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FIRESIDE TRIVIA

Pull up a chair. The fire’s going and one of the uncles swears this one is true.

One small piece of baseball history a night. Some of it is genuinely remarkable. Some of it is a grown man in 1903 doing something extraordinarily stupid. We don’t rank them.

TONIGHT AND THIS WEEK

  • The Hitless Wonders

    Both Chicago teams are going to the postseason this year. The first time that happened was 1906, and it did not go the way anybody expected.

    The Cubs went 116-36 that season. That .763 winning percentage is still the best of the modern era, and nobody has won more regular-season games since.

    The White Sox, meanwhile, hit .230 as a team, the worst batting average in the American League. A sportswriter named Charles Dryden gave them a nickname that stuck for the next 120 years: the Hitless Wonders.

    They met in the World Series, the first one ever played between two teams from the same city. And the Hitless Wonders won it, four games to two.

    They did not suddenly learn to hit. In the six games the White Sox batted .198. They won because the Cubs batted .196.

    A few other things happened in that Series that are still in the books:

    • Ed Walsh struck out 12 Cubs in Game 3, a World Series record at the time
    • George Rohe won that game almost by himself, with a two-out, bases-loaded triple
    • Doc White was credited with the first save in World Series history, in Game 5

    We tell this story every October because it’s the purest version of the sport: the best team in the world lost to a team that couldn’t hit, by two points of batting average.

    This year’s White Sox, for what it’s worth, are not hitless. They have three players with 30-plus homers. They also have the shortstop who just tied the record for strikeouts in a season.

    So, a Hitless Wonder after all, in his way. The tradition lives.

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