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The Chicago Cubs: From Early Excellence to the Golden Age to That Darn Goat Th e Ch ic a g o Cu bs were a team to be reckoned with back when Teddy Roosevelt was President of the United States, and they continued to be the club to beat during the early administration of William Howard Taft. They forged a golden age for the record books, providing their fans with enough stories to keep them warm during many a cold Chicago winter night. But here’s the problem with golden ages: everything afterward savors of anticlimax . This is particularly true when the golden age took place in the distant past. You don’t have to go back to the Greeks and Romans, either. Spain was on top of the world in the sixteenth century. The Dutch could buy and sell just about anyone in the seventeenth century. The French had a Sun King in the seventeenth century and gave England a good game in the eighteenth century. Great Britain ruled the waves in the nineteenth century. The United States, in a fit of wisdom, saved its best for more recent times. Sadly, the Chicago Cubs took their cue more from Spain than America. In four generations of baseball history, the Cubs have been accused of many things, but never of saving the best for last. Not yet, anyway. Quite the opposite, they burned like a comet during their first generation and then promptly and unceremoniously fell to earth. Back in the Golden Age, at the birth of the Cubs, baseball looked different than it does today. It was like a child, changing and maturing by the year, and it was di cult for anyone living though the game’s awkward, gawky stage to predict what it would look like when it grew up. Baseball during the 1870s and part of the 1880s resembled fast-pitch softball. The pitcher employed a stiffarmed , underhanded delivery from forty-five feet away from the batter. The ball the pitcher tossed was soft and loosely wound, and the batter could not hit it very far, but he did have the right to request high or low pitches, and his batting average was bolstered by the fact that until the 1880sfew fielders wore gloves. To make matters even more complicated, the number of balls it took to walk a batter varied over the years. In some years a walk required nine balls. The game, then, featured short hits, frequent errors, and high scores. In the later 1880s and 1890s, the sport’s teenage years, baseball began to more closely resemble its adult form. After changing the number of balls that constituted a walk seemingly every year, for the 1889 season the rules committee settled on four, a number that both seemed fair and speeded up the game. Pitchers won the right to throw overhand and batters lost the right to request high or low pitches, though perhaps as a humanitarian concession for a few years batters were permitted to use a flat, cricket-like bat. Gloves arrived en masse, errors dipped to respectable levels, and many of the refinements of the modern game took shape. It became a game for Americans on the make, a game novelist Mark Twain described as “the very symbol, the outward visible expression, of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the living, tearing, booming nineteenth [century].” Gone were the trappings of the mid-century gentleman’s game, replaced by the swell of immigrant players, crush of rowdy fans, smell of stale beer, and bloody-nose fights for pennants. Through these evolutionary waters, the Chicago Cubs steered the boat. Of course, they were not called the Cubs back then. For more than thirty years of the team’s history it went by different monikers. Originally, in addition to being referred to as the Chicagos or Chicagoans, the team took the name White Stockings—not to be confused with the South Side team and never called the White Sox. During the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, sportswriters and fans pinned other names to the team. They were dubbed the Colts, Orphans, Microbes, Remnants, Spuds, and Zephyrs. Not until 1907 did the Cubs become, formally and eternally, the Cubs. Perhaps all the name changes left deep-seated psychological scars, the kind that burrow into the soul and never really go away, resurfacing every few decades with a sudden unprovoked ax murder or singularly maladroit play. Whatever the case, during...

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