MLB | The Cubs Did Not Win It Here (West Side Grounds site, Chicago)

The Chicago Cubs won the World Series in 1907 and in 1908 and then did not win another for 108 years. The ballpark they were living in at the time is now a medical school on the Near West Side, and almost everything written about it gets one thing wrong.

West Side Grounds stood on the block bounded by Polk, Taylor, Wood and Wolcott, and the Cubs played there from 1893 to 1915 under four different names, ending as the Cubs. The park held around 16,000, and the club routinely sold standing tickets that let people ring the edge of the playing field, so real crowds ran well past that. The 1907 opener drew 24,377.

This is where Mordecai Brown pitched, having lost parts of two fingers to a farm machine as a boy and turned the grip that left him into one of the best curveballs in the game. It is where Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance turned enough double plays to get a newspaper poem written about them. The 1906 team won 116 games, a record that still stands, and lost the World Series to the White Sox across town.

Now the correction. This site is regularly described as the place where the Cubs last won a World Series. They did not win either one here. The clinching game in 1907 and the clinching game in 1908 were both played at Bennett Park in Detroit, on the corner of Michigan and Trumbull that appears elsewhere in this collection. What Chicago got at home were the middle games. Four World Series were hosted at West Side Grounds, in 1906, 1907, 1908 and 1910, and not one of them ended here.

The Cubs left for Weeghman Park in 1916. Sources disagree on the date of the last game, giving either 3 or 13 October 1915. The ballpark was sold to the state of Illinois and demolished in 1920 to build a research and teaching hospital, which grew into what is now the Illinois Medical District.

A marker went up in 2008, a hundred years after the last title, put there by the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Illinois Medical District, the Illinois State Historical Society and a group calling itself the Way Out in Left Field Society. Its wording caused enough argument that a revised plaque was installed quietly in January 2009. The marker credits the ballpark with originating the phrase "way out in left field", which is a folk etymology rather than a settled fact, and is repeated here as a claim made on the plaque rather than as history.

Coordinates are the Neuropsychiatric Institute at 912 South Wood Street, near the marker and roughly where centre field was. This is a working hospital and university campus.

Cover: West Side Park, photographed by George R. Lawrence, 30 August 1908. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: a Franklin Post Card Company view of the ballpark, 1908. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.