Franklin P. Adams's "Trio of Bear Cubs"

Abstract

Evers again played second base without an error, accepting seven chances, and in addition secured a clean hit to center. The youngster is remarkably fast in relaying plays. Chicago Daily Tribune, September 16, 1902, 6. For the record, the September 15 game at Chicago's West Side Grounds marked Johnny Evers's second play with his infield colleagues. Just 260 spectators--a mere sprinkling of fans, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune's press account--were on hand to see Evers's dexterity as Frank Selee's Colts beat the Cincinnati Reds by the score of 6-3. Perhaps attendance was down that afternoon due to the double drubbing the Reds gave the Colts the before. Although the two losses on September 14, 1902, (2-1 and 8-6) dampened the spirits of the hometown crowd of some 8,500, the second game did quietly produce one historical statistic: the first 6-4-3 play recorded by shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance. (1) There would be more plays, of course, though in the deadball era that particular fielding statistic meant little to record keepers. And besides, as Hall of Fame historian Lee Allen often observed, care very little for statistics as such. My concern is the players. Who are these men? What are they? (2) For Allen, the stories behind the baseball players mattered, and during the early part of the twentieth century, many of these tales centered on the scrappy, steely-eyed Chicago Cubs. Led by Chance, the team's peerless leader, this true baseball dynasty captured four National League (NL) pennants (1906-1908, 1910) and two World Series titles (1907-1908). Chance and his players would be the first to acknowledge that tenacity and old-fashioned grit had much to do with the team's good fortune, and even their opponents admired Chicago's aggressive play. After the Cubs' archrivals, the New York Giants, beat them 5-4 during a hard-fought game in September 1908, the Giants sportswriter covering the game conceded that they're wild and woolly and full of tease, are the Cubs. Hard to handle, and apt to scratch all opposition out of their way. But we like to play with them at that. They keep us trying all the time. (3) The Cubs similarly relished their own confrontations with their New York nemesis. When a Chicago Daily News reporter asked Tinker to recall his greatest day in baseball, the shortstop immediately replied that might know it was against the I think that goes for every Cub who played for 'Husk' Chance in those years on Chicago's West Side. Warming to his subject, he added, If you didn't honestly and furiously hate the Giants, you weren't a real Cub. (4) You weren't much of a Cub fan, either, as New York newspaper columnist and pundit Franklin P. Adams knew. The Chicago-born journalist began his career in 1903 on the pages of the Chicago Journal, but he moved to New York and the New York Evening Mail a year later. Filled with jokes, poems, witty observations about the city, and puns (cotton is the root of boll weevil), his Always in Good Humor column soon became a staple among New York readers and a fixture on the editorial page of the New York Evening Mail. (5) When he wasn't pouring over his writing, F. P. A.--as Adams signed his columns--would often go to the ball games at the Polo Grounds, occasionally with his friends and fellow journalists Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon, and Ring Lardner. Baseball was a passion with Frank, according to biographer Sally Ashley, and he possessed a sincere enthusiasm for the sport. He would usually on the results of the games, and in a city where it was not unusual for three-inch headlines to trumpet GIANTS THROTTLE CUBS, he preferred to root for his hometown team and bet gleefully against the Giants. (6) As Adams recalled decades later in a letter to Hall of Fame historian Ernest Lanigan, one in July 1910 the foreman of the newspaper's composing room told him that eight more lines were needed for his column. …