Week 25 Summary

Week 25 is in the books and the 1901 regular season is now completed. Congratulations to the Chicago White Stockings and Pittsburgh Pirates for their respective league championships. While Chicago's championship was not really in doubt, the NL came across a peculiar circumstance. With two days remaining in the regular season, Pittsburgh had a 2.5 game lead over Brooklyn and both teams had two remaining games on the schedule, meaning that if Brooklyn won their two and Pittsburgh lost their two that Pittsburgh would still have a .5 game lead. There were rumblings out of Brooklyn about a protest since both teams finished with less than 140 games played it might be necessary to arrange the missing games to be played so a true championship could be crowned. Brooklyn won their two games, but so did Pittsburgh, so the commissioner's office (i.e., me) summarily declared Pittsburgh the NL champion.

1901 Al Champion Chicago White Stockings

Despite the two leagues still being virtually at war with each other with several court cases still being worked, bars and sports pages across the country have spent the past few weeks debating who would win in a final play-off series between Chicago and Pittsburgh. In the end, Pittsburgh kind of stumbled into their championship while Chicago dominated the stronger AL teams for most of the year, so the general consensus was that Chicago would win in a "World Series" (as people had begun to call it).

1901 NL Champion Pittsburgh Pirates

Clark Griffith

There was plenty of back and forth on this topic - would it really happen? How many games? When? Where? Who gets what money (it's always the money)? No one doubted there would be a tremendous amount of interest in this all across the country. Finally, the commissioner's office (i.e., me) announced that following the completion of the NL games on Sunday, September 6, a seven-game World Series would indeed be played. After a day-off on Monday, the first game would be played in Chicago on Tuesday to be followed by Game Two in Chicago on Wednesday. The two teams would then hop a train to Pittsburgh for Games Three, Four, and Five (as needed) to be played on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. This would allow the teams to avoid the restrictions on Sunday baseball (09/13) in Pennsylvania and give them a day to run back to Chicago for the final two games (as needed) on the following Monday and Tuesday.

Fred Clarke

Pittsburgh was already in Chicago since they finished the season playing the Orphans, and Chicago player-manager Clark Griffith, having heard the rumors floating around about the possibility of a post-season championship had kept his players in town already, plus he had notified pitcher Roy Patterson to return from his early release to home. Griffith also announced that catcher Billy Sullivan would be available to play following his late-season finger injury. Pittsburgh player-manager Fred Clarke announced they would do a light workout Monday in South Side Park to familiarize themselves with the surroundings, plus it was widely known that infielder Jimmy Burke, now on the Pirates, had played earlier in the season for the White Stockings, so no one doubted that both teams would be ready to play on Tuesday with a desire to uphold their own reputation as well as that of their league.

Roger Bresnahan