Successive editions of this text are counting down the 50 best ballclubs of all time — a/okay/a the Greatest 50 — as ranked by my new ebook, Baseball’s Greatest (and Worst) Groups. Right now’s entry focuses on No. 44, the 1907 Chicago Cubs.
Right here’s a fast boilerplate rationalization that I’m appending to each story on this collection:
I compiled the Greatest 50 by analyzing 2,544 major-league groups from 1903 to 2024. These golf equipment have been ranked by their workforce scores (TS), that are plotted on a 100-point scale. (A given membership’s all-time percentile is the share of the opposite 2,543 groups that it outperformed.)
See my ebook for a proof of my TS calculations. The ebook additionally presents separate breakdowns of the very best and worst golf equipment for each decade and franchise, complete profiles of the Greatest 50 (together with position-by-position lineups and way more data than you’ll discover on this e-newsletter), and related summaries of the ten worst groups of all time.
Now on to as we speak’s profile.
Group: 1907 Chicago Cubs
Group rating: 85.235 factors
All-time rank: 44 of two,544
All-time percentile: 98.31%
Season file: 107-45 (.704)
Season place: First place in Nationwide League
Last standing: World champion
The Chicago Cubs entered 1907 with unfinished enterprise. That they had dominated the Nationwide League in 1906, establishing a big-league file with 116 victories (a mark they nonetheless share with the 2001 Seattle Mariners). But they’d in some way dropped the ’06 World Sequence to the crosstown White Sox, a punchless workforce nicknamed the “Hitless Wonders.” Cubs supervisor Frank Probability was distraught. “There may be one factor I’ll by no means consider,” he sputtered, “and that’s the Sox are higher than the Cubs.”
Probability’s workforce aimed for redemption in 1907. It gained 24 of its first 29 video games. However this torrid begin was matched by the New York Giants, who rang up an equivalent 24-5 file. Have been the Cubs in peril of being thwarted once more?
The reply got here in early June, when a three-game sweep of the Giants put Chicago on observe for an additional NL title. The Cubs went 73-36 the remainder of the way in which, finally rolling to a 17-game lead over second-place Pittsburgh. The Giants completed fourth, 25.5 video games again.
Get the entire lowdown on the 50 best (and 10 weakest) golf equipment of all time
The Cubs had misplaced the opening sport of the 1906 World Sequence to the White Sox, and the same shock loomed in 1907. The underdog Detroit Tigers jumped to a 3-1 lead within the eighth inning of Recreation One. Chicago clawed again on the final minute, rallying for 2 runs within the backside of the ninth. The rating was nonetheless tied 3-3 when impending darkness pressured the umpires to halt play after 12 innings. Such a sport would merely be suspended as we speak, however 1907’s guidelines wiped it from the books.
The Cubs breathed simpler after that shut name. Their superior pitching asserted itself, permitting the Tigers solely three runs over the rest of the collection. Frank Probability grew cocky after his membership gained Video games Two and Three. “I don’t suppose there’s something to it now,” he instructed reporters. He was proper. Mordecai Brown’s seven-hit shutout nailed down a sweep in Recreation 5.
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Chicago’s batters didn’t strike concern within the hearts of Nationwide League pitchers in 1907. “No terrific hitting marked the Cubs’ surge by way of their very own league race,” conceded longtime Chicago sportswriter Warren Brown. No one on the membership batted .300, and your entire roster hit solely 13 dwelling runs, the second-lowest whole for any NL workforce.
Probably the most reliable participant in Frank Probability’s on a regular basis lineup was Probability himself. He led the Cubs with a .293 batting common, and he anchored the double-play mixture — “Tinker to Evers to Probability” — that was immortalized by poet Franklin P. Adams. Shortstop Joe Tinker and second baseman Johnny Evers would be a part of Probability in Cooperstown in 1946. “Nearly singlehandedly, that poem was later to hold these three gamers into baseball’s holy of holies, the Corridor of Fame,” wrote former commissioner Ford Frick in 1973. High quality scores counsel that Probability (26 factors) was a borderline candidate for induction, particularly when his managerial file was added to the dimensions. However Tinker (21) and Evers (12) had been terrible selections.
Pitching was the key to the Cubs’ success in 1907. 5 of their starters completed among the many NL’s six leaders in earned run common, led by Jack Pfiester (1.15) and Carl Lundgren (1.17). Orval General, who had been acquired from Cincinnati in a 1906 commerce, gained 23 video games. Mordecai Brown chipped in with 20 victories. A pair of childhood accidents had left Brown with a mangled proper hand (and the well-known nickname of “Three-Finger”), but he nonetheless threw a pointy curveball. “It was essentially the most deceiving, essentially the most devastating pitch I ever confronted,” mentioned Ty Cobb.
