by Scott Fennessy
We continue our coverage of the 1905 Chicago Cubs replay. Having returned from a successful road trip the second place Cubs return home to play their arch rival St. Louis Cardinals. Doc Casey has returned from the DL and will be in the lineup today at third base. In earlier action in NYC the Giants destroyed their cross town rivals Brooklyn 21-1. Christy Mathewson picks up the win again with a 4 hitter for the G-Men.
West Side Park, Chicago, IL 5/27/1905
John Taylor takes the hill today for the redbirds, and “Big Ed” Reulbach goes for the Cubs.
Reulbach looks sharp in the first with a 1-2-3 inning. Arthur Hofman drops a two out single and steals on a 0-1 count, but is stranded and we have a scoreless tie at the end of one. Nothing doing for the cards again in the second, Joe Tinker who just had his modest hitting streak snapped the other day hits a solid single to lead off the second inning. Taylor fools Frank Schulte with a two strike change up for a strikeout, and perhaps a bit overconfident grooves a first pitch fastball to Johnny Kling who deposits it half way up the left field bleachers and the Cubs have a 2-0 lead. Taylor settles down and retires Casey on a pop up to Burke at short, and strikes out Reulbach to end the inning.
Big Ed continues to dominate and the Cardinals don’t get their first hit until “Pepper” Clarke singles with one out in the 4th. He steals second and moves to third as Homer Smoot hits a weak grounder that Casey gets to but holds the ball, not wanting to risk a bad throw. Reulbach bears down and the birds get another goose egg. While the Cardinals get a leadoff triple from Jake Beckley who is stranded there and another one out single from Clarke with no score, Taylor has now found his good stuff and retires 12 straight batters after the Kling homer with Evers getting a one out double. Johnny has continued to hit well and is hitting over .340 for the season.
The Cubs finally break through again on Tinker’s second hit of the day followed by a steal of second and “Wildfire” Schulte’s single puts runners on the corners. A Kling grounder to McBride scores before Beckly hits a weak grounder that Chance takes himself for the final out of the game and a shutout to boot.
Tinker and increases the lead to 3-0. Reulbach retires 10 straight hitters, but with two out the Cards threaten with a single to right by Mike Grady and a beautiful hit and run single by Harry Arndt
This was a rare game for me where there were no errors or any defensive “oddities” Solid pitching on both teams kept this game close. While both teams had some chances the only real mistake was the Kling homer in the second.
no errors.. interesting. Do you think the two error #s on each card adequately reflect the era fielding? We got to talking about deadball APBA during our league’s get together this past weekend and that came up.
I am not 100% sure on that. Because I am playing the basic game I only keep track of team errors. I know there is a way to do individual fielding but it seems like a little more work than I am interested in.
That said I think scorers in general marked anything a fielder got the glove on and didn’t get the out was an error.
That is one gripe I have about today’s game. Official scorers are getting too involved with the “hometown discount” on what clearly should be an error but giving the home team a “Hit” on a muffed play.
But I looked on BR’s site and the further back in time you go the worse the fielding gets. Perhaps it was because the things we take for granted today about pre positioning and stuff were being learned in those days.
The biggest problem with having the two error numbers is that there are way too many 23’s. I have had so many injuries at third base again that it is driving me insane. I had every reserve on the white sox roster on the dl at one point. Combine this with the fact there are a lot of J-3 & 4 ratings I have had 3-4 players miss almost a month to date. Oddly almost all of them are reserves.