A Game of Chance

By EARL GUSTKEY

Sept. 26, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

OK, Frank Chance, you can rest easy now.

The record stands.

Your 1906 Chicago Cubs still live--in the record book.

The 1998 New York Yankees aren’t going to make it to 116 wins, as your ’06 Cubs did.

Of course, the Yankees can still win what the ’06 Cubs didn’t--a World Series championship.

In the history of major league baseball, no team went through a season as player-manager Chance’s did, 92 years ago. Those Cubs won 116 times--in 152 games--a record no team has approached.

But the ought-six Cubs did something else astonishing that year.

They failed to win the World Series.

Even worse, they lost it to a team called “the Hitless Wonders,” the White Sox.

Baseball historians have never forgiven the 1906 Cubs. When, in the 1940s, baseball author Tom Meany set out to write “Baseball’s Greatest Teams,” he ranked 25 teams--and excluded the ’06 Cubs.

Nevertheless, no team this century has even challenged the Cubs’ ‘06 regular season. The 1954 Cleveland Indians came the closest, winning 111 of 154 games. Not even the 1927 or 1961 Yankee juggernauts could match it, winning 110 and 109, respectively.

The closest any National League team has come is 110, by the 1909 Pittsburgh Pirates.

The Cubs began winning early in that season 92 years ago and never stopped. Most amazing was their road record, 60-15. They had a 13-game winning streak. The team that couldn’t finish completed the regular season by winning 50 of its last 57.

The New York Giants won 96 games that year and finished second--by 20 games.

Giant Manager John McGraw said at the season’s midway point he believed the Cubs would wilt in the heat of August.

Some swoon. They were 26-3 in August.

Baseball in 1906 was a hit-and-run, bunt-and-run, low-scoring, base-stealing game played by hard-drinking, tough men, most of whom had escaped the drudgery of farm or factory life.

In an era when you could buy a suit for $20--and a box seat for the ’06 World Series for $2--only a few of baseball’s brightest stars made five-digit salaries. Pittsburgh’s Fred Clarke was the game’s highest salaried player at $15,000.

The Cubs’ Chance earned $10,000. Sixteen years would pass before Babe Ruth was paid $52,000 by the Yankees.

The Cubs won 116 games that year by relying heavily on:

* Future Hall of Fame pitcher Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, who went 26-6 with a 1.04 earned-run average.

* Johnny Kling, called the best catcher in baseball, who hit .312.

* Baseball’s best infield: Joe Tinker at shortstop, Johnny Evers at second and Chance at first.

* The leadership of Chance, a doctor’s son from Fresno, one of California’s great turn-of-the-century athletes.

At only 28, when given the player-manager’s job, Chance’s nickname already was “the Peerless Leader,” or simply “P.L.”

And he was as shrewd with a buck as he was at managing. After the 1906 season, Cubs’ management offered Chance an opportunity to buy 10% of the team, for $10,000.

He bought in, and seven years later sold his stake for $140,000.

He was 6 feet tall, a powerfully built 190 pounds, had steely gray eyes . . . and didn’t like losing much.

When the Cubs’ 13-game winning streak ended that summer, he found some of his players afterward enjoying themselves too much in a hotel bar. He grabbed a baseball bat and broke a piano in half with it.

He also applied his bat to its intended use, of course. He hit .319, and led the National League in runs scored with 103, and stolen bases with 57.

Baseball that year had infields that turned more double plays than Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, but none were as effective. The three had a knack for turning twin killings in game-turning situations, particularly against the Giants.

Tinker and Evers, with cannon-like arms, threw out many runners at home plate . . . nearly as many as catcher Kling threw out at second base.

Late in his life, Three Finger Brown named 10 players as the best he ever played with or against. Of those he named, only Kling is not in the Hall of Fame.

Harry Steinfeldt remains as the answer to the trivia question: “Who was the third baseman in the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance infield?” But he wasn’t trivial in 1906. He led the team with a .327 average and was considered one of the game’s best third basemen.

The outfielders were Frank “Wildfire” Schulte, who led the league with 13 triples, Jimmy Sheckard and Jimmy Slagle. Schulte hit seven home runs in ‘06, then in 1911 became the first 20th century batsman to hit 20.

But the centerpiece player was the pitcher born Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown in 1876.

Brown lost most of the index finger on his right hand, his pitching hand, in an Indiana farm accident when he was a boy. He actually had four fingers, but his little finger was rendered useless in the accident. So, “Three Finger” stuck.

A sidearmer, Brown was the ace on a staff that gave up 89 fewer runs than any other in the National League. The staff ERA was 1.76.

Four of the pitchers--Brown, Ed Reulbach, Jack Pfiester and Orval Overall--had sub-2.00 ERAs.

They were aided by a lineup that hit a league-best .262 and stole 283 bases, also tops in the league.

While the Cubs--many in Chicago, including some sportswriters, called them the Spuds--were winning their pennant with ease, such was not the case with the White Sox, a.k.a. “the South Siders” and “the Hitless Wonders.”

Their team batting average, .228, was the American League’s lowest, and the club’s top hitter, Frank Isbell, hit .279, or 79 points lower than the league leader, the St. Louis Browns’ George Stone, who hit .358.

While the Cubs stormed to their pennant, the White Sox won by three games, thanks to a 19-game August winning streak.

As the World Series began, Chicago was beside itself with excitement. This was before either Comiskey Park or Wrigley Field, and the largest crowd of the series would be 23,257, in an era when overflow fans were permitted to sit in the outfield.

The Cubs played on Chicago’s West Side then, and the White Sox near the stockyards at 39th Street and Princeton Avenue.

It was also before radio, and generations before TV.

The Chicago Tribune rented a 4,000-seat auditorium and offered, for $1 admission, a telegraphic game re-creation on a large scoreboard.

(That practice was common for major boxing matches of the era. It was estimated, for example, that on July 4, 1910, more people gathered outside the Los Angeles Times to hear announced telegraphed bulletins of the Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries fight at Reno than were actually at the fight.)

The Series opened amid snow flurries at West Side Grounds on Oct. 9, 1906, before 12,693 fans, many in fur overcoats.

The White Sox won the opener, 2-1, and the Cubs evened it the next day, 7-1.

They split the next two games, but Isbell hit four doubles in Game 5, putting the White Sox a game up with an 8-6 win.

Then Chance, hailed as a genius all summer, started the wrong pitcher in Game 6 and the mighty Cubs went spinning off into history’s dust bin, the team that couldn’t finish.

Chance tabbed Brown to pitch, after only one day’s rest. Brown lasted less than two innings, giving up eight hits and seven runs. Overall, a 215-pounder from Visalia, gave up only one run the rest of the way, but it was too late. The White Sox won, 8-3.

The Cubs righted themselves in subsequent years, winning the Series in 1908. But the Cubs of ’06 carried the disappointment of that World Series to their graves.

And they’ve been gone for generations now.

Three Finger Brown died at 72 in 1948 in Terre Haute, Ind., and the last of the Cubs’ famed double play combination, Tinker, was 68 when he died in 1948 at Orlando, Fla.

The team’s longest-living player was Schulte, who was 92 when he died in 1975 at Roseville, Mich.

Chance’s health began to fail in his 40s. He was beset by severe headaches, believed to have been associated with the many beanings he suffered. He underwent brain surgery in 1920 for removal of blood clots.

Chance, who lived on his Glendora orange ranch, died after a bout with bronchial asthma at Los Angeles’ Good Samaritan Hospital on Sept. 16, 1924. He was 47.

He was enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1946.

He is buried in Los Angeles’ Rosedale Cemetery, in the shade of two towering Italian stone pines. Next to him lies his wife, Edythe, who died in 1954.

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story from Chicago.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Tinker to Evers to Chance

The most enduring legacy of the 1906 Chicago Cubs is this poem by turn-of-the-century New York journalist Franklin P. Adams, a New York Giant partisan. He wrote it in tribute to the Cubs’ Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double-play combination:

These are the saddest of possible words--

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

Trio of Bear cubs, and fleeter than birds--

“Tinker to Evers to 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.”

Most Victories in a Season

Year: 1906

Team: Chicago Cubs

W: 116