The Birth of the World Series

A game at the Boston field a few days before the World Series started.

(LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

On October 1, 1903, more than 16,000 people packed into Boston’s baseball stadium, the Huntington Avenue Grounds, to watch an event more historic than they could have imagined—though they knew they were seeing something big. They were there to watch the two most successful teams in the country, Boston and Pittsburgh, face off, with opposing “rooting clubs” to cheer on the two squads. “The eyes of the whole baseball world are upon this city today,” the Pittsburgh Leader declared, “for this afternoon will open about the most important and widely interesting series in the history of the national game.” The inaugural game of baseball’s first World Series was being played, launching a tradition that endures prominently to our day.

To call the game a clash of titans would not be an exaggeration. The Boston team that would later, starting in 1907, become known as the Red Sox had pulverized its competitors over the summer, winning the American League pennant by a wide margin. Boston had started the season unimpressively, with a respectable but unexceptional record of exactly .500 at the end of May, but the club had pulled away from its opponents in July and August, finishing with a commanding winning percentage of .659. Boston’s pitching squad was certainly the jewel in its crown. The team’s earned run average was a startlingly low 2.57, a figure significantly better than the best in the National League, which was 2.77. The Pittsburgh Pirates were no less impressive. Capturing the National League’s pennant with a winning percentage of .650, the Pirates had racked up 793 runs during the season, exceeding Boston’s total by 85.

The pitchers who led their teams that October day were big too. Both Cy Young, of Boston, and Deacon Phillippe, of Pittsburgh were unusually tall. Phillippe, a right-handed hurler of exceptional skill, was thin and lanky, quiet, friendly, and unassuming, and his first name seemed to fit him well. Young, after whom Major League Baseball’s annual pitching award would later be named, possessed an imposingly burly physique and obviously extraordinary strength. Reed Browning, Young’s biographer, described his “high overhand delivery, designed among other things to accentuate the advantage his height and the mound already gave him.” One of the pitcher’s admirers said “the ball was shooting down from the hands of a giant.”

And so 102 years ago today, Cy Young became the first man to throw out a pitch in a World Series. He also became the first pitcher to lose a World Series game. In the first inning alone Boston’s fielders committed three errors, leading to an early score of 4-0 in Pittsburgh’s favor. Boston never recovered. In the best-of-nine series that the two teams were playing, Pittsburgh sustained its early momentum to win three of the first four games. Boston was not to be easily defeated, however. It turned the tide in the fifth game and went on to win the sixth, seventh, and eighth, and with them the championship. On October 14, 1903, the Boston Post hailed its home team’s victory in “the greatest sporting event ever known in this country.”

The rivalry at stake in the World Series went beyond that between the Pittsburgh and Boston teams. The 1903 World Series represented the first clash between the National League, a longer-established and more entrenched institution, and the American, a much newer one of less impressive pedigree. The American League had been put together at the turn of the century after the model of the earlier American Association, uniting a number of teams rejected by the National with those of the geographically isolated Western League. When Boston, an American League team, and Pittsburgh, from the National, were both clearly headed for decisive 1903 pennant victories in their leagues, their owners, Henry J. Killilea and Barney Dreyfuss respectively, agreed to finish the season with an unprecedented interleague match-up. Dreyfuss angered many National League owners with the deal, since it could only serve to legitimize the upstart American League. Considering Boston’s victory, they may have been right.

By the end of the series 100,429 people had watched the two teams play. Total ticket sales amounted to $55,500, a piddling sum to present-day baseball owners but a very pleasing amount in 1903. Dreyfuss and Killilea divided the money equally, thoroughly convinced of the good financial sense of what they had started. The whole baseball world would soon agree, coming to understand that greater entertainment and profit were to be had if the leagues played competitively, rather than separately and in hostile opposition. In 1997, nearly a century later, baseball’s owners took this development a step further and began allowing interleague play in the regular season. The first World Series in 1903 was what first started that cooperation between the leagues, and it created as important an institution as exists in America’s beloved national sport.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com.