Chicago in the World Series, 1903–2005

When the White Sox met the Astros in the 2005 World Series, it marked only the second time Chicago team had appeared in a televised World Series. (The first was in 1959 when the White Sox lost to the Dodgers.) Of the other 12 Series involving the Cubs or White Sox, seven occurred before the radio broadcasting of baseball. Five others were broadcast, but because the games were played during the workday, fans continued to get their coverage from newspapers. There they found accounts penned by some of the greatest journalists of the 20th century, including Ring Lardner, Grantland Rice, Arthur “Bugs” Baer and Westbrook Pegler, as well as legendary Chicago scribes Charles Dryden, James Crusinberry, Hugh Fullerton, I.E. Sanborn, and Irving Vaughan.
With a chapter on each World Series involving a Chicago team, this book covers 100 years of championship diamond contests in the Windy City, from the intra-city classic of 1906 to the end of the White Sox’s 88-year championship drought in 2005. Contemporary accounts from newspapers and sports publications complement the author’s informed commentary, providing two views of the Series: one shared by those who were there, and one informed by the decades since.

Bruce A. Rubenstein is a professor of history at the University of Michigan-Flint. He has presented numerous papers on baseball and sportswriting on the World Series. He lives in Imlay City, Michigan.

Bruce A. Rubenstein
Format: softcover (7 x 10)
Pages: 252
Bibliographic Info: 17 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2006
pISBN: 978-0-7864-2575-4
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments      vii

Introduction      1

1. White Sox vs. Cubs, 1906      3

2. Cubs vs. Tigers, 1907      18

3. Cubs vs. Tigers, 1908      30

4. Cubs vs. Athletics, 1910      42

5. White Sox vs. Giants, 1917      58

6. Cubs vs. Red Sox, 1918      74

7. White Sox vs. Reds, 1919      84

8. Cubs vs. Athletics, 1929      106

9. Cubs vs. Yankees, 1932      122

10. Cubs vs. Tigers, 1935      135

11. Cubs vs. Yankees, 1938      154

12. Cubs vs. Tigers, 1945      165

13. White Sox vs. Dodgers, 1959      184

14. White Sox vs. Astros, 2005      199

Notes      209

Bibliography      235

Index      237

“brings alive a foregone era…for all baseball history collections”—Library Journal.