If you were to draw up the perfect baseball franchise, chances are you might come up with the Chicago Cubs. Here you have a long-established team in a large city with a fanatical fan base, an impressive roster of Hall of Fame players, and a beautiful, timeless ball park that reeks of unique traditions and is actually part of the personality of the team and the city.
Alas, nothing is perfect and the blemish that prevents the Cubs from being that perfect franchise is the interminable lack of success they have suffered on the playing field. It has been more than ninety-five years since the team's last World Championship and over half a century since their last World Series appearance. Still, they embody much of what makes baseball uniquely great and magical.
No baseball team in any city has the length of lineage the Cubs have in Chicago. They were originally formed as an amateur team less than a decade after the Civil War (1874) and joined the National League for its initial season. Playing their first professional game on April 25, 1876, exactly two months before Custer's Last Stand and while Ulysses S. Grant was President of the United States, they defeated the Louisville Greys 4-0.
Ironically, at this time they were known as the White Stockings. Their star player was Hall of Famer Adrian "Cap" Anson, the first player to accumulate three-thousand hits (hi accepted total for over a century / adjusted on site to 2,995). He played and managed in Chicago for twenty-two years.
Chicago greeted the 20th century by changing the team name to the Cubs and changing superstar players — dismissing Anson in 1897 and replacing him with Frank Chance in 1898, considered the best first baseman of his time. Called the "Peerless Leader" for his ability to manage and motivate players, Chance became player-manager halfway through 1905, and began guiding the Cubs down a road that would lead them to one of the greatest seasons of all time.
The 1906 Cubs had it all: a great manager, first baseman and hitter in Chance, the immortal Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance infield and a virtually unhittable pitching staff with Mordecai "Three-Finger" Brown (26-6, 1.04), Jack Pfeister (20-8, 1.56), Ed Reulbach (19-4, 1.65) and Carl Lundgren (17-6, 2.21). The team won one-hundred sixteen games, a record that still stands, and finished twenty games ahead of the competition. The only thing the Cubs did wrong in 1906 was lose the World Series. They were upset by their cross-town rival White Sox in six games in what remains the only all-Chicago World Series ever played.
Chicago Cubs History
