A brief bit of musing about the 1906 Cubs

A brief bit of musing about the 1906 Cubs

You know how good the Red Sox are this year, right? They are playing unheard-of .700 ball and are more than ten games better than the next best team in the majors.

Well get this: in order to equal the record of the 1906 Cubs, the Sox would have to win their next 29 games in a row!

In today’s market, it is unlikely that anyone could assemble a team as good as those Cubbies. They had the best player in the league at six of the eight positions. Their other two guys were a Hall of Famer in his prime (Joe Tinker) and a young guy who would develop into stardom (Circus Solly Hoffman, who would be the league’s best centerfielder by 1910). Their pitching staff had an ERA of 1.75. Their worst pitcher was Carl Lundgren, who was 17-6 with a 2.21 ERA. Their best pitcher, Three-Finger Brown, had an ERA of 1.04, which is still the National League record at the modern pitching distance.

And they lost the World Series! To make matters worse – they lost that series to the crosstown White Sox. Oh, the shame.

4 thoughts on “A brief bit of musing about the 1906 Cubs

  1. Wasn’t the 1906 Cubs the season when the man and his goat were banned from entering the stadium for the last three games of the Series in Chicago, resulting in the the “Cubs Curse”?

    1. No, that was WW2-era.

      (It couldn’t have been in 1906 because those same Cubs actually won the World Series in 1907 and 1908.)

  2. The Seattle Mariners went 116-46 about 15 years ago. They didn’t win the World Series either. (and haven’t been back in the playoffs since either.)

    1. The current Red Sox have an outside chance to equal the Mariners. They’d have to go 29-10, which is difficult but possible. That’s certainly easier than 29-0, which is what they need to equal the ’06 Cubs.

      One incredible fact about the 2001 Mariners – they did that without Randy Johnson, who had left for the D-Backs and was by that time the best pitcher in the NL (that’s the year he had 372 Ks). There’s no telling how many more the Mariners might have won in 2001 if they could have retained the services of The Unit.

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