Chicago's Greatest Year, 1893: The White City and the Birth of a Modern Metropolis

9. The West Side Grounds

181 N9 O The West Side Grounds What was the best baseball team of all time? The 1927 Yankees , with Ruth, Gehrig, Lazzeri, and Meusel? Or one of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machines of the early 1970s, with Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, and Joe Morgan? What about the Dodgers when they had Duke Snider, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, and Pee Wee Reese? Well, as Casey Stengel used to say, “You could look it up.” None of these teams holds the record for the best single season in baseball history. Or the best three consecutive seasons. Or the best five. The best three-year record in major league history is 322–136 (a winning percentage of .703). The best five-year record is 530–235 (.693). And the most wins ever achieved in one year was 116. Every one of these feats was accomplished by the same team. The best team of all time was the Chicago Cubs. Consider the team that won 116 games in 1906.Manager Frank Chance’s stalwarts led the league in runs (705), batting average (.262), hits (1,316), triples (71), slugging average (.339), fielding average (.969), strikeouts by pitchers (702), shutouts (30), and earned run average (an ungodly 1.75). Now that the season lasts 162 games, the number of victories notched by the ’06 Cubs was bound to be equaled, as it was by the Seattle Mariners in 2001. But that team lost forty-six games,ten more than the Cubs.And it will be a long time before we witness a club that plays .800 ball on the road,as the 1906 Cubs did.That team inexplicably lost 182 The West Side Grounds the World Series, to, of all people, the Chicago White Sox, the “Hitless Wonders,” but it was essentially the same group that won the World Series in 1907 and 1908. The Stadium and the Team The Cubs are practically synonymous with Wrigley Field, but those victories did not take place there because Wrigley Field opened in 1914. Those Cub teams played in a ballpark known as West Side Grounds, which opened on May 14, 1893. The West Side Grounds (also known as West Side Park II) stood on a plot bounded by Polk Street on the north, Taylor Street on the south, Wood Street on the east, and Lincoln Street (now called Wolcott) on the west. As the ballpark was not Wrigley Field, the team was not the Cubs. The name of Chicago’s entry in the National League has a complicated history, made more confusing by the fact that during its first years the team was called the White Stockings (although not the “White Sox”). The first organized professional baseball league, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, was founded in New York City on St. Patrick’s Day, 1871. Chicago was one of eight cities represented. Late in 1875, baseball’s leading pitcher, During sold-out games, such as this World Series match between the Cubs and White Sox in 1906, spectators at the West Side Grounds were allowed to stand around the edge of the outfield. (Library of Congress) The West Side Grounds 183 Albert Spalding, and William Hulbert, a Chicago entrepreneur, began discussing a new league. Spalding, who was a straight arrow and a smart businessman, was dismayed by the gambling and liquor sales that blighted the professional game; he also envisioned a system in which each team would have two “interdependent divisions, the executive and the productive.”1 That is, the players would work, under contract, for the owners. The result was the establishment in 1876 of the National League of Professional Baseball Players, the league in which the Cubs play today. One of the best young players on the Chicago White Stockings in 1876 was Adrian “Cap” Anson, who would go on to manage the team. He became so identified with the team that eventually it became known as Anson’s White Colts, or just the Colts. After Anson was fired in 1898, the writers viewed the team as leaderless and called it the “Orphans” or the “Remnants.” But club names were fluid and sportswriters enjoyed inventing varied cognomens; thus Chicago’s team was occasionally known as the “Zephyrs,” “Microbes,” “Spuds,” and “Cowboys.” It didn’t matter much because baseball teams were more commonly called after their cities, such as “the Chicagos beat the Detroits, 5–2.” City names...