Baseball History Comes Alive Now Ranked #2 by Feedspot Among All Internet Baseball History Websites and Blogs!
Guest Submissions from Our Readers Always Welcome!
Several months ago I came across a very cool photo of Bennett Park on Facebook with a handwritten caption “Ty Cobb choosing his bat” that looked like was from around 1908 and posted by Dan McMurray, a retired US Army veteran with a Masters in Anthropology. I soon discovered that Dan had an impressive collection of photos taken by Dr. W.E. Cutler as he traveled the Midwest, including a good handful of old baseball photos. I contacted Dan and we were given permission to research his collection.
I counted eight photographs in total that were taken at two different ballparks, the one I stumbled on showed what did look like Ty Cobb on deck with two bats in his left hand.
The large letter “P” that confirmed it was the Phillies playing the Cubs
I recruited some friends to help out in Don Stokes, Phil Hecken and Graig Kreindler. We did a quick review of the collection and soon realized that the other ballpark was historic West Side Park in Chicago (home to the Cubs) and the photo above was one that caught our attention right away due to a scoreboard that we could visually make out, so we decided to tackle this one first.
Phil suspected one of the names on the scoreboard was Philadelphia, which was a keen observation since the name was on the bottom where most might suspect the home team to be, not the visitors, which wasn’t uncommon then. Blowing up the image of just the scoreboard you could see Phil might be on to something. Graig then surmised that based on the uniforms the photo could not have been taken any earlier 1908. Which was a positive note since 1908 is the cutoff date for Baseball-Reference.com supplying box scores for games.
But just as we were settling in to work on the timestamp Don soon had most of the details of the game all figured out – he found a closeup that showed the “P” on the Phillies uniform (Phil was right and a close up photo of the uniform is to the right) and from the scoreboard he was able to pinpoint the date to July 16, 1910 (Graig was right), when the Cubs beat the Phillies 3-2 before 11,000.
As for details of the game:
- The winning hurler for Chicago was their ace and future Hall of Fame pitcher Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, who got the complete game win by holding the Phillies to eights and walking none to improve his season record to 14-8. He would finish the year with 25 wins, the fourth most in his brilliant career.
- The hero swinging the big bat was Cubs third baseman Harry Steinfeldt, his two-run double in the first inning got his club a 2-1 lead they would never relinquish. In the sixth frame, Three Finger (was given the nickname after a farm accident mauled his hand) would help his cause adding to the Cubs lead with a sacrifice hit making the score 3-1. The Phillies would add a run in the eighth inning to cut the lead to 3-2 but it got no closer, Brown’s sharp twirling made sure of it.
- Phillies manager Red Dooin sent righty hurler Earl Moore to the slab to start the game, but Dooin, who was also catching and served as Moore’s batterymate, saw firsthand Moore was struggling and yanked him after just two innings work. Moore would take the loss dropping his record to 7-10. However, Moore would go 10-0 in his next 11 starts and finish the season strong with a 22-15 record and a solid 2.58 ERA.
There are more photos from Dan McMurray’s collection we hope to post in the near future, it’s a small collection in number but as you can see by this photo it’s a magnificent lot.
-Ron A. Bolton
