Phillies-Astros tilt raised memories of Cubs-Sox World Series

The 2022 World Series summoned from the graveyard of baseball trivia an obscure statistic that had a unique connection to Chicago baseball history.

The matchup between the Phillies and Astros brought together the two teams with the second-largest regular-season win difference between two World Series opponents in the annals of the game. Philadelphia won a puny 87 wins compared with the Astros' robust 106-victory total.

The only gap bigger? Look no further than the Windy City.

The 1906 Cubs ran away with the National League pennant, winning 116 games. Meanwhile, the White Sox won American League laurels with 93 victories.

Under the guidance of the Peerless Leader, Manager Frank Chance, the team that people only recently had begun calling the Cubs were led by a dominant pitching staff of Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown, Jack Pfiester, Ed Reulbach and Carl Lundgren.

The fielding was distinguished by the immortal double-play combination of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Chance.

It was a team emphasizing speed, with 283 stolen bases, and moving runners along, with 231 sacrifices.

David Rapp, author of "Tinker to Evers to Chance: The Chicago Cubs and the Dawn of Modern America," said in a text to me, "The 1906 Cubs were a juggernaut in the National League, which included Honus Wagner's Pittsburgh Pirates and the defending 'World Champions' New York Giants, led by the irascible John McGraw. Their 116 wins in a 154-game season has never been topped."

The 1906 White Sox, Rapp said, "known as the 'Hitless Wonders,' were a good team, with solid pitching and defense if paltry hitting. But no one thought they had a chance against the powerhouse Cubs."

Under the guidance of player-manager Fielder Jones, the White Sox, only a few years after arriving in Chicago from St. Paul, Minnesota, had emerged from a tight pennant race, boosted by a 19-game winning streak in August.

Pitching was by far the team's strong suit, with Frank Owen pacing the team with 22 wins and Nick Altrock, later better known as a baseball clown in tandem with Al Schacht, with 20. Ed Walsh, two years away from a 40-win season, notched 17 victories.

Bernard A. Weisberger, in his book "When Chicago Ruled Baseball: The Cubs-White Sox World Series of 1906," said the odds were 2-1 and even 3-1 against the Sox.

The writers lined up accordingly. The exception was Hugh Fullerton, who predicted a Sox victory in a Tribune column that, Rapp said, was held until after the series.

Chicago geared up for a festival of civic pride, with the City Council passing a resolution giving municipal employees the day off so they could watch the first game of the series, while the Board of Trade closed.

But, Weisberger points out, the city's industrial workers, in the days of six-day, 10-hour work weeks, did not have the luxury of attending the afternoon contests.

It was a very different world. Automotive transportation was still in its infancy - horses were still the predominant mode of conveyance.

Without television or radio, you either attended the games or followed them in the newspapers, with word pictures created by such scribes as Charles Dryden and "Sy" Sanborn and an occasional action photo, such as the Tribune's shot of White Sox third-baseman George Rohe's game-winning triple in the third game.

Another option for spectators was provided by the Tribune, which leased the Auditorium Theater and the First Regiment Armory. Spectators could monitor a bulletin board with a reproduction of a baseball diamond. Prefiguring later baseball recreations on radio, telegraphers would receive information about plays and move counters with the players' names around the "bases," while also posting balls, strikes and outs.

The temperatures were bitterly cold for the fans watching at West Side Park, home of the Cubs, located near Cook County Hospital, and South Side Park, the Sox home until they moved a few blocks north to Comiskey Park - the series drew a total attendance of nearly 100,000 fans.

The Sox jumped out to a surprising 2-1 lead in the series, only to see the Cubs even things up in Game Four behind a Brown shutout.

But the Sox found their groove in the final two games, led by such unlikely heroes as Rohe, a utility infielder who only hit .258 in 77 games, but hit .333 and drove in four runs in the series, with two triples, a double and three walks.

"The Sox win in six games stunned the nation," Rapp wrote me. However, he said, "It may have given the still-experimental World Series between the NL and AL pennant winners an imprimatur that would have taken many more years to earn."

He pointed out that the John McGraw-led Giants were so contemptuous toward the AL that they refused to play in the 1904 World Series.

"The Chicago series of 1906 proved that the AL was a worthy competitor, and that the result was on the up and up."

For the Cubs, the loss was devastating, but they bounced back with back-to-back championships in 1907 and 1908, the last Chicago baseball team to repeat.

As for the Sox, they would regain the crown in 1917, only to throw the series in 1919 against the Reds, whose manager, Pat Moran, while playing for the Cubs, made the last out of Game Five of the 1906 World Series.