Mordecai Brown by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Mordecai Brown

Page 89

1910 Chicago Cubs Season

The Cubs returned to finishing first in the National League with a record of 104–50, almost identical to 1909’s second place finish, but this time 13 games well ahead of the second place New York Giants; the Pirates falling way back. The team was defeated four games to one by the Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series.

Mordecai Brown was quite the workhorse that year, as he also had been in 1908 and 1909, 343 innings pitched in the latter, a number unheard of in modern baseball. He wound up winning 25, losing 14, .641, with an ERA of 1.86, that also a sharp rise from the previous four great years, but still second in the league to his 24 year old Cub team mates’ best year - King Cole’s 1.80, and ahead of Mathewson’s third place finish at 1.89. Maybe time and wear were making their presence felt, albeit a bit quietly, as if it held a secret, but wanted to keep the guessing game going.

Late in the summer of 1910, when the Cubs were running away with the pennant but the season still felt strangely heavy, Mordecai Brown found himself lingering on the bullpen bench long after the rest of the pitchers had drifted back to the clubhouse. The