Best 50 — 1907 Chicago Cubs (#44)
These Cubs were weak at the plate, but their pitching staff was first-rate
Successive editions of this newsletter are counting down the 50 greatest ballclubs of all time — a/k/a the Best 50 — as ranked by my new book, Baseball’s Best (and Worst) Teams. Today’s entry focuses on No. 44, the 1907 Chicago Cubs.
Here’s a quick boilerplate explanation that I’m appending to every story in this series:
I compiled the Best 50 by analyzing 2,544 major-league teams from 1903 to 2024. Those clubs have been ranked by their team scores (TS), which are plotted on a 100-point scale. (A given club’s all-time percentile is the percentage of the other 2,543 teams that it outperformed.)
See my book for an explanation of my TS calculations. The book also offers separate breakdowns of the best and worst clubs for every decade and franchise, comprehensive profiles of the Best 50 (including position-by-position lineups and much more information than you’ll find in this newsletter), and similar summaries of the 10 worst teams of all time.
Now on to today’s profile.
Facts and figures
Team: 1907 Chicago Cubs
Team score: 85.235 points
All-time rank: 44 of 2,544
All-time percentile: 98.31%
Season record: 107-45 (.704)
Season position: First place in National League
Final status: World champion
Season summary
The Chicago Cubs entered 1907 with unfinished business. They had dominated the National League in 1906, establishing a big-league record with 116 victories (a mark they still share with the 2001 Seattle Mariners). Yet they had somehow dropped the ’06 World Series to the crosstown White Sox, a punchless team nicknamed the “Hitless Wonders.” Cubs manager Frank Chance was distraught. “There is one thing I will never believe,” he sputtered, “and that is the Sox are better than the Cubs.”
Chance’s team aimed for redemption in 1907. It won 24 of its first 29 games. But this torrid start was matched by the New York Giants, who rang up an identical 24-5 record. Were the Cubs in danger of being thwarted again?
The answer came in early June, when a three-game sweep of the Giants put Chicago on track for another NL title. The Cubs went 73-36 the rest of the way, eventually rolling to a 17-game lead over second-place Pittsburgh. The Giants finished fourth, 25.5 games back.
Baseball’s Best (and Worst) Teams
Get the complete lowdown on the 50 greatest (and 10 weakest) clubs of all time
Postseason summary
The Cubs had lost the opening game of the 1906 World Series to the White Sox, and a similar shock loomed in 1907. The underdog Detroit Tigers jumped to a 3-1 lead in the eighth inning of Game One. Chicago clawed back at the last minute, rallying for two runs in the bottom of the ninth. The score was still tied 3-3 when impending darkness forced the umpires to halt play after 12 innings. Such a game would merely be suspended today, but 1907’s rules wiped it from the books.
The Cubs breathed easier after that close call. Their superior pitching asserted itself, allowing the Tigers only three runs over the remainder of the series. Frank Chance grew cocky after his club won Games Two and Three. “I don’t think there’s anything to it now,” he told reporters. He was right. Mordecai Brown’s seven-hit shutout nailed down a sweep in Game Five.
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Lineup summary
Chicago’s batters didn’t strike fear in the hearts of National League pitchers in 1907. “No terrific hitting marked the Cubs’ surge through their own league race,” conceded longtime Chicago sportswriter Warren Brown. Nobody on the club batted .300, and the entire roster hit only 13 home runs, the second-lowest total for any NL team.
The most dependable player in Frank Chance’s everyday lineup was Chance himself. He led the Cubs with a .293 batting average, and he anchored the double-play combination — “Tinker to Evers to Chance” — that was immortalized by poet Franklin P. Adams. Shortstop Joe Tinker and second baseman Johnny Evers would join Chance in Cooperstown in 1946. “Almost singlehandedly, that poem was later to carry those three players into baseball’s holy of holies, the Hall of Fame,” wrote former commissioner Ford Frick in 1973. Quality scores suggest that Chance (26 points) was a borderline candidate for induction, especially when his managerial record was added to the scale. But Tinker (21) and Evers (12) were awful choices.
Pitching was the secret to the Cubs’ success in 1907. Five of their starters finished among the NL’s six leaders in earned run average, led by Jack Pfiester (1.15) and Carl Lundgren (1.17). Orval Overall, who had been acquired from Cincinnati in a 1906 trade, won 23 games. Mordecai Brown chipped in with 20 victories. A pair of childhood accidents had left Brown with a mangled right hand (and the famous nickname of “Three-Finger”), yet he still threw a sharp curveball. “It was the most deceiving, the most devastating pitch I ever faced,” said Ty Cobb.