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Greatest Rivalry In Baseball

The National League teams in Chicago and St. Louis adopted the nicknames Cubs and Cardinals shortly after the turn of the 20th century. But the rivalry between baseball teams representing those two cities has its roots in the 19th-century origins of the professional game.

Those late-1800s duels between the Chicago White Stockings and St. Louis Brown Stockings produced their share of drama as well as comedy—and featured a game that drew the most fans to any major league contest in that era. St. Louis and Chicago also battled for the championship of the baseball world in October of both 1885 and 1886. Competition between the White Stockings and Browns (not to be confused with the later American League team) began in 1875 when both played in the National Association of Professional Baseball Players (NA), the country's first major league.

A baseball rivalry between Chicago and St. Louis was a natural complement to the geographical and economic competition they'd started after the Civil War. They were two "western" cities in a league largely based on the East Coast. And civic leaders in both towns jockeyed for bragging rights. Just five years before, the U.S. Census had shown St. Louis with 310,864 residents, about 12,000 more than Chicago; by 1880 Chicago, rebuilding mightily after the great fire nine years before, had a half-million citizens, 150,000 more than St. Louis.

Shortly before the 1875 season opened, the New York Times carried this observation: "The new St. Louis club, judging from the players engaged by the managers and the amount of capital invested, is going to make a good fight for the supremacy with its rival, the White Stockings of Chicago. The St. Louis club was not organized for the purpose of contending for the pennant so much as for becoming a permanent and formidable rival of\the Chicago club."

Baseball then was played on rough-surfaced fields by men who caught the ball bare-handed. Rules prohibited a pitcher, 45 feet from the plate in a ground-level boxed area, from lifting his pitching arm above his waist, making everyone a submarine-style hurler. Batters could call for either a high or low delivery.

The NA's 1875 campaign was its fifth and final one. Its loose organizational structure was a reason many clubs had come and gone, often running out of money before they could complete their schedules. The association's inability to keep gamblers out of the ballparks often led to public skepticism that games hadn't been "on the square."

The first-ever professional baseball meeting between St. Louis and Chicago, in St. Louis's Grand Avenue Park May 6, 1875, helped ensure that both clubs could pay their expenses. It also gave gamblers plenty of business: a St. Louis newspaper listed the times that bets could be made at a local establishment which was to receive inning-by-inning results via telegraph.

A much larger than expected crowd filled all 3,000 seats in the wooden grandstand while more than twice as many other fans were allowed to stand behind roped-off areas along the field. All told, 8,251 patrons watched the Browns thrash the White Stockings 10-0.

Shutouts were rare then and labeled "Chicago games," from the whitewashing a Chicago team had suffered in 1870. St. Louis papers gleefully used the term "Chicagoed" in describing the result; the Chicago Tribune lamented, "Chicago is sorry she was ever rebuilt."

St. Louis edged Chicago 4-3 two days later before 8,728 spectators in St. Louis, the largest crowd for any NA game that season. The Browns and White Stockings split their 10 contests that year, each winning its home games. Both the fourth-place Browns and sixth-place White Stockings finished far behind perennial champion Boston.

Chicago, however, did have an easy time with a second team St. Louis entered in the NA that year. Known as the Red Stockings, it survived only 18 games, and lost all four it played against the White Stockings. Included in that was a 1-0 shutout Chicago gained over the Reds just five days after it had been humiliated by the Browns.

In the off-season, the presidents of the Chicago and St. Louis clubs put their competitiveness briefly aside to devise a reorganization plan for the NA that led to its rebirth as the National League the following year. "You and I can carry the day for everything we want," Chicago's William Hulbert wrote to St. Louis' Charles Fowle. St. Louis lawyer Orrick Bishop, under Hulbert's direction, wrote the NL's first constitution.

That constitution sanctified Hulbert's raiding of the champion Boston team and signing its four best players, including ace pitcher Albert Spalding, as well as versatile slugger Adrian Anson from Philadelphia. That fab five transformed the White Stockings into champions of the NL's inaugural season. The third-place Browns, however, held the season series edge, 6-4, mostly because of the pitching of George Washington Bradley. He hurled all but four of the team's 577 innings, compiling a 45-19 mark (same as the Browns' record) with an earned run average of 1.23, right up there with Spalding's 47-13, 1.75.

Modern Cubs fans have been dismayed to see pitching greats Bruce Sutter and Lee Smith go to the Cardinals. A century before, St. Louis fans saw their pitching workhorse, Bradley, jump ship and don the White Stockings uniform for 1877. Since there was no reserve clause in contracts until 1879, the best players in the early days of the NL could go where they wanted, and Bradley simply took Chicago's better offer. A newspaper noted that he received "a rather hearty round of applause" when he beat his former teammates in St. Louis near the beginning of the season. But both he and his new team fared poorly in 1877. Chicago tumbled to fifth, 1 1/2 games behind fourth-place St. Louis, though the White Stockings won the season series 8-4.

For reasons never fully understood, the St. Louis club went out of business after that season while Chicago went on to win NL pennants in 1880, '81 and '82. It wouldn't be until the mid-1880s that baseball teams from Chicago and St. Louis would face each other again. A new St. Louis NL team, called the Maroons, lasted only two seasons, 1885-86, and served as batting practice for the powerful White Stockings as Chicago won the pennant in both years.

Those White Stockings, however, met a more formidable opponent from St. Louis each October in what newspapers called the "World's Championship Series." This one was a new St. Louis Browns, the perennial powerhouse of the American Association (AA), a major league that successfully challenged the NL's major league monopoly from 1882 through 1891. Chicago's Tribune scoffed at the AA, calling St. Louis and its other members "a few . . . villages."

The two leagues—and their premier teams, Chicago and St. Louis —offered a complete contrast to each other. The NL didn't play on Sundays, charged 50 cents admission (about a half-day's pay for a workingman, who toiled six days and wasn't welcomed in NL parks for fear he would contaminate the higher society types the league appealed to). The NL also banned the sale of booze in the park. The AA played on Sundays, charged only 25 cents admission and sold liquor (its critics called it the "beer and whiskey league") so that workingmen could enjoy it all.

Al Spalding, the former star pitcher for the White Stockings, was now its president. An American blueblood, he'd also built a successful sporting goods business that supplied the official NL ball. Adrian "Cap" Anson, the only player still around from the White Stockings' first championship season, was the club's first baseman and manager.

The Browns' president was flamboyant German immigrant Chris von der Ahe, who'd owned a grocery-saloon just down the street from the Grand Avenue Park. He renamed the baseball grounds Sportsman's Park after declaring himself "boss president" of the Browns.

Von der Ahe often interfered with his club's performance, to the dismay of his players. Yet manager-first baseman Charley Comiskey (later owner of the American League's Chicago White Sox) still molded the Browns into four-time pennant winners, 1885-1888.

The Chicago and St. Louis clubs which met in the 1885-1886 world series also differed in style. Heavy-hitting Chicago—in its white caps and jerseys, blue pants and high white hose—often bludgeoned its opponents into submission; St. Louis—with its high brown stockings and brown- striped caps—relied more on pitching and defense. The two clubs even differed on base-running styles, the 'White Stockings often sliding in feet- first while the Browns went head first.

Chicago's heroes had nicknames such as "King" (slugger Mike Kelly), "Silver" (catcher Frank Flint) and "Unser Fritz" (second baseman Fred Pfeffer, who sported the league's longest handlebar mustache). St. Louis' stars were nicknamed "Tip" (outfielder Jim O'Neill), "Yank" (second baseman Billy Robinson) and "the Flying Dude" (third baseman and ladies' man Arlie Latham). Overhand pitching by then had been allowed and some players, notably catchers, had begun wearing thin gloves, mostly to protect their palms.

The 1885 series was to be a best-of-17 affair, touring several cities besides Chicago and St. Louis. But when after five games it looked as if both clubs were going to lose money (fans in the neutral cities didn't care to attend), the clubs agreed to make Game Six the finale. They first agreed to forget about a forfeit win Chicago had gotten when Comiskey had pulled the Browns off the field to protest an umpire's call, making it two games apiece. But after St. Louis thrashed Chicago 13-4 to claim the crown, Spalding decided to count the forfeit win and declared the 1885 series a 3-3 tie, a decision most history books have accepted.

Both St. Louis and Chicago again won the pennants of their leagues in 1886. This time, von der Ahe and Spalding agreed to a best-of-seven series, the winner to take every penny of the gate receipts. The first three games were scheduled for Chicago, the next three in St. Louis and a seventh game, if needed, would be in the neutral city of Cincinnati.

Chicago blanked St. Louis 6-0 in the opener, and St. Louis won the second contest 12-0. That led some skeptics to call the games a "hippodrome," the 19th-century term for a fix. "These games are on the square," a Chicago player said in denying the charge. Chicago took the rubber game and looked forward to putting the Browns away in their home town.

However, because of injuries, Chicago had only one good starting pitcher left (the team had relied primarily on two during the season). Von der Ahe wouldn't let Spalding use a hurler he'd signed for the next season, and St. Louis used that advantage to take a three-games-to-two lead.

But going into the bottom of the eighth of Game Six, it looked as if the two teams would be Cincinnati bound for the finale. The White Stockings held a 3-0 lead. Thanks to a misjudging of a fly ball by Chicago left fielder Abner Dalrymple, the NL's best outfielder that year, the Browns rallied to tie the score. They won 4-3 in extra innings as center fielder Curt Welch danced across the plate following a wild pitch.

For six days' play that October, each of the Browns earned about $580, equal to about a full year's wages of the workingmen who'd supported the team. Von der Ahe challenged Spalding to play the seventh game in Cincinnati anyway. Spalding responded: "Friend von der Ahe, . . . we know when we have had enough." A deeply disappointed Spalding sold Dalyrmple and some other stars to other NL clubs and not see his team win another pennant for 20 years. The Browns would win two more AA pennants but no postseason series.

After the AA folded following the 1891 season, von der Ahe was allowed to move his Browns to the NL—without his star players, who were allowed to jump ship and happy to do so to get away from him. The Chicago-St. Louis rivalry in the 1890s, however, was a mere shadow of its former self: neither team seriously contended for the pennant and the White Stockings usually, and easily, won the season series. "Rivalries had a tendency to disintegrate when one team becomes as bad as the Browns became," said baseball historian J. Thomas Hetrick of Pocol, Virginia, who's published Chris von der Ahe and His St. Louis Browns (Scarecrow Press).

Von der Ahe sold his best players for cash to make ends meet, rarely buying or developing good athletes. The only real deal between the clubs in the 1890s was when St. Louis purchased the contract of outfielder-first baseman George Decker in 1898. He'd been a solid hitter for Chicago for six seasons but fizzled in his three months with the Browns.

Change was in the works as the century neared its end. Anson was fired as Chicago's manager after the 1897 campaign, causing the club to be referred to in print as the "Orphans," since they now were without their longtime leader. The Browns, meanwhile, almost became orphans of a different sort on Saturday, April 16, 1898. A match dropped by a fan started a fire that destroyed the grandstand of new Sportsman's Park.

Von der Ahe ordered his players to help rebuild the grandstand the next morning so that the Browns would not miss their scheduled game against Chicago. They joined tradesmen in putting up temporary seats but found themselves too pooped after the chore to play very well. Rested Chicago took advantage and pummeled St. Louis 14-1.

After yet another disastrous year, von der Ahe was forced out through a lawsuit filed by disgruntled stockholders. New St. Louis owners brought in new players for 1899, including legendary pitcher Cy Young. The Perfectos, as the St. Louis NL team of 1899 was often called in an attempt to break a losing tradition, got off to a 9-1 start and went to Chicago for an April 30 game.

It was perhaps that great beginning that prompted a record 27,489 fans to overflow the stands at Chicago's West Side Park that day. That, according to attendance stats compiled by baseball historian Robert L. Tiemann of St. Louis, was the largest crowd to ever see a major league game in the 19th Century. "It was also the first good-weather Sunday in Chicago, which as sure to bring out a big crowd," Tiemann said. Whatever reason, Chicago shut out St. Louis 4-0 (the term "Chicagoed" long having been discarded in newspapers). Both teams, however, were far from the top as the year ended.

As the 20th Century dawned, the NL discarded four of its 12 teams, settling on a league membership that would last for the next five decades. A St. Louis fan, remarking, "Oh what a lovely shade of Cardinal," at the sight of the team's new socks, led to the club's being renamed the Cardinals. Shortly before the Chicago club set the major league record for wins with 116 in 1906, newspapers and fans started calling it the Cubs and the little bear emblem began to appear on the uniform. The nicknames stuck. And so has the tradition between the two teams, lasting through some lean times and blossoming into one of the best rivalries in sports history.

George Castle and Jim Rygelski. The I-55 Series: Cubs Vs. Cardinals. Sports Publishing. June 1, 1999.

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