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Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn Images Shota Imanaga is back. Both literally, since he signed a qualifying offer this past offseason to remain with the Chicago Cubs, and performance-wise, as he has 2.81 ERA through his first three starts in 2026. Of course, the same caveat that comes with every piece of baseball analysis in mid-April exists here: it’s early. After all, this is the same guy that the Cubs passed over in Game Five of last year’s Division Series after he got rocked in Game Two. Or is it? A look at some of the under-the-hood numbers might give us an idea. [All stats courtesy of FanGraphs.] Year xERA FIP K% BB% 2024 3.36 3.72 25.1% 4.0% 2025 3.73 4.86 20.6% 4.6% 2026 2.68 2.18 33.3% 6.7% Well, okay! All four metrics here would suggest that Imanaga is as good as he has ever been in a Cubs uniform after taking a step back last season. The walk rate is a bit elevated, but if that is coming along with the jump in strikeout rate, the Cubs, and their fans, probably take that trade off. To help understand how repeatable this is for the lefty going forward, we’re going to have to take this a step further. He’s still allowing a ton of fly balls, however, he is allowing less loud contact, as well as more fly balls to the opposite field, where they tend to do less damage. That, plus the increase in strikeout rate, is what is helping to keep those advanced numbers like his xERA and his FIP so low. Let’s get the raw stuff out of the way first: Imanaga’s velocity is up this season. After throwing his four-seam fastball at an average of 90.8 mph last season, that figure is up to 92.2 mph this season, according to Baseball Savant. That might feel like a small difference, but it is a meaningful one. This rise in velocity, plus a higher arm angle (up to 40 degrees this season after sitting at 36 degrees, on average, last year), has resulted in less drop and less arm-side movement on the four-seam fastball, two massive developments for a pitcher who tends to live up in the zone. Combine those two things and we’re seeing a massive increase in quality from Imanaga’s four-seamer. Per FanGraphs, the Stuff+ rating on his four-seam fastball is at 110, which is up from 99 last season and 105 from his rookie year in 2024. The actual results on the four-seam fastball, which plagued him last season, have rebounded accordingly. After hitters slugged .567 on the pitch last year, that number is down to just .217 this year. We can also utilize Location+ to help us evaluate how well a pitcher is locating a pitch. Location plus is measured based on where a pitch should be thrown to based on the count. For example, a fastball is most effective when thrown to certain places in a 2-0 count, but also most effective when thrown to a different place in an 0-2 count. Just like stuff plus, higher is better, and Imanaga is certainly trending in that direction this year. Year Location+ Fastball Location+ Splitter Overall Location+ 2024 111 109 109 2025 108 109 108 2026 126 117 116 Woah! Location plus is suggesting that Imanaga is spotting both his fastball, and his splitter, in much more effective spots this season than he ever has been. Of course, our next step has to be to take a look at where Imanaga is throwing his fastball and his splitter. Thanks to the handy dandy new heat maps pivot feature over at FanGraphs, we can do just that. Here are heat maps for the location of his four-seamer, with 2025 on the left and 2026 on the right. First is against left-handed hitters, and second is against right-handed hitters, with the perspective being from behind home plate. Imanaga is making an effort to keep the ball both up and outside, rather than just up. This is helping him stay off barrels and avoid some of the loud contact in the air that we saw last season. It would also explain the jump we’ve seen in fly balls to the opposite field. Here are the same charts for his splitters: The veteran is staying on the outside part of the plate, just like he is with his fastball; however, his splitter is much further down, and in a lot of cases, even further outside of the strike zone than it was previously. As a result, hitters are chasing more than they ever have against Imanaga. Per Baseball Savant, his 40.5 percent chase rate would be a career high, and that is in the 96th percentile of pitchers this season. There is risk in doing that, of course. That is explained by the bloated walk rate. Throwing more pitches outside of the strike zone is going to result in more walks. Plus, hitters will likely adjust to seeing splitters that low more often, but then again, a splitter properly located down there is just so tough to lay off of when paired with a fastball on the high and outside corner of the strike zone. All of this suggests that while it may be early, Shota Imanaga is either currently as good as he was in the 2024 season, or perhaps even better. The jump in his velocity, as well as better and different execution of both his four-seamer and his splitter, have resulted in a jump in his strikeout rate and less loud contact when hitters do put the ball in play. With Cade Horton’s early season injury bogging down the rotation, this is great news for the Cubs, because they just might need this version of Shota Imanaga for the rest of the season. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images I love early-season baseball, because it allows for some crazy, small sample statistics. These numbers almost certainly don't mean anything, of course, but you can convince yourself that they do. After all, who's going to tell you what's really going on? All we have to go on are these few numbers and vibes, and between those two, the numbers are usually sending a stronger signal—even after a week. For example, if Andy Pages is the best hitter in baseball for eight games later this season, nobody outside of Los Angeles notices. However, Andy Pages was the best hitter in baseball for the first eight games of the season, which means he goes right to the top of a bunch of sorted leaderboards and everybody notices. One scroll through the leaderboards for the Cubs, and the newly extended Nico Hoerner sticks out the most. Entering Sunday's doubleheader, he led Cubs regulars with a 147 wRC+, according to FanGraphs. He had a .400 on-base percentage, buoyed by a 16.7% walk rate. Then he was hit by two pitches in Game 1 of the twin bill and went 1-for-3 with a pair of walks in Game 2, so these numbers ticked up, even on a day when the rest of the Cubs offense did little. Nico Hoerner? A 16.7% walk rate? I love Hoerner, but drawing walks is not his strong suit. Since 2022, his 6.5% walk rate is 228th among 310 qualified hitters. When you think about it, this makes sense. The Gold Glover has also managed just 33 home runs in that time frame, which is 229th of those 310 batters. Pitchers have little reason not to challenge him. If you throw him some hittable strikes, in all likelihood, the worst thing that happens is that he ends up at second with a double. If you don’t throw him strikes and walk him, he just might end up there after a stolen base, anyway. You might as well make him earn it. Not only that, but Hoerner so rarely swings and misses that it’s tough for him to get into a count deep enough to walk. Historically, he rarely strikes out. He succeeds by putting a lot of balls in play. With his speed, putting the ball in play that often makes sense, especially now that he's become a bit more of a line-drive guy, but that plan at the plate means relatively few walks. So, with all of that out of the way, is there any reason for the bump in walk rate this year? For the first week or so of the season, the Cubs’ second baseman has essentially been one of the most patient hitters in baseball. His 38.5% swing rate is 180th out of 204 qualified hitters. His 47.2% swing rate at pitches in the zone is 202nd! These are all significant decreases from last season, according to FanGraphs. (He only swung at 15 of the 42 pitches he saw in the doubleheader Sunday, so these trends haven't changed after another two games.) Year Swing Rate In Zone Swing Rate Out of Zone Swing Rate 2025 48.5% 63.2% 32.3% 2026 38.5% 50.8% 27.0% What specific pitches is Hoerner now laying off of? Here are his swing rates by zone from last season, on the left, compared to this season, on the right: Compare this to his slugging percentage by zone from last season, and it’s clear what the plan is: Hoerner is making a concerted effort to concentrate his swings to the lower inside quadrant of the strike zone—the area where he did the most damage last season. If it’s a strike, and it’s not down there, he is comfortable letting that pitch pass by, even if it means falling behind in the count. He’s so good at making contact that falling behind in the count doesn’t put him at that great a disadvantage, anyway. Not all swings are created equal, even when the pitch is in the strike zone. That's especially true when you’re Nico Hoerner. When he swings, the ball is (in all likelihood) going to be put into play. When he swings at a strike that he can’t do damage with, it’s getting put into play weakly. He’s rarely living to see another pitch. Now, he's isolating the pitches he knows he can hit hard, and the result is a career-high slugging percentage, to go along with the elevated walk rate. Oh yeah, the walk rate! That was, after all, how I noticed all of this. Do I think he’ll keep walking at a Juan Soto-like rate? Of course not! Though I do think it’s possible Hoerner will have a higher-than-usual walk rate this season if he keeps up this level of selectivity, there'll be regression here. The great source of optimism should be that, even when his walk rate comes down, this change in approach will beget more extra-base hits. Hoerner is swinging less, and thus seeing more pitches and working deeper counts. Ultimately, that's resulting in the elevated walk rate. His strikeout rate has also increased a bit as a result, from 7.6 percent to 13.3%, but that’s still incredibly low (and he only struck out once in nine trips Sunday). The Cubs will take that tradeoff for a bit of newfound thump, as well as a few additional walks—especially from a guy that they just decided will be around Wrigleyville for a long time. View full article

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images When the Cubs signed Alex Bregman in January, much was made about the way he typically gets to his power. The former Red Sox third baseman was famous for pulling fly balls barely over the left-field wall, where the fence—especially at his two former home parks, in Houston and Boston—is quite close. Wrigley Field, with the left-field fence sitting 355 feet away from home plate, has the deepest left-field corner in the majors. After the signing was announced, our own Randy Holt examined Bregman’s tendencies. Randy compared Bregman’s spray chart to that of Isaac Paredes, another third baseman whom the Cubs brought in who had a tendency to pull a lot of fly balls over the left field wall. He ultimately concluded that Bregman would fare just fine at the Friendly Confines. Paredes only hits the ball down the line, while Bregman can, and has, sprayed the ball from gap-to-gap. On Sunday, Alex Bregman hit his first home run in a Cubs uniform, and it basically proved Randy right: He hit a home run to (left-)center field! But I thought he never hit home runs there? Well, you’re not entirely wrong. Here's a spray chart of every home run that Bregman has hit since 2020: That grouping of five home runs that I circled, just to the left of the 400 marker, is where Bregman hit this homer. So, yes, he doesn’t hit many home runs to that area. Typically. Usually. The thing is, Bregman also didn’t typically play baseball games at Wrigley Field. While Wrigley has a very deep left-field corner, the distance to the left-center field wall is incredibly short. Here's every out that Bregman made last year, overlaid onto Wrigley Field’s dimensions: There’s a lot of dots there, but I count about eight fly balls that would have sailed into the bleachers. This doesn’t even take the wind into account. According to Statcast, it gave his home run on Sunday an extra 25 feet of distance. It’ll cost him some home runs, but it will also give a fly-ball hitter like him some cheapies. In his last plate appearance of the game, Bregman stepped to the plate and did it again, this time homering to right-center: This one just feels like an anomaly, but I will leave you with this: Before this season, 17 of Bregman’s 209 career homers were to the opposite field. From 2020-2024, he only hit three. He hit three last season alone, and now in 2026, he already has one. It might be an anomaly. Or maybe he's continuing to adapt. Regardless, I can say one thing with a little bit more confidence after Sunday’s game: Alex Bregman is going to be just fine hitting in Wrigley Field. View full article

Image courtesy of © Troy Taormina-Imagn Images There’s no sense beating around the bush on this. We all know exactly what Pete Crow-Armstrong has to do in order to become a successful hitter. The man himself seems to know what he has to do in order to become a successful hitter. “It’s definitely the swing decisions. I know what I do well. I know what I don’t do well. I know that I chase. I know I can get away with hitting bad balls and doing damage on bad balls, but there is no consistency there. It’s very sporadic,” he told Sahadev Sharma of The Athletic last month. In fact, according to Baseball Savant, the young center fielder swung at 41.7 percent of pitches outside the strike zone last year, the fifth highest rate in baseball. That alone doesn’t make you an unsuccessful hitter. It just doesn’t give you a whole lot of room for error. What’s neat about this preseason, and the World Baseball Classic, is that we have a small set of meaningful games that we can point to in order to give us a basis of a guy’s improvement from the offseason. Crow-Armstrong, in particular, had a very successful tournament for Team USA. After starting pool play as a late-game defensive substitute, he injected the team with some sorely needed energy with a two home run performance against Team Italy, stealing the primary center field job from Byron Buxton in the process. The Cubs’ slugger ended up being one of eight core guys for Team USA that logged 20 plate appearances. He hit .263/.333/.632, and of those eight guys, his .402 wOBA trailed only Kyle Schwarber and Brice Turang. Was anything different under the hood? Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this article if it wasn’t! Crow-Armstrong saw 40 pitches outside of the strike zone in this tournament, and he swung at 13 of them. That is a chase rate of 32.5 percent. The league average last year, for what it’s worth, was 28.2 percent. So, we’re still not talking about Juan Soto here. Still, that is a meaningful decline, enough to pull him from fifth-worst among qualified hitters to 28th-worst, which is an area where plenty of successful hitters live. It’s the difference between Crow-Armstrong striking out on uncompetitive pitches routinely and working himself back into a few plate appearances. This backs up what we have seen in the less meaningful games, too. Per FanGraphs, he has swung at 30.8 percent of pitches outside of the strike zone in 14 Cactus League plate appearances. Whether all of this will continue into the season remains to be seen. A 162-game season is a long grind, and when you are in the middle of a slump, it’s hard to stick to a process like this. And after all, it should be noted, this is all based on small sample sizes. What is encouraging to me, though, is that the youngster has both acknowledged what needs to change, and has shown a willingness to change it. A more mature Pete Crow-Armstrong would be a terrifying threat against the rest of the league. View full article

Image courtesy of MLB.com Welcome to the tenth and final edition of North Side Baseball’s offseason series covering the 1918 Chicago Cubs. You can find the first nine parts here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Last time, we dove into the first three games of the 1918 World Series. The Cubs find themselves down 2-1 and are headed to Boston for the final four games of the series against the Red Sox. A Potential Strike? According to The Society of American Baseball Research, the players were upset about the new revenue sharing plan set to begin with this World Series. Before the season began, the National Commission agreed to share some of the gate receipts from the first four World Series games with the top four teams in each league. Because of this new rule, the reduced ticket prices, and low attendance due to the ongoing war, these shares were set to be much smaller than previous years. The players wanted a guarantee of their shares, and were set to meet with the commission after the fourth game when they knew what the full revenue was going to be. Game Four The Red Sox were sending Game 1’s winner, Babe Ruth, to the mound to go up against the Cubs’ Game 2 starter, Lefty Tyler. The game was tied in the fourth inning with men on first and second and two outs. Babe Ruth, still hitless in his World Series career, stepped up to the plate. Tyler, electing to pitch to the slugger, fell behind 3-0. After coming back to bring the count full, Ruth got a pitch to hit, and let it rip. “Ruth’s smash soared high over Flack’s head and Max was so flustered that at first he took a few steps forward before he realized that the ball was soaring past him,” the New York Times wrote at the time. A triple brought home two runs, and the Red Sox took a 2-0 lead. The score stayed there until the eighth inning. After a leadoff walk to Bill Killefer, which was followed by a single from Claude Hendrix, who hit for Tyler, the Cubs found themselves in business. A groundout from Charlie Hollocher scored the first run, and then a two-out single from Les Mann brought home the tying run, giving the Cubs some life. With Tyler out of the game, the Cubs brought Phil Douglas in to pitch the bottom half of the eighth inning. A leadoff single from Wally Schang, coupled with a passed ball, gave the Red Sox a runner at second with nobody out. Harry Hooper laid down a bunt, and in attempting to throw him out at first base, Douglas threw the ball away, allowing the go-ahead run to score, and the Red Sox to take a 3-2 lead. Even still, the Cubs wouldn’t go away quietly. Fred Merkle began the ninth with a single, and after a walk to Rollie Zeider, Red Sox manager Ed Barrow took Ruth out of the game and put him into the outfield and instead inserted Bullet Joe Bush to pitch. A bunt from Chuck Wortman forced Merkle out at third, and then a ground ball double play from Turner Barber ended the game. The Cubs found themselves just one loss away from losing this World Series. Game Five The players, still seeking a resolution to their shares of the revenue, remained in the locker room after the game was supposed to begin. The game would eventually start an hour late. “The players of both clubs went on a strike because the National Commission refused to guarantee the prize money provided for under the new agreement which gives $2,000 to players of the winning club and $1,400 to those of the losing club. The players were willing to compromise at $1,500 and $1,000, but the receipts of the first four games, in which the players share, leaves only $890 for the winning players and $535 for the losers,” the Times reported. It was agreed upon to reopen the discussion after the series and play the game, which pitted Hippo Vaughn against Sad Sam Jones. In the fourth, Hollocher walked, stole second, and scored on a double from Mann, giving the Cubs a 1-0 lead. The Cubs would eventually extend the lead to 3-0 in the eighth, when Dode Paskert ripped a double to score Flack and Hollocher. From there, Hippo Vaughn did the rest. Vaughn threw another complete game, this time a shutout. He allowed just five hits, one walk, and struck out four. Following nine innings of one-run ball in Game 1, and nine innings of two-run ball in Game 3, this meant that Vaughn had pitched 27 innings in six days and allowed just three runs. What an incredible performance to extend the series for the Cubs, who were still behind 3-2. Game Six The Cubs, still desperate to keep Babe Ruth out of the Red Sox’s lineup, sent the left-handed pitching Lefty Tyler to the mound. This meant that each of the first six games of this series had been started by only Tyler or Vaughn. The Red Sox sent out their Game 3 starter, Carl Mays. The game began with nothing more than a few two-out runners until the bottom of the third. Tyler walked both Mays and Dave Shean, and with two on and two outs, George Whiteman hit a line drive to Flack in right field. According to the Times, “he caught up to the rapidly descending ball and had it entirely surrounded by his hands. Tyler was offering thanksgiving for crawling out of a bad hole when the ball squeezed its way through Flack’s buttered digits. As the ball spilled in a puddle at Flack’s feet, both Mays and Shean were well along on their way home before Flack’s alarm clock went off and woke him up.” The Cubs, with their backs against the wall, notched a lead off single in the top half of the fourth, and after a one out hit by pitch, they had two runners on with just one out. However, Mann was picked off of first base. After a walk to Paskert and an RBI single from Merkle, the Cubs trailed just 2-1, though the inning as a whole felt like a lost opportunity. The Cubs would go down the rest of the game without much incident, managing just one baserunner on a walk after that fourth inning rally. With a 2-1 loss in Game 6 of the 1918 World Series, the Cubs’ season was over. Aftermath Because of the war, there was such little fanfare around this World Series, with the Times reporting in their recap of Game 6 that “baseball’s valedictory this afternoon should have been played to the weary strains of Chopin’s Funeral March. The smallest gathering that ever saw the national game’s most imposing event sat silently about and watched Boston win and Chicago lose. There was no wild demonstration of joy when the last man went out.” The war, it was clear, had taken its toll, and it would take a toll on more than just the atmosphere of this World Series. The previously agreed upon revenue sharing remained, with Cleveland, both New York teams, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Washington all receiving shares, according to the Times. Per SABR, the winning shares ended up being $1,108.45 for the Red Sox, which is the lowest amount ever awarded to the World Series champions. The Cubs received $671 per player. Thankfully, World War I would end just a couple of months later, on November 11. Baseball players returned home, and the 1919 season was shortened to 140 games to accommodate those returning players. Of course, Grover Cleveland Alexander was among those players, as he joined Hippo Vaughn atop the 1919 Cubs’ pitching rotation. Some have since wondered if there was a fix in the 1918 World Series in the aftermath of the Black Sox scandal in the 1919 World Series. John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball, was quoted by the Seattle Times in 2011 that “it seems more likely that there would have been a fix than there would not have been.” A court deposition that was displayed at the Chicago History Museum from Eddie Cicotte, one of the members of the 1919 Black Sox, would suggest that the series was. Cicotte mentioned that his teammates had discussed that “one or several” Cubs were offered $10,000 to fix the series. There were certainly some very costly misplays and errors that ended up costing the Cubs dearly, Flack’s misplay among them. Of course, we’ll never know for sure. The 1918 season was ultimately a successful one for the Cubs, even if they came up short at the end. It was a wild ride that I am sure gave so many fans something to think about other than the happenings in Europe. View full article

Thanks! It’s been a lot of work, so I am glad you’re enjoying it and am grateful for your comment. Hope you’ll check out the final piece coming sometime soon!

Image courtesy of © Rick Cinclair/Telegram & Gazette / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images Welcome to part nine of North Side Baseball’s offseason series covering the 1918 Chicago Cubs. You can find the first eight parts here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 When we left off, the National League and the American League had come to an agreement to end the regular season early, in order to play the World Series. This allowed baseball players to respect the 'work or fight' rule, which required all draft-eligible men to engage in essential work, or register to be drafted into the army. The Cubs, who finished 84-45-2, were set to face off with the Red Sox (75-51) for the championship in early September. Today, we’ll take a look at the start of the series. Game One As the teams prepared for Game 1, the Cubs were viewed as the favorites to win the whole series, according to the Society for American Baseball Research. The New York Times concurred: “when the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Red Sox clash in the opening game of the [World Series] at Comiskey Park in Chicago on Wednesday afternoon, baseball fans who base their hopes and figures on form will be sure to favor the National League club as the winner.” The Times went on to predict that the Cubs’ left-handed pitchers, specifically Hippo Vaughn and Lefty Tyler, would play a huge role in the series, neutralizing Boston’s slugging left-handed hitters Babe Ruth and Harry Hooper. This made it an easy decision for the Cubs to start Vaughn in Game 1. He went up against Ruth, who was still both pitching and hitting at the time. After a one-day delay due to rain, Game 1 happened on Sept. 5, with the Red Sox triumphing 1-0. Both Ruth and Vaughn went the distance, with Ruth striking out four and allowing six hits, while Vaughn gave up five hits and struck out six. The lone run was scored in the top of the fourth. After a leadoff walk to Dave Shean, the Red Sox strung together back-to-back singles from George Whitman and Stuffy McInnis with one out to bring Shean home. The Times was quick to note the apparent lack of excitement around the Series, given the circumstances: Nonetheless, the World Series trucked onward. Game Two If a 1-0 game one was considered boring, Game 2 was anything but. In a pitching matchup of Bullet Joe Bush against Lefty Tyler, the Cubs got out to an early 3-0 lead in the second inning on hits from Charlie Deal, Bill Killefer, and the aforementioned Tyler. However, it was what happened after the inning that caused some excitement. According to SABR, Otto Knabe, the Cubs’ first base coach, had been heckling Bush during the Cubs’ rally. Heinie Wagner, the third base coach for the Red Sox, met Knabe out on the field in between innings. Things got heated between the two, who ended up in the Cubs’ dugout. I’ll let The New York Times take it from here: “In a jiffy the two coaches were locked in an embrace which was not one of affection. Like a bird of prey, Knabe perched on top of Wagner as he fell to the ground. They were merrily mauling each other all over the dugout when Claude Hendrix and other Cub players pulled Knabe off his tormentor.” By the time the Boston players reached the dugout to further intervene, “Wagner emerged all mussed up and excited. From the appearance of his uniform it was plain that Knabe had brushed up the floor of the dugout with Wagner, for his uniform looked as if he had been repairing a flivver. The umpires volunteered soothing words to the combatants and a truce was declared.” [Ed. note: I was wondering, and I bet you were, too. A flivver is an old car or aircraft, usually beaten up and worn down. It's a cousin to 'jalopy,' which is only marginally more familiar to our modern ears and eyes but was certainly more common in its heyday.] The game remained 3-0 until the ninth inning. After two leadoff triples made the game 3-1, McInnis grounded back to Tyler, who was still in the game. He completed the out at first without the run scoring. Per SABR, after a walk to Everett Scott, Boston manager Ed Barrow thought about pinch-hitting with Ruth, who wasn’t in the starting lineup due to a left-handed pitcher being on the mound for the Cubs. But Ruth never got a chance. Jean Dubuc pinch-hit instead, and after he struck out, Wally Schang swung (schwung?) at the first pitch and popped out to Charlie Hollocher to win the game for the Cubs and tie the series at one game apiece. Game Three According to Times, most figured the Cubs would be starting Claude Hendrix in Game 3. Instead, surprisingly, they opted for Vaughn again, which also meant that Ruth remained on the bench. On the Boston side, Carl Mays got the start. Vaughn worked out of trouble in the second, though the Red Sox would get to him in the fourth. Following a strikeout of Amos Strunk to start the inning, George Whiteman was hit by a pitch in the next plate appearance. Singles from McInnis and Schang scored the first run of the game; that brought Everett Scott to the plate. Scott laid down a bunt that, according to the Times, Vaughn fielded cleanly, but he simply didn’t throw the ball anywhere. “With the ball in his hand, his arm outstretched ready to throw it, some unknown influence seemed to stay the poised throwing wing. He was within half a dozen feet of McInnis as he scored from third, and was facing toward first base, but he held the ball as if it was a chunk of gold.” This brought home the second run of the game to give the Red Sox a 2-0 lead. A double from Charlie Pick and a single from Bill Killefer in the fifth cut the lead in half at 2-1, where the score remained until the last inning. With Mays still in the game, both Dode Paskert and Fred Merkle grounded out to start the inning. Then, Pick singled and stole second base, putting the tying run just 180 feet away with two outs in the ninth inning. The next pitch from Mays got past the catcher, Schang, and allowed Pick to take third base on a close play. After Pick slid in safely, the ball trickled away from the third baseman, Jackie Thomas. Pick dashed for home with the potential tying run. Alas: “Straight and true and as swift as a bullet the ball went from Thomas’s hand into the waiting mitt of Schang at the plate. As Pick came tumbling into the final bag, stretching his left foot far out as to hook the corner of the rubber platter, the ball clapped against the catcher’s glove, and Schang tagged the runner with the ball. ‘You’re out,’ yelled Umpire Klem, and right then and there the Cubs’ chances in that game were gone forever.” Just like that, the Cubs lost 2-1, and were also down 2-1 in the World Series, when mere seconds ago, fans were ablaze at the potential of a tie game as Pick dashed home. It wasn’t to be. The final four games of the series were set to be played at Fenway Park in Boston, and the Cubs now found themselves in a situation where they needed to win three of those games. Suddenly, their backs were against the wall. View full article

Image courtesy of Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons Welcome to part eight of North Side Baseball’s offseason series covering the 1918 Chicago Cubs. You can find the first seven parts here: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Today, we’ll be doing another player profile, this time on the great Hippo Vaughn. By FanGraphs WAR, Vaughn is the best left-handed pitcher to ever don a Cubs uniform, and he was an essential member of that 1918 Cubs team, leading the pitching staff in fWAR. His 1.74 ERA that season was second among qualified pitchers, behind only Hall of Famer Walter Johnson. Vaughn never made the Hall, but deserves to be recognized for his contributions to the Chicago Cubs. James Leslie “Hippo” Vaughn was born on April 9, 1888, in Weatherford, Texas, a town located about 25 miles outside of Fort Worth. According to his Society for American Baseball Research biography, the young lefty began pitching professionally in the Texas League, where he was eventually recognized and acquired by the New York Highlanders—or, as you likely now know them, the Yankees. Vaughn would become the youngest Opening Day starting pitcher in Yankees history in 1910, at 22 years and five days old—a record that he still holds today. He would go on to post a stellar 1.83 ERA in the 1910 season, but following a more difficult 1911 season that saw him put up a 4.39 ERA, Vaughn was sold to the Washington Nationals, and then to Kansas City of the American Association. After a couple of impressive seasons there, Vaughn wound up on the Chicago Cubs, and it was there where his career really took off. Following a brief debut of 56 innings in 1913, from 1914 to 1920, he never had a season wherein he posted less than 3.8 fWAR, and he never produced an ERA higher than 2.87. From 1914 to 1920, per FanGraphs, his 33.6 WAR was third in baseball, behind only two future Hall of Famers: Walter Johnson and Grover Alexander. The latter, ironically, was Vaughn’s teammate in Chicago for a bit. Vaughn’s 2.16 ERA over those seven seasons was fourth. His 143 wins was third. His 165 complete games, 2,051 innings pitched, and 1,071 strikeouts all also ranked third, behind the aforementioned greats. Any way you slice it, he was one of the best pitchers in baseball for a time. There is no greater illustration of how dominant Vaughn could be than the game he started on May 2, 1917. It featured him against Fred Toney of the Cincinnati Reds. Both pitchers threw no-hitters through nine innings, though, of course, the score was tied at 0-0, so the game persisted into the tenth. In a retrospective on the game from 1953, Arthur Daley at The New York Times wrote the following about Vaughn: “Vaughn, perhaps, pitched a mite better than Toney because only one member of the Reds even stroked the ball beyond the infield.” Daley would go on to describe the top of the tenth inning, when Vaughn finally allowed a hit (and, unfortunately, a run) that led to a 1-0 Reds win. “Larry Kopf sliced a roller between the gloves of Fred Merkle at first and Larry Doyle at second. It was the first hit of the game," Daley wrote. "Then Hal Chase flied out deeply to [Cy] Williams—except that Williams dropped the ball for an error, as Kopf raced to third.” That brought up Jim Thorpe, who hit a little tapper out in front of home plate. Vaughn, likely knowing that he would have a tough play on Thorpe, a former Olympic gold medalist in the classic pentathlon and decathlon, threw home. Art Wilson, the catcher, never saw it coming, and the ball “shot past him to the backstop and Kopf pattered home from third base with the only run of the game.” Toney retired the Cubs without a hit in the bottom half of the tenth, completing his no-hitter and wrapping up the win for the Reds. Still, this is the only known game in baseball history where two pitchers both had no-hitters through nine innings of baseball. Unfortunately for Hippo, who was given that nickname due to his large stature for a player at the time at 6’4”, 215 lbs, he is also commonly known for the way that he left baseball. He was not his usual, dominant self during the 1921 season, and after a start against the New York Giants on July 9, Vaughn disappeared. “Jim walked from the pitchers’ box to the clubhouse at the Polo Grounds on Saturday after being belted for successive home runs by Frank Snyder and Phil Douglas and he has not been seen since by Manager Johnny Evers or any other member of the Chicago Cubs,” the Times reported on July 11. The article said that should Hippo Vaughn return to the team, he would be suspended for his unexplained absence. According to his SABR biography, the Cubs were later ready to reinstate the pitcher, but Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of baseball, refused to do so, and suspended Vaughn for the remainder of the season. Interestingly enough, the Times reported in October of that same year that Vaughn was missing again, with his wife having asked the Chicago police to look for him. The same wife, Edna, filed for divorce in 1920, the previous year, only to later drop the proceedings sometime after Edna’s father stabbed Vaughn. Perhaps this all helps explain the sudden decline of Vaughn, who went from one of the best pitchers in the National League in the 1920 season, to a pitcher with a 6.01 ERA in the 1921 season. He would never appear in Major League Baseball again, despite bouncing around several lower-level leagues. Arguably, Vaughn is the best left-handed pitcher that the Chicago Cubs organization has ever seen. Between the double no-hitter and his performance both during and leading up to the 1918 World Series (we’ll get to that in more detail in a future article), his on-field feats deserve greater remembrance. View full article