It’s hard to imagine what Chicago would be like if the White Sox and Cubs met in a World Series. Mayhem comes to mind.
The unfathomable has happened only once. On Oct. 11, 1906, the White Sox, behind Ed Walsh, took a 2-1 lead in their series over the Cubs with a 3-0 victory.
While the fever pitch didn’t reach the level it would in 2005, the city still went crazy over a Sox-Cubs showdown 99 years ago.
The teams
The Cubs were loaded. They had their legendary double-play combination of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance.
The Cubs also had solid pitching, lead by Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown. Nobody could touch the Cubs, as they compiled a 116-36 mark, a .763 winning percentage that stands as a modern-era record.
The White Sox, meanwhile, were huge underdogs. They had a solid pitching staff led by Walsh, a future Hall of Famer. But they batted only .228 as a team, mustering a mere seven home runs. They dutifully earned their nickname, “The Hitless Wonders.”
The Cubs went into the Series as 3-1 favorites. Baseball writer Hugh Fullerton, though, disagreed, picking the Sox. However, his editor thought the pick was so ridiculous he refused to print the article until after the Series.
The first two games
Business stopped on the day of the opener, and City Hall closed. Tempers flared, and bar fights erupted. Apparently not much has changed on the baseball front in Chicago.
The Sox’s Nick Altrock pitched a four-hitter for a 2-1 win in Game 1 at the Cubs’ West Side Park. But the Cubs bounced back at the Sox’s South Side Park with a 7-1 triumph in Game 2.
Game 3
With additional seats added and tickets being scalped, 13,667 jammed West Side Park. The Cubs, though, didn’t have a chance against Walsh.
“Big Ed” was the Sox’s first superstar. Coming aboard in 1904, he enjoyed his first big season in 1906, winning 17 games with a 1.88 earnedrun average. Using a spitter, which was legal back then, he pitched every third day in 1908, posting a 40-15 record with 42 complete games.
Walsh was stellar against the Cubs in Game 3. He fanned 12 and allowed only two hits, none after the first inning. The Sox, meanwhile, mustered only four hits, but they made the most of their meager attack.
With the game scoreless in the sixth, the Cubs’ Jack Pfeister hit and broke Ed Hahn’s nose with a pitch to load the bases. Pfeister got the next two hitters, but George Rohe, a reserve infielder, hit a shot to left for a bases-clearing triple.
Walsh continued to dominate, much to the delight of the Sox faithful en route to a 3-0 victory. Walsh also won Game 5, and the Sox captured the series, four games to two.
What they said back then
The Tribune’s Charles Dryden on Walsh: “Before and after the wrecking of (Hahn’s nose), Walsh was ever in the public eye. He flimflammed the Cubs with his misty float ball, nee spit ball. From the first to last, Walsh had the Cubs marooned in a cloud of doubt. They didn’t know where they were at. Twelve men whiffed and but two hits drifted out of the maze of speed and spray to soften the horror of the scene.”
The Tribune on Rohe: “Such an opportunity as Rohe’s comes to one man in a thousand in private life–to leap in an instant to the highest pinnacle of fame and popularity.”
Sources: Tribune archives; “The White Sox
Encyclopedia” by Richard C. Lindberg.
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1906 in perspective
– SOS becomes an international distress signal.
– The San Francisco earthquake destroys much of the city, killing 3,000 people.
– Theodore Roosevelt becomes the first sitting president to leave the United States, visiting the construction of the Panama Canal.
