The Year the Giants won 106 games but refused to go to the World Series
The 2021 San Francisco Giants are one win away (with three to play) from reaching 106 victories, which would tie the franchise record. No Giants team has won that many games since the 1904 New York Giants, which begs the question: Did the Giants win the World Series that year? The answer is no. But they didn’t lose it either.
Managed by the cantankerous John McGraw, who also played a few games that season, and led by Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson, who won 33 games that year, the New York Giants wrapped up the National League title with ease. The American League was tighter with the Boston Americans (forerunners of the Red Sox), edging the New York Highlanders in the season’s final days.
McGraw and New York Giants owner John T. Brush viewed the American League as inferior. National Leaguers derisively called the American League the “junior circuit” because it was founded in 1901, a quarter century after the National League. The label stuck, but Brush’s stance made little sense. The first World Series, in 1903, was won by the American League: the Boston Americans defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The real reason the Giants dismissed the World Series was that Brush didn’t want to share baseball’s premier showcase with any team from the American League. He’d tried to undermine the upstart A.L. by hiring stars such as McGraw from the junior circuit’s Baltimore franchise and constantly feuded with A.L. President Ban Johnson.
The World Series had begun the year before and was popular with fans and especially with players, who earned bonus money. So Giants players were not happy with ownership, to put it mildly. The bonus money in 1903 for World Series winners and losers was roughly equal: about $1,200 per player, according to Baseball Almanac, more than some players earned for an entire season. (The team’s best player, Mathewson, earned $5,000 in annual salary; it’s hard to find salary info for lesser players, but those numbers were far lower.)
Fans vociferously criticized the Giants’ decision not to meet the American League champion, and Brush, who had taken over the team just two years prior, realized he’d made a mistake. After trying to decimate the rival American League for years, Brush led the move toward making the World Series a permanent institution of Major League Baseball.
Starting in 1905 — when the New York Giants topped the Philadelphia Athletics four games to one — the World Series was played annually until 1994, when a strike called it off.
As I write this, the 2021 San Francisco Giants, who were projected by ESPN’s initial power rankings to win 70 games this season, have 105 wins. That’s 35 games over the projected total and the season is not over yet.
One win over the reeling San Diego Padres, who limp into San Francisco tonight having squandered their playoff hopes, and the Giants will tie the franchise record. If the Giants can take two of three from the Padres, they’ll exceed the team mark for most wins in a season and clinch the division title, at last.
For fans, most of whom weren’t expecting much of this team composed of over-30 veterans and no-name reclamation projects, it’s sheer heaven. Playoff baseball is coming back to San Francisco, after a five-year hiatus.
But unlike every year from the early 1900s until 1968, the team with the best record doesn’t go straight to the World Series. The Giants would have to win a divisional series, then the League Championship Series, to get to the World Series. For every player, coach, executive, and of course for manager Gabe Kapler, reaching the Series would mean the world.
No chance in hell these Giants would forego the opportunity to play on baseball’s grandest stage this time around.
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Tangent: After the Giants won the 1905 World Series, the Chicago Cubs won the National League pennant the next three years, and won the World Series the last two of those years: 1907 and 1908. That 1908 victory would be their last World Series triumph for more than a century; they didn’t win another championship until 2016.
Those 1908 Cubs won the N.L. pennant thanks to what’s known as Merkle’s Boner, a base-running blunder by the Giants Fred Merkle in a game against the Cubs. After the Giants appeared to have scored the winning run and fans swarmed the field, Merkle was called out on a force at second because he’d assumed the game was over and didn’t run from first to tag second base.
The game was ruled a 1–1 tie and would be replayed only if it would impact the standings. Naturally the Giants and Cubs finished that season tied; the game was replayed. The Cubs won and went on to win the World Series. Fans gave Merkle the nickname “Bonehead” and he was booed in New York for many years. After retiring he avoided the game for decades, finally returning to the Polo Grounds in 1950. Merkle received a boisterous ovation from the crowd, who 42 years after that infamous game, finally found foregiveness.
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Michael Shapiro is an amateur baseball historian and interviewed Mike Krukow for his book, The Creative Spark, a collection of interviews with artists, writers and all sorts of other creative people.
