As the Texas Rangers poured onto the field to celebrate their first championship, a stinging blast of frigid air tore through the Midwest the same way it always seems to during this time of year. It’s baseball – only baseball – that allows summer to float into the autumn longer than it has any right, and somehow, when it all comes to an end, it still feels too early.
Fortunately for frigid fans of the Chicago Cubs, they can warm themselves over the flames of the hot stove season, burning hotter than it has in almost a decade. Shohei Ohtani on the Northside? Sure. Juan Soto and Cody Bellinger in blue pinstripes next year? Why not? Pete Alonso patrolling first base? I’ve heard crazier.
This is the time of year when nothing is likely, and everything is possible. No matter how wild the rumor, we remind ourselves that stranger things have happened, and on occasion, much stranger things. In fact, there is nothing the Chicago Cubs can do this offseason that will nearly approach the most salacious and ridiculous deal of their history. It’s a story that includes an appearance by a famous farm accident, a rumored connection to the very beginnings of the Chicago mob scene, and of course, a Cubs’ World Series victory.
THE FIRST TRADE IN THE HISTORY OF THE CUBS
In baseball’s earliest years, players were bought and sold. They were acquired and kicked to the curb. They were stashed, used, and cut. But rarely were they traded straight up. In 1898, for the first time, that was about to change. The Cubs were about to make a deal. No one knew what an incredible butterfly effect would be set off by the transaction.
The terms: The Cubs sent 23-year-old rookie pitcher Walt Woods to the Louisville Colonels in exchange for 24-year-old Jack Taylor. You’re forgiven if neither of those names rings a bell.
After the trade, Woods would pitch for the Colonels for just one season, posting a better-than-league-average 3.28 ERA. But despite pitching two decent seasons between Chicago and Louisville, Woods would spend the rest of his career toiling away in the minors until 1914. His three innings with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1900 were the last that he would pitch at the highest level.
The real star of the trade was the Cubs’ acquisition, Jack Taylor. Taylor was primarily a control pitcher who featured a rudimentary fastball-changeup combination.
Taylor, who was acquired just before the end of the 1898 season, would go on to pitch five games that September, completing (and winning) each of them. He finished the 1898 season with a 2.20 ERA and the Cubs began to realize they’d just acquired a star.
But for Jack Taylor, the best was yet to come. And for the Cubs, his finest contribution would come when the team got rid of him.
JACK TAYLOR: THE FIRST IRON MAN
Taylor began the 1899 season as the workhorse and staff ace on a disappointing eighth-place Cubs’ team. That was largely the theme of Jack Taylor’s early Cubs career. He was generally pretty good, and the Cubs were not.
Taylor’s best season came in 1902, when he went 23-11 for a Cubs team with a losing record. His 1.29 ERA led the league, and if Cy Young had been retired and dead long enough to have an award named after him for pitching excellence, Jack Taylor would have won it.
Of the 34 games Taylor started during his excellent 1902 season, he completed all of them. He would go on to repeat that feat the next three seasons, never leaving a game for a reliever. The next time someone asks you about the most unbreakable of all baseball streaks, this is it.
Not Joe DiMaggio’s hits. Not Cal Ripken’s games played. Not Orel Hersheiser’s scoreless innings.
Between 1901 and 1906, Jack Taylor threw 187 consecutive complete games.
If such a thing as a Hall of Fame would have existed then, Jack Taylor had the appearance and statistics of a guy who was almost certainly bound for it. That’s what would make 1903 such a strange year for everyone involved.
A MOB-RELATED SCANDAL IN CHICAGO? NEVER!
1903 was another good year for Jack Taylor. He put up a 2.45 ERA and was again among the best pitchers in the league.
Even better, the Cubs were finally good. 1903 was the first full season they got out of their legendary combination of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance. This was the best team that Taylor had played for so far in his career, finishing in third place with an 82-56 record. The future was bright for Taylor and these Cubs at season’s end, but things immediately turned rocky.
After the season ended, the Cubs played an exhibition series against the crosstown White Sox. Taylor pitched in and won the first game of the series, 11-0. His next three starts did not go so well, as he allowed a combined 23 runs.
Almost immediately, rumors began to circulate that Taylor had been paid off to throw the games. Depending on which stories you choose to believe, Cubs’ President Jim Hart may have even been the one who paid him to throw the games. It may have been due to Hart’s problems with the early Chicago mob, or it may have merely been a juicier rumor than reality. Either way, the poison was already in the well and that was it for Taylor in Chicago.
With the stench of game-fixing about him, the Cubs didn’t really have a choice. They were going to have to cut ties with their staff ace and superstar.
“THE TRADE OF THE CENTURY”
Granted, it was early in the century, but as Christmas of 1903 crept closer, the Cubs were on the verge of a deal with the Cardinals that would rock the balance of baseball power for seasons to come.
There wasn’t much to be had for Jack Taylor. Once a guy had a reputation as a game-fixer, that reputation tended to stick, fair or not. Taylor might have been one of the top three pitchers in baseball, but teams weren’t nearly lining up to acquire his services.
Only the woeful Cardinals, desperate for a top-of-the-rotation starter, were willing to take on Jack Taylor and all his warts. Even then, they weren’t willing to give up too much value in return, and so the Cubs swallowed hard and dealt their star pitcher for a 27-year-old rookie out of Terre Haute, Indiana; a pitcher who was rumored to have just three fingers on his throwing hand.
Mordecai ‘Three Finger’ Brown was in better shape than the rumors told of him. In truth, he had four-and-a-half fingers thanks to a teenage farming accident, although one of the full fingers that remained was crooked and badly mangled. The narrative is that Brown was able to use his disability to put intense and deceptive spin on the ball.
Still, imagine the salaciousness of a story if the Yankees traded away a scandal ridden Gerrit Cole for an unknown rookie pitcher who allegedly had just three fingers on his throwing hand. That’s exactly what the Cubs did on December 12, 1903.
The terms were simple. The Cubs would receive Mordecai Brown and backup catcher Jack O’Neill in exchange for Jack Taylor and Cubs’ backup catcher Larry McLean.
We’ll get to Brown in a second, but just to refresh your memory, here were Jack Taylor’s stats in the six years he had with the Cubs ahead of the trade:
| AGE | W | L | ERA | |
| 1898 | 24 | 5 | 0 | 2.20 |
| 1899 | 25 | 18 | 21 | 3.76 |
| 1900 | 26 | 10 | 17 | 2.55 |
| 1901 | 27 | 13 | 19 | 3.36 |
| 1902 | 28 | 23 | 11 | 1.29 |
| 1903 | 29 | 21 | 14 | 2.45 |
That guy’s an ace, and if there had been an award for pitching excellence, Jack Taylor is a perennial contender and probably the winner in at least one of those seasons. The Mordecai Brown trade wasn’t a blockbuster because the Cubs were acquiring a future Hall of Famer. It’s because they were sending away a guy who certainly looked like he was going to be one.
(You know, if such a thing as the Hall of Fame had existed.)
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
Neither O’Neill nor McLean would do anything noteworthy in baseball for the remainder of their careers. Essentially, this was a deal of Brown for Taylor.
After the trade, Taylor remained good, but would only pitch four more seasons. Brown was good for thirteen more seasons, ten of those with the Cubs. Mordecai Brown won 188 games with the Cubs, posting a sub-2.00 ERA during his ten seasons in Chicago.
Yep, read that again. It says what you think it says.
His ten-season ERA with the Cubs was 1.80. It was a different era, yes; but that number is still way better than any of his contemporaries, including Cy Young and Christy Mathewson.
Jack Taylor, on the other hand, would post a 2.63 ERA the rest of the way, and in a plot twist, the last years of his career came with the Cubs after the Cardinals traded him back to Chicago in 1906.
By 1906, Hart was no longer with the Cubs in any capacity and the whispers about Taylor had faded away a bit. Jack Taylor was no longer the ace he used to be, but he became a solid middle-of-the-rotation starter for the 1906 NL Champion Cubs and the 1907 World Series championship team.
Imagine trading away your unquestioned staff ace for a rookie who goes on to become a Hall of Famer, and after being gone for a season-and-a-half, that ace comes back to perform as a solid number three starter en route to a World Series championship.
As temperatures plunge and noses begin to run, the offseason feels impossible to endure, but the hot stove invites us, at least, to dream of better days ahead. Any move could be the move that changes the fates of a franchise, that builds a dynasty, that begins a legacy. Feel free to indulge the rumors; even the impossible ones; especially the impossible ones. Sometimes, that’s the best way to stay warm.