A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (4 page)

By the time Spalding retired, in 1902, his team had a new owner, Jim Hart, and needed a new name. The team had been called the Colts, or Anson’s Colts, until Anson’s twenty-two years with the team ended. After his retirement, some newspapers had begun referring to the team as the Orphans. Because Hart signed so many young players, the team was briefly called the Spuds. This nomenclature chaos had to stop, but the team could not go back to being the White Stockings, because in 1902 the American League was formed and the name was grabbed by the team on Chicago’s South Side.
According to Golenbock, at about this time a group of Chicagoans recommended finding a name that would suggest “bear-like strength and a playful disposition.” And one newspaper’s sports editor began substituting “Cubs” for “Orphans” and “Spuds.”

Soon the Cubs were generating big headlines. Beginning in 1904, the team had a future Hall of Fame pitcher,
Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown. He’d earned his nickname the hard way, by a common nineteenth-century hazard: an accident with a farm implement. The culprit was a corn shredder, against which Brown harbored no grudge: After his baseball career ended, he ran a service station in Terre Haute, Indiana, where customers could gaze upon the shredder while their gas tanks filled. Even though his shredded hand was his pitching hand, he had seasons with 26, 20, 29, 27, 25, and 21 victories.

The anchor of the team was first baseman Frank Chance. At six feet and 188 pounds—the size of a small middle infielder today—he was, in his day, an imposing figure. At second base was Johnny Evers, the shortstop was Joe Tinker, and the two detested each other because of a dispute about a taxi fare. On September 13, 1905, in an exhibition game played in Bedford, Indiana, spectators were startled to see a fistfight erupt between Tinker and Evers near second base. The Cubs had dressed for the game at their hotel, and Evers had jumped into a hack and headed for the ballpark, leaving Tinker and others to fend for themselves. This led to the fight, which led, the next day, to them agreeing not to speak to each other. They played together, in sullen silence, for seven more seasons.
According to one of baseball’s durable myths, they played magically well together, so well that their proficiency at turning double plays became the subject of a famous and god-awful poem, “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon,” published in the July 18, 1910, edition of the
New York Evening Mail:

These are the saddest of possible words:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,

“Tinker and Evers and Chance”

Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

Making a Giant hit into a double—

Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

The poem was written by a reporter with a presidential name, Franklin Pierce Adams, whose editor needed something to fill space. Largely, one suspects, because of this poem, there is space in the Hall of Fame filled, unjustly, by bronze plaques for Tinker and Evers. Their career batting averages, .262 and .270, are rather low for non-pitchers who are in the Hall of Fame without sparkling power-hitting or defensive credentials.

Facts, those stubborn things, prick the bubble of the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance fable. In their seasons of greatest Cubs success, 1906–1909, their double play totals were 8, 7, 8, and 6, for a less than grand four-year total of 29 and an average of 7.25 per season. In the 2012 season, the thirty major league teams averaged 142 double plays. The Cubs, while losing 101 games, still “turned two” 148 times.

The 1906 West Side Cubs—or Spuds, as some writers still called them—won 116 games in a 155-game season. From the beginning of August through the end of the season
they were an absurd 50 and 8 (with one tie), including winning streaks of 11, 12, and 14 games. The 116 wins are still the major league record, even though the seasons have been 162 games since 1961. The 1954 Cleveland Indians hold the American League record for the most wins in a 154-game season, with 111. The 2001 Seattle Mariners won 116 in a 162-game season. All of which suggest that the 1906 Cubs’ .763 winning percentage may be one of baseball’s most durable records.

The 1906 American League pennant was won by the White Sox, as the White Stockings were beginning to be called. That year they were also called the “Hitless Wonders,” having finished last in their league in hits, home runs, and batting average (.230). Chicago is a city of ethnic enclaves, and the World Series not only pitted the Cubs against the White Sox but the Germans against the Irish. Golenbock says the Germans favored the Cubs, who had players named Schulte, Sheckard, Steinfeldt, Reulbach, Pfiester, Hofman, and Kling. The Irish supported the Sox, with players named Walsh, Donahue, O’Neill, Dougherty, and Sullivan. The White Sox won the Series, 4 games to 2.

In 1907, the Cubs again won the National League pennant, helped by twenty-three wins by a melodiously named pitcher, Orval Overall, from a California town named, of course, Farmersville. The Cubs swept the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. In 1908, they won another pennant and again trounced the Tigers, this time in five games, becoming the first team to win consecutive championships. In
1908, the year “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” was first sung, no one suspected that more than a century would pass without the Cubs winning a third title.

The next season, in a harbinger of things to come, their catcher, Johnny Kling, abandoned baseball to become a professional billiards player. Remarkably, the Cubs won 104 games but finished second, behind the Pirates, who won 110. Soon the Cubs were shedding some expensive players, and players throughout the major leagues were becoming resentful and restless because their salaries were kept low by the lack of negotiating leverage, which was the result of the reserve clause. This gave rise to a rival league, the Federal League, which signed many American League and National League players, including Joe Tinker and Mordecai Brown.

Charles Weeghman, who owned a slew of Chicago lunch restaurants, owned Chicago’s Federal League team for the two years, 1914 and 1915, before the league collapsed. His midwestern team, on the shores of Lake Michigan and a long way from salt water, was named, perhaps whimsically, the Whales. It won the 1915 Federal League pennant. Encouraged by the Whales’ success and looking to the future, Weeghman had built, on the land purchased from Chicago Theological Lutheran Seminary, a $250,000 ballpark at the corner of Clark and Addison Streets. However, the Federal League had no future and failed after the 1915 season. Before the 1916 season, before the corpse of the Federal League was cold, Weeghman bought an interest in the Cubs and moved them from the West Side Grounds to Weeghman Park, which seated sixteen thousand.

1915: Horses and horseless carriages. (
photo credit 1.3
)

Weeghman had some interesting friends. One of his partners in his early days as a Cubs owner was oilman Harry F. Sinclair, who had been an organizer of the Federal League. In 1922, Albert B. Fall, the secretary of the interior in the administration of President Warren G. Harding, leased to Mammoth Oil Company, one of Sinclair’s subsidiaries, the exclusive right to develop the oil and gas reserves near Casper, Wyoming, beneath a geological formation known as Teapot Dome. The lease was granted without competitive bidding, a fact that seemed suspiciously related to Sinclair’s generous contributions to Harding’s 1920 campaign. Before the dust settled from the many investigations, both Sinclair and Fall went to prison.

Another of Weeghman’s colorful friends was Arnold Rothstein, a New York gambler. He was widely suspected
of being the mastermind behind the Black Sox scandal—the fixing of the 1919 World Series, in which the heavily favored White Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds.
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
, Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, are having lunch in a restaurant with a Meyer Wolfsheim, whom Fitzgerald, perhaps reflecting the anti-Semitism of his time, describes as eating “with ferocious delicacy” and wearing cuff links made of what Wolfsheim calls the “finest specimens of human molars.” When Wolfsheim leaves the table, Gatsby tells Carraway, “He’s the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919.” Carraway muses:

The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely
happened
, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

Actually, a remarkable amount about the Black Sox scandal remains speculation, but undoubtedly baseball back then was entangled with unsavory people and practices from the world of gambling. In
Rothstein: The Life, Times and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series
, David Pietrusza makes it clear that Rothstein—certainly Fitzgerald’s model for Wolfsheim—was
intimately involved with the shady dealings of Charles Stoneham, a New York financier and gambler and the owner of the New York Giants. Meyer Lansky, a founding father of organized crime in America, was a young associate of Rothstein’s. Lansky was the model for Hyman Roth, the gangster who in
The Godfather: Part II
tells Michael Corleone, “I loved baseball ever since Rothstein fixed the World Series in 1919.” Such facts are discordant with the narrative of Wrigley Field as a sonnet of sweetness and light. But they underscore this truth: At the time, baseball was a rough business and not as fastidious as it should have been about the company it kept.

This was so even before the front row of the box seats at Wrigley Field was occupied by an unsavory fan from the South Side, Al Capone. When Bill Veeck Jr. was a student at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, he was summoned home by the news that his father, then president of the Cubs, was ill with incurable leukemia.
In his 1962 memoir,
Veeck as in Wreck
, Bill Jr. wrote, “I was determined that he would go out in some comfort and some style,” drinking champagne. And Bill knew that the best of this drink could be acquired by someone who had spent happy afternoons in Wrigley Field:

I hurried to Al Capone’s headquarters at the Hotel Metropole and told him what I wanted, and why. “Kid,” he said, “I’ll send a case of champagne right over.” The case was there when I got back. Every morning during these last few days of my
father’s life, a case of imported champagne was delivered to the door. The last nourishment that passed between my daddy’s lips on this earth was Al Capone’s champagne.

When Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of baseball, objected to Cubs chatting up Al Capone when he sat in a front row box seat, Gabby Hartnett, a longtime Cub player and manager, supposedly said, “If you don’t want me to talk to the big fellow, Judge, why don’t you tell him yourself?” This looks like one of those suspiciously perfect quotes that journalists refer to as “too good to check.”

Hartnett was what Chicagoans back then called “an old-neighborhood guy,” by which they meant he never stopped being approachable. If you invited him to dinner, he was apt to come. It was in response to such a dinner invitation that Hartnett met his future wife. Roberts Ehrgott, in
Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club: Chicago and the Cubs During the Jazz Age
, reports that when Hartnett was invited to a high school prom, he went.
The student who invited him had made his acquaintance when Hartnett visited the baseball team’s practice at St. Cyril High School, where he knew the football coach. During the practice Hartnett peeled off his jacket and hit some fly balls to the team. One of the adolescents shagging flies was James Farrell, who in the 1930s would publish the Studs Lonigan trilogy:
Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan
, and
Judgment Day
. These deeply depressing novels of ethnic strife,
family tensions, and material hardship on Chicago’s South Side during the Depression tell the story of a young man struggling, and failing, to cope with life. But the author of these dark stories of naturalism and realism knew how to light up a prom.