At a Loss to Eternity: Baseball Teams of Note That Didn’T Win It All

At a Loss to Eternity

Baseball Teams of Note That Didn’t Win it All

by

Thomas Porky McDonald

© 2005 Thomas Porky McDonald. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 04/04/05

ISBN: 1-4208-3352-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4634-8712-6 (eBook)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Jacket Design and Formatting

by Olga Khropovitski

Text and Graphic Formatting & Compilation

by Eustace Castellaneta

Editing by Adam Boneker

Contents

Introduction

Part One

1906

1907-1909

1911-1913

1936-1937

1949; 1952-1953

1954

1965

1969

1970; 1972-73

1982

1990-1992

1991-1993

1995-1998

2001

Part Two

1908

1912-1913

1922

1942

1951-53; 55-56

1961

1993

Part Three

1919-2003

1909-2004

1918-2004

Epilogue

To

Al Fleming

and

Al Young

Lovers of the game;

Teachers of the same

"Grief will take care of itself, but

to get the full value of a joy you

must have somebody to divide it with."

Mark Twain

Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar

Introduction

Is Winning All There Is?

Introduction

Is winning all there is?

The most overused word in sports is not star or superstar, as some people would have you believe. No, the most overused term or expression is fan. This word is tossed about with reckless abandon, blanketing all types of individuals under one banner that only a relative few rightfully have a claim to. To clear this up, once and for all, a fan is someone who has an unconditional love for his or her predetermined favorite team (predetermined at birth, if at all possible). A fan does not, ever, change allegiances, especially to latch onto a winning squad. A true fan does not go to games only when his team is a winner. A fan goes to games always, year in, year out, simply because their team is there.

The terms one might use for many of those who might claim to be fans or are similarly portrayed as fans by a most amused and collectively snickering media, range from front-runners to spectators to out and out phonies. I have heard (more and more as the years go by) on too many occasions, someone claiming that I am the type of fan that……, before delving into some justifying factor. To begin a sentence this way is comical. There is no type of fan. You either are or you aren’t. Those who boo their own team are not fans; they’re just people letting off steam at someone else’s expense. What’s more, the curious practice of booing your own is self-serving, defeatist and serves no tangible purpose, other than to make the perpetrator feel strangely better about himself/herself. If you are a fan, you are supposed to be rooting for the team, hoping it will win. Booing your own only puts more pressure on the players, which almost always results in continued poor performance, since the players are, in fact, human beings. I know that the absurd sums paid to athletes these days (and thus passed on to the ticket buyers) is some kind of rallying cry for a slew of unenlightened types, and has made booing your own somehow more fashionable and prevalent than ever, but a long, still silence by a crowd of upwards of 50,000 people was always a more powerful form of showing disappointment at a ballgame than the inane practice of booing. A silence in the home yard also had a much better chance of garnering a positive reaction from your team. (Let’s give ‘em something to cheer about.) Moreover, booing the home team is probably the most obnoxious act imaginable to those other patrons at the same game, who also paid a lot of money, yet who are there mainly for the love of the game they are watching. Fans (real fans) go to a game to have a good time. Baseball is about joy, not whining. If you go to a park just to create a negative atmosphere, the real fans don’t really need you there.

As a baseball fan, I am irritated by those at the park who do nothing but live game-by-game (in April or May?) and play-to-play, ostensibly to complain about anything and everything, while still claiming they are fans. As a New Yorker, I am insulted when I hear commentators saying how learned New York fans are, before adding they’ll boo you if you’re bad, and cheer you when you’re good. Well, from where I’m standing, as a lifetime New Yorker born in 1961, there’s nothing learned about that approach, and certainly nothing universally New York about it. A learned fan understands that baseball, above all other sports, is predominantly a game of failure. The winner is generally the team that fails the least. So to boo a guy every time he makes an out, simply because he has not been very successful for your team, is moronic, since even the best hitters are going to make out 7 times out of 10. I have seen this scenario, wherein a certain player has fallen out of favor to the point that they are booed every time that they make out. This is absolutely idiotic and stunningly clueless.

Now, if you want to razz, boo or jeer the opposing team, fine – that’s part of the genuine give and take of being a fan. I could even give you booing one of your own guys when he doesn’t hustle on a particular play, but that would be an isolated incident. Booing at the drop of a hat, whenever everything doesn’t go as you want it, is beyond reasonable comprehension, though these days that practice is prevalent and all but accepted without debate. I know that ballplayers can’t point out the hypocritical nature of some claiming to be fans, since that’s a no win situation, again because of the money they make now. (You make the big bucks, you take the heat.) And the media isn’t going to say all that much, because many of them do variations of the same on a daily basis, criticizing something they can’t do, while owing their professional existence to the athletes they belittle. I have no such ties binding me. I recall as a kid reading about Ted Williams and admiring him as much for his honesty about hypocritical fans and unfair press as his on field accomplishments. The Splendid Splinter may have been loud and bombastic, but he was also right about those two items. When all is said and done, if you only follow a ballclub from April to September to berate them, try football – the genuine lovers of baseball don’t need you.

Everyone wants to win, of course. But everyone can’t, that’s the simple arithmetic of it. For every World Series Champion, there have been at least another 15 teams (1901-1960), and as many as 29 (1998 and on, through 2004), who have not won it all. This book is for some of those that, through the manic need to celebrate only winners, might not ever be acknowledged properly. Every year that your local area fields a team, Major League, Minor League or whatever league, you should celebrate it and hold it closely to your heart. The following pages contain some of the finest teams ever, although they generally get only a smattering of applause on the rare occasions when they are mentioned. Fundamentally, not winning a World Series does not constitute a lost season, as a large portion of the media and too large a portion of an apparently non-independently thinking public which gets their opinions from that media would have you believe. For if it did, why do we even go to the games, or watch or listen on television or radio, respectively, for six months a year?

Simply put, baseball was bringing joy to the Summer long before silly rotisserie leagues, idiotic call-in radio shows and inaccurate internet columns existed. To base your assertions on these and other self-serving entities is laughable.

There are other teams that are not listed here, to be sure. You could argue that this volume simply drops the bar one level, which could then be dropped another, and then another. But the point is: there have been enough generic books about the World Series, or World Series books, in general (of which I am also guilty, though I like to think that my book, Series Endings, about the final plays of each October showcase, does look at the Fall Classic in a unique way). The time is ripe for a book about other teams in history that real fans know about, but that even the front-runners might appreciate, and possibly learn from.

Be they post-season losers, regular season runner-ups or the latest entry in the continuance of an extended Championship drought, all those mentioned in the three sections explored in the following pages are to be savored. Just like the 100th World Series Champions (the supposedly cursed Boston Red Sox, who won for the first time in 86 years) were etched in stone in the year 2004, so too these other teams have rosters that contain All-Time greats, solid stars and momentary comets who shone brightly for a time.

May they shine again, in a pointed way, so that all may share their glow.

Part One

A Late Turn to Oblivion

Part One

A Late Turn to Oblivion

The math is simple. One team wins it all. In any sporting league, be it High School, College, Semi-Pro, Minor, Major or Softball Beer League, only one team remains standing at the end. In Major League baseball, since 1903 (the year of the first modern World Series), the New York Yankees have, of course, been the most successful team, from a pure wins-losses standpoint. From 1903-2004, the Yankees won the World Series 26 times, after giving the original 16-team league a 20-year head start (New York didn’t win it’s first World Title until 1923). When you consider that the St. Louis Cardinals and the Philadelphia/Kansas City/Oakland Athletics come in a distant second with a singular 9 titles each, this is a most remarkable accomplishment. Thus, like the Montreal Canadiens of the NHL (23 Championships) and the Boston Celtics of the NBA (17 Titles), the Yankees are the team most associated with their sport at the Dawn of the 21st Century. So much so that many folks out there manage to meld into the crowd of genuine Yankee fans, calling the team their own, not because they have a true tie to them, but mainly because the former Highlanders/Hilltoppers have won so often since their permanent name change in the second decade of the 20th Century. Somehow, winning expands the fan base. I root, for now, therefore I am.

Unfortunately, winning can tend to blur things at times. While there is naturally a pretty substantial amount of print, audio and video records out available to research all past World Championship teams, the sheer number of titles can lose all but the most astute, knowledgeable and actual fans. Plenty of people deftly toss around the 26 Championships their team, the Yankees, have won. Many also seamlessly dish off the names of the most famous icons of former Eras, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, to promote their supposed knowledge of the great Yankees. But how many could name, off the top of their head and in sequence, all of the Yanks’ Championship years, then speak credibly of hardly mentioned ex-New York stars Bob Meusel, Earle Combs, Waite Hoyt or Herb Pennock, even though all but Meusel are Hall of Famers? The manic need to be connected to winning can be distanced from a state of truly being a fan with little difficulty, even though these lesser known stars can be reached without incident by simply looking back at the Series Champions they played on, right alongside the Babe and the Iron Horse.

Moving forward, what of the players on teams that did not quite win it all? What of those teams themselves? Do we arbitrarily dismiss players and teams, simply because they lost in post-season? Should one-time fine teams from Brooklyn, Cleveland and other magic baseball towns become like football teams of a later Era (the Minnesota Vikings and the Buffalo Bills come to mind), merely a punchline because they never finished first overall? Now that would be simple.

In the following pages, you will not find answers as to why certain teams somehow had the Championship ring elude them. You will not find excuses for what is strangely considered an ultimate failure, nor a treatise on how not to win the big one. What you will find is a collection of wonderful ballclubs, through an admittedly brief and narrow landscape. Most of these were the World Series runner-up, though a few lost in the other forms of post-season play that were created from 1969 to the present. They were all in the post-season, though, a self-imposed pre-requisite for Part One. All had fine seasons, ones their local and loyal fans will always cherish, regardless of their final standing. As such, they warrant some sort of more tangible recognition than the checkbook versions that non-Series Champions have inevitably fallen into.

You will note that there are no Yankee, Red Sox or White Sox teams mentioned here, among other franchises that have been less pointedly omitted. The Yankees, through 2004, had lost in the post-season on 17 occasions (13 World Series, 2 League Championship Series, 2 Division Series), but since they’ve had so much coverage for their winning years, with many of the same players that toiled in those so-called losing seasons, it says here that they don’t need any more light shone upon them. They are, in fact, referenced often herein, since many of the teams covered were (predictably) beaten out by the New York A.L. nine. The Red Sox and the White Sox, on the other hand, will be collectively addressed later in this book, along with the Chicago Cubs, whose All-Time regular season win leader (116) squad of 1906 (since tied by the 2001 Seattle Mariners, who are also cited in Part One) does appear here as the first entry in this assembly of near World Champions.

Those Cubs, like a few other teams that follow them here, did come back to win Championships immediately or soon after their ignominious fall from grace in the humbling glare of the Fall. In any case, all of these teams were fabulous contingents that deserve – no, demand – the respect of all true baseball fans everywhere. From the Cubs of Frank Chance to Cobb’s Tigers to McGraw’s Giants, on through Weaver’s Birds, Sparky’s Reds and Harvey’s Wallbangers, each one brought the crowd to its feet, making those particular Summers that much sunnier in those particular towns. To the many other Series losers that I’ve overlooked here, I apologize. My choices were done straight from a gut feeling I had, one that I’ve learned to respect and listen to attentively. If things work out in a most positive manner, possibly an expanded version could be realized at a future date, when even more lost near Champions can take a bow.

Maybe they all took a late turn to oblivion. Maybe the time is right to recall the magical rides they realized, before they derailed from their mission, if not the hearts of all that cheered them on during their Summers of mostly content.

1906

Chicago Cubs

National League Champions

Manager – Frank Chance

Record – 116-36 (.763)

(+20 games over second place New York Giants)

Lost World Series, 4 games to 2

to Chicago White Sox

_____________

Key Performers

Mordecai Three-Finger Brown – righthanded pitcher who went 26-6, with a League high 10 shutouts and a League low 1.04 earned run average. Brown, who’d lost a portion of his right index finger and the feeling in his right little finger to a food cutter on his family’s farm as a boy, used this supposed disability to his advantage. His pitches, thrown in certain ways, held by his intact digits, would dip sharply as they approached the plate. Also known as Miner Brown, in deference to his days spent in the Indiana coal fields, Brown was in his third full season with the Cubs in 1906 (following 15 and 18-win campaigns in 1904-05). A disappointing 1-2 mark (3.20) in the 1906 World Series vs. the White Sox was overshadowed as Brown proceeded to go 3-0 in the 1907-08 Fall Classics versus the Tigers, including a pair of victories and an E.R.A. of 0.00 over 11 innings in the 1908 set. Originally Cardinal property (9-13 as a rookie in 1903), he would retire with a 239-129 record in 14 seasons, including a lifetime E.R.A. of 2.06, which still represents the third lowest of All-Time. Also a manager for a portion of the 1914 season with the outlaw Federal League team in St. Louis (his 50-63 record contributed to a last place finish), the remarkable Three-Finger Brown was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1949.

Frank Chance – known as the Peerless Leader, Chance managed the 1906 Cub juggernaut from his perch at first base, and anchored the famous Tinker to Evers to Chance double play combo that was immortalized in a poem by columnist Franklin P. Adams. In 1906, his 9th year as a player and 2nd season as a field manager (all with the Cubs to that point), Chance hit .319 with 3 homers and 71 runs batted in. He finished the season tied for 4th in batting average and tied for 5th in RBI, and led the Senior circuit in runs scored (103) and stolen bases (57). The Cubs’ leading batter in the 1908 World Series with a .421 mark (8-19), the righthanded hitting field general batted .296 over his 17 seasons in the Majors. In 11 years as a manager (Cubs, 1905-12; Yankees, 1913-14; Red Sox, 1923), he compiled a 946-648 won/loss record (.593). Through 2004, his 1906 squad’s 116 wins still represented the single season Major League standard (although it had been tied by the 2001 Seattle Mariners). Chance also piloted the Cubs to three more Fall Classics, winning twice (1907-08) and losing once (1910), and was the only Chicago Cub manager to win a World Series in the 20th Century. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1946.

Johnny Evers – diminutive (5’9, 125 lbs.) lefty swinging second baseman known alternately as The Crab (for his temperament) and The Trojan (for his hometown of Troy, New York), Evers was a royal pain to all who opposed him, and even some of his own teammates. It was said that keystone mates Joe Tinker and Evers spent years not talking to one another, while maintaining their professional integrity around the second base bag. In 1906, his fifth in the Majors, Evers hit .255 with 1 homer and 51 runs batted in. A leader on the field despite his churlishness, The Crab would be instrumental in the infamous regular season encounter of September 23, 1908 between the Giants and the Cubs, wherein a controversial tie was forged and eventually replayed at seasons’ end, which ultimately helped Chicago capture that season’s N.L. flag. He was traded to the Boston Braves in 1914, and immediately became a major part of the Miracle Braves" Championship run that year. He also played briefly for the Phillies and White Sox, and managed in the Bigs for parts of three seasons with little success. He entered the Hall of Fame in 1946.

Johnny Kling – one of the most respected catchers in all of baseball at the Dawn of the 20th Century, Johnny Kling hit .312 in 1906, which represented his highest average of the six seasons in which he played in more than 100 games. In his 5th full season with the Cubs (and 7th overall), the righty hitting Kling also knocked in 46 runs with a pair of homers. Over 13 seasons, mostly in Chicago (and briefly with the Boston Braves and Cincinnati Reds), the dependable backstop would hit .272. In 1912, in his only foray into Big League managing, Kling led the Braves to a last place finish with a 52-101 (.340) record.

Carl Lundgren – a righthander in the middle of Chance’s starting rotation, Carl Lundgren went 17-6 with a 2.21 earned run average in 1906. He completed 21 of 24 starts and tossed 5 shutouts on the season. In a mostly successful 8-year career (1902-09), all spent with the Cubs, Lundgren would go 90-55 with a 2.42 E.R.A. His top season was 1907, when he went 18-7 with a 1.17 E.R.A.

Orval Overall – a big (6’2", 214 lbs.) righthander who arrived in a June 2nd trade from Cincinnati (where he’d gone 20-27 since breaking in as a rookie in 1905), Orval Overall went 12-3 with a 1.88 earned run average for the remainder of the season. After recording no decisions in two appearances during the 1906 World Series, Overall went 3-0 in the 1907-08 Fall Classics, including a 2-0, 0.98 mark with 15 strikeouts in the 1908 Championship round. He would go on to record a pair of 20-win seasons in 1907 (23-8) and 1909 (20-11), before finishing a brief, 7-year career (1905-1910; 1913) with a 106-71 lifetime record. This slate included a 2.24 E.R.A., good for 8th best All-Time.

Jack Pfiester – a lefthanded starter who complemented Chance’s predominantly righty staff,