The 1903 Chicago City Series
The series that time forgot
The 1903 Chicago City Series
Did you know that the Cubs and White Sox met in October 1903 for a postseason series?
You can be forgiven if you didn’t know this. Retrosheet doesn’t mention it at all:
This is true despite the fact that Retrosheet heavily insinuates that its collection of box scores and play by play accounts of these games is complete:
Actually, the collection that Retrosheet has is not only incomplete, but it’s way off the mark.
Wikipedia has a brief article on the history of the Cubs - White Sox city series. It’s a bit more accurate:
We’re going to take a closer look at that 1903 series.
Now, the origins of this series can be traced back to February 1903:
I haven’t looked at the spring exhibition games yet; that might be a good topic for a future post.
From here, let’s just dive right into the original newspaper articles. I’ll present these one game at a time, starting with articles from The Chicago Daily Tribune and then moving to the same articles from The Inter Ocean. I’ll insert a little bit of commentary, but will keep my comments to a minimum.
The days are pretty easy to keep track of. The 15 games were played from October 1 to October 15, with no rest — aside from a single rainout, as we’ll soon see.
Game 1
The crowd of 8,000 shows just how seriously they took this series. For the sake of comparison, the 4th and 8th games of the Pirates - Red Sox World Series that year drew under 8,000 fans.
Game 2
I included the final two scores to show that the postseason series in 1903 weren’t exclusively city series — something that has been largely forgotten.
Game 3
There were 7,500 there for this game, which is also quite impressive.
Game 4
This was the big one. 15,000 was a huge crowd in those days. Only 3 actual World Series games drew more fans.
Game 5
Game 6
If you’ve lost track, the score now stands at 4 games for the Cubs and 2 for the White Sox.
Game 7
This is where things get funny.
Rain prevented a 7th game from being played. We’ll move straight to the 8th game, which they called the 7th.
This was the only day off for the entire series. I’ve got no idea how these guys were able to play so many days in a row without a day off.
Game 8
Game 9
And so, after 9 games, the series stood at Cubs 5, White Sox 3.
Game 10
Game 11
Game 12
Game 13
This one put the Cubs within 1 win of clinching the whole thing. Their lead was now 7 games to 5.
Game 14
And this is where the threat came out. The players were only under contract to play through October 15. The White Sox allegdly wanted to play the series to the end; the Cubs allegedly refused, saying that only one more game was allowed.
And so we move to the 15th and final game of this series, the Cubs a single win away from local glory.
Game 15
And there you have it. Even after 14 games, we couldn’t figure out which team was better.
Interesting that the White Sox are almost invariably called the White Sox, while the Cubs are usually called the Colts, sometimes called the Cubs, and at least once just called Chicago (as in White Sox vs Chicago). Even more interesting is that the later reports include the Boston-Pittsburgh series as just one among several post-season series. And the articles themselves reveal, or indicate, much of what journalism was like in the pre-radio, pre-film, pre-TV era. And the public's interesting in baseball clearly was sufficient to create a demand for ultra-detailed articles about exhibition games.
You might have already noted this elsewhere since you posted this summary last year (I ran across your YouTube video, which is how I'm arriving here first), but Retrosheet does actually talk a bit about this series and a number of others. These articles linked below have been on their site since 2010.
https://www.retrosheet.org/Regional%20Series/apocrypha.htm
https://www.retrosheet.org/Regional%20Series/I-Cartl3.htm
https://www.retrosheet.org/Regional%20Series/chi03.htm
It appears that because these fall into a bit of a gray area, being "permitted" though "unsanctioned", they don't group them with the other city series since they aren't "official" games to the same degree.
The first link to Mike Cantor's article also contains a couple significant lines relevant to why they might be excluded.
"The Cubs owner sincerely, and probably with good cause, believed the games were not on the level and vowed never to play another without a sanctioning body overseeing things."
And, "The [1903] games were a bit haphazard with no check on rosters or umpires, frequent fights, no discipline for the umps to enforce, and no real official scorer. They existed, they were taken somewhat seriously by the day's newspapers, but had no real structure as we know it."