After so long with no baseball — by which I mean the 48 hours following the American League’s 5-3 win in the All Star Game — I thought we’d take a look at a game from 112 years ago yesterday in which not only was there baseball, there was all of baseball in a game the Phillies played against the Cubs in Chicago.
“Pestiferous.”
That’s the word the Chicago Tribune chose to describe the Phillies on July 18, 1912. You can guess what it means. But I’ll just tell you — annoying, bothersome, toxic. It’s the word that enters Trea Turner’s head every time he sees the Daycare approaching with their water cups.
The combination of a biblical heat wave and a Phillies team eight games under .500 by the end of June is enough to ruin any summer. But on July 18, 1912, cooling showers blessed the region, dousing the streets and steaming the rooftops. People unclung their shirts from their torsos and wiped the sweat from their eyes and, when they checked the papers, they learned that the Phillies had won four games in a row. Two more victories and they’d have climbed all the way back to .500. And wouldn’t you know it, on July 18, they were scheduled to play exactly that many games.
The Phillies and Cubs had played at the West Side Grounds in Chicago the day before. The Cubs were playing for first place behind the Giants in the NL, the Phillies were trying to fight their way out of the middle. It had been a back-and-forth game with multiple lead swaps and the two teams’ disdain for each other only grew as the game went on.
The Cubs went up 2-0, the Phillies went up 5-2, and the Cubs tied it back up at 5-5 in the seventh. Chicago believed it had the comeback in hand, with one paper reading that it was assumed throughout the ballpark that the Phillies would get “what they richly deserved.” Until the Phillies’ Gavvy Cravath, referred to as “a human nuisance” by Chicago writers, crushed a solo shot to deep right that “fell like a bolt from a clear sky.”
Phillies pitcher Earl Moore struck out the Cubs’ Tommy Leach looking to end the game for a Phillies’ 6-5 win. Leach turned around and “humiliated” the umpire with some “third-rail language,” according to one writer.
So things were getting persnickety between these two teams by the time they were playing a doubleheader the next day. Hey, you know what usually calms everybody down? Extra innings.
Twenty of them, to be exact; a regulation nine in one game and 11 in the other. This doubleheader lasted five hours and featured 48 hits and three home runs. That was a lot of home runs back then, keep in mind. That two of them were back-to-back was likely interpreted as a message from the gods.
A back-and-forth affair
The Phillies went up 5-0. They blew it, of course, and the Cubs had tied the game at 7-7 in the ninth inning thanks to a last-second barrage of singles.
The two teams stared at each other in rigid silence until the top of the 11th, when two one-out singles, including one by Cravath, put two runners on, and an intentional walk of Luderus gave him the chance to load the bases and show off his new pair of socks.
A sac fly brought in one run and gave the Phillies an 8-7 lead. Then Cravath, now on third base, started thinking. The Cubs’ pitcher’s windup was awfully slow. And he was letting Cravath take quite the lead. What if he just …
The dirt flew with every footstep as Cravath took off for home plate. A surge of panic pushed against every chest in the ballpark. Cravath slid in safely, by so much that the Chicago crowd didn’t even flinch, gasp, or groan. The Phillies had a 9-7 lead.
To cap things off, the Cubs threatened in the bottom of the 11th, getting a run across with an RBI double. The tying run danced on second base and the Cubs manager looked around for a pinch hitter but realized his bench was empty. So he had to let Jimmy Lavendar hit, the pitcher who’d just let Cravath steal home, in the most important at-bat of the game.
He struck out looking.
By the time Cravath came to the plate to start Game 2, the people of Chicago were ready to run him over with a horse. He responded to their jeers with a run-scoring triple that gave the Phillies an early 2-0 lead.
“Attempts to capture him alive at third resulted in more disaster for us,” noted a Cubs writer’s story that read like a war diary. He was referring to the moment in which a throw to third hit Cravath behind his ear and, in the ensuing chaos, he trotted home with a smile on his face and only minimal damage to his skull.
But like many early 2-0 leads of this era, it was all the Phillies offense could muster in Game 2.
If the Cubs had let the Phillies beat them by a run for a third straight game, with Cravath spearheading the attack again, they’d pretty much have to give them the keys to the stadium. So they weren’t really feeling another charming Phillies rally, and that was clear through both their play and their physical attacks.
Phillies first baseman Fred Luderus had hit a grand slam in the first inning of Game 1. In Game 2, Vic Saier of the Cubs chopped him so hard running to first base that a boy was sent into the locker room to get him a new sock and stirrup.
The sun was rapidly sinking behind the western billboards and the fans were in a hurry to get back to their loved ones at home. They did not care whether Mr. Luderus had a hole in his sock or not, and they said so in a loud tone of voice.
That’s how you know a baseball game is getting scary: When a boy is sent to retrieve replacement hosiery.
The Cubs used back-to-back homers, one of them inside the park, as well as a disastrous bottom of the sixth for the Phillies that, despite a Cubs runner getting cut down at the plate, featured a walk, a passed ball, and three singles that gave the Cubs the 4-2 lead they’d use to win it.
The summer went on. The rain continued. The Phillies’ success did not, as they finished in fifth place, having heroically fought their way out of the basement only to flame out in baseball’s sad, saggy middle. The Cubs won 91 games in 1912. That was good enough for third place in the NL and no playoff appearance. This is just a reminder that the 84-win Arizona Diamondbacks are the defending National League champions.
But clearly the pestiferous Phillies had left an impression on the Chicagoans after their doubleheader in July 1912 and, as usual for Philadelphia, it was less of an impression and more of an accusation.
Read one Illinois newspaper, “They’d have stolen the grandstand and the catcher’s mask if they’d thought about it.”
