beyond the outfield walls surfaced in the early 1900s. We may even owe the idiom out in left field to the teams West Side Grounds. And, though the White Sox enjoy bragging rights for winning the only Chicago vs. Chicago World Series, they inherited the Cubs old name and were even preceded by the National League franchise at 35th and Wentworth.

Sadly, beyond shaping so much of the Soxs identity, the enduring legacy of the early Cubs was not winning, but being lovable and profitable losers. More than the famous goat, that may be the franchises true curse, a theory thats not altogether out in left field.

On a old and foggy London day in March 1889, a group of American baseball stars played an exhibition game before Edward, Prince of Wales and future King of England, and hundreds of curious nobles and onlookers. The affair had been arranged by A. G. Spalding, perhaps the games greatest early promoter, who painstakingly explained the games subtleties to the prince. Though excited by the action on the field, the monarch concluded, I consider Base Ball an excellent game, but Cricket a better one.

The goal of the exhibition, which marked the end of a world tour by Spalding and assorted stars, had been to give the masses everywhere an opportunity to witness a pastime peculiarly American. The princes statement, reported by several newspapers, was an affront made all the more stinging to Spalding in that he had dedicated himself to erasing baseballs British roots.