The First Fall Classic

Baseball History Tidbit of the Week

1903 World Series:  Boston Americans (AL) 5, Pittsburgh Pirates (NL) 3

    Sometime this October, the best team from the American League will play against the best team from the National League in the World Series, to determine the best team in baseball.  No one will dispute the legitimacy of one of the leagues, and no one will question the means by which the two competing teams were chosen.  It hasn't always been that simple though.

    Since the inception of the American League in 1901, there was a bitter hatred between the team owners of both leagues, mostly spurred by AL owners raiding NL teams of their players.  In 1903, Barney Dreyfuss, the owner of the NL's Pittsburgh Pirates, offered an outstretched hand to Henry Killilea, the owner of the AL's pennant winner, the Boston Americans.  In the interests of furthering the scope of baseball as a sport, and of course making money, the two owners agreed to hold a best of nine series to determine the champion of baseball.  The Pirates were heavily favored over the representatives of the supposed second-class, upstart American League.

    Game one took place on October 1, at Boston's Huntington Avenue Grounds.  There were 16,242 fans on hand to witness the first World Series game ever, and for the time that was an enormous crowd.  In fact, crowds overflowed at games in both ballparks, so fans were permitted to stand in the outfield along the fence.  A new ground rule was instituted, declaring a ball hit into the outfield crowd a triple.  A whopping 25 triples were hit during the series, including 16 by Boston.  The pitching matchup for game one featured Boston's ace and living legend, Cy Young, who had gone 28-9 in 1903, and Pittsburgh's workhorse Deacon Phillippe, who had been 25-9 to his own credit.  Pittsburgh jumped out to a 4-0 first inning lead, and held on to win 7-3 behind the strong outing from Phillippe.

    Pittsburgh's rout of the Americans in game one affirmed most baseball fans' beliefs that the American League was inferior, and as a result the crowd dropped to only 9,415 for game two.  But those who failed to attend missed quite a pitchers' duel, and a turning point in the history of the sport.  Boston's Bill Dinneen shut out the Pirates 3-0 to even the series, beating Sam Leever, who had led the NL with a 2.06 ERA during the regular season.  Boston's victory sent a message that the AL was indeed on par with the best the NL had to offer, and the fans responded, packing the Huntington Avenue Grounds to the gills with 18,801 onlookers for the third game of the series.  Game three was another spectacle of Deacon Phillippe's brilliance.  He went the distance for the 4-2 triumph, and notched his second win in three games.

    With the Pirates leading 2-1, the series shifted to Exposition Park in Pittsburgh.  A rainout produced a relatively meager crowd of 7,600 on October 6, but the extra day off allowed Phillippe to once again start for the Pirates.  He faced Bill Dinneen, and once again was victorious.  Phillippe's third win of the series was punctuated by three hits from both Ginger Beaumont and futre Hall-of-Fame shortstop Honus Wagner, who had won the second of his eight batting titles with a .355 average during the regular season.  Third baseman Tommy Leach added three RBI to put the 5-4 win on ice, and it looked as if Pittsburgh would claim victory in the first World Series.

    With the series on the line, Boston sent Cy Young to the mound for game five, against the veteran, Brickyard Kennedy.  The game was scoreless until the sixth, when some shoddy Pittsburgh defense allowed Boston to break through for six runs.  The Americans coasted the rest of the way, and inched back into the series with a 11-2 win.  Bill Dinneen started game six for the Americans, against Sam Leever, who was recovering from a shoulder injury.  Boston's offense attacked Leever, and built a 6-0 lead before Pittsburgh got to Dinneen in the seventh inning.  It was too little, too late for the Pirates, and their 6-3 loss knotted the series at three games apiece.

    Game seven was incredibly important for the Pirates, because Pittsburgh's only effective pitcher thus far, Deacon Phillippe, faced Cy Young in the final game at Exposition Park.  More than 17,000 fans flocked to the stadium and overflowed the outfield, helping create seven triples in the game.  Phillippe began to exhibit some fatigue as Boston tagged him for seven runs, and Cy Young won his second game for the Americans, 7-3.  With the series at 4-3 in favor of the Americans, the bout returned to Boston for the eighth round.

    A travel day and another rainout gave Pirates player-manager, Fred Clarke the ability to use Phillippe once more, so the right hander took the mound with the series, and the pride of the National League, on the line at the Huntington Avenue Grounds.  He opposed Bill Dinneen, who had his A-game working on that particular day.  Boston's light-hitting second baseman Hobe Ferris drove in three runs and Dinneen went the distance for the 3-0 series-clinching win, his third win of the series.  After eight competitive games between the best of both leagues, the Boston Americans had defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first ever World Series.

    More than 100,000 fans had watched the first World Series, and the owners of the two teams had agreed that 70 percent of profits from the gate would be given to the players.  After the series' resounding success, Dreyfuss (Pittsburgh's owner) decided to give his 30 percent share of the profits to the players as well.  In a time long before million-dollar contracts, Boston players' bonuses totaled $1,182 and Pittsburgh players netted $1,316.

    Despite the success of the first World Series, no such event took place in 1904.  New York Giants owner John Brush and manager John McGraw had opposed the merger between the two leagues even in 1903, and upon winning the National League pennant in '04, refused to participate in the postseason.  Backlash from the fans, the media, and the players, who sought their bonuses, was negative and plentiful, so in time for the 1905 season the two sides agreed to a formal establishment of a championship series between the pennant winners from the two leagues.  And since the New York Giants defeated the Philadelphia Athletics in the 1905 World Series, the Fall Classic has been a staple of American culture.

*Game recaps and statistical information derived from www.baseball-reference.com.

*See the "bullpen" entry about the 1903 World Series from www.baseball-reference.com for further reading:  http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/1903_World_Series