Cubs by the Numbers

ALL-TIME #31 ROSTER
Player	Years
Stan Hack	1932
Jim Mosolf	1933
Taylor Douthit	1933
Augie Galan	1934
Earl Whitehill	1939
Dom Dallessandro	1940–41
Joe Berry	1942
Johnny Schmitz	1942
Bill Lee	1943
Dale Alderson	1943
Bob Chipman	1944–49
Fred Baczewski	1953
Al Lary	1954
Turk Lown	1956–58
Dick Ellsworth	1958
Dave Hillman	1959
John Goetz	1960
Mark Freeman	1960
Jug Gerard	1962
Bob Buhl	1962–66
Fergie Jenkins (player and coach)	1966–73, 1982–83, 1995–96
Tom Dettore	1975–76
Joe Coleman	1976
Jim Todd	1977
Davey Johnson	1978
Ray Fontenot	1985–86
Greg Maddux	1986–92, 2004–06
Kevin Foster	1994, 1997–98
Bobby Ayala	1999
Brad Woodall	1999
Mike Fyhrie	2001
Donovan Osborne	2002
Mark Guthrie	2003

Of all the numbers worn in Cubs history, #31 may lay claim to be the greatest of them all because it was worn by not one but two Cubs Hall of Famers. Both pitchers were honored when the number was retired on May 3, 2009. But, oh, if they could have only stayed Cubs their whole careers… one left of his own volition and the other was shipped out of town when the front office threw out nearly everything of value in their mid-1970s house cleaning.

And neither one of them, when first coming to the Cubs, appeared to be anything special at all. When, on April 21, 1966 the Cubs acquired Ferguson Jenkins, John Herrnstein and Adolfo Phillips from the Phillies for veteran pitchers Bob Buhl (whose number Fergie took) and Larry Jackson, the Cubs were initially more excited about Phillips. Jenkins made a couple of spot starts early in ’66 and was finally moved into the rotation to stay on August 25; that’s when his talent started to shine. In nine late-season starts in ’66 he went 4–2 with a 2.13 ERA, capped by a four-hit shutout of the pennant-winning Dodgers on September 25.

You know what happened next. Six straight 20-win seasons, topped off with a Cy Young Award in 1971 when he won 24 games (and hit six home runs, a team record for pitchers that was equaled by Carlos Zambrano in 2006). His 20–15 mark in 1968, the noted “Year of the Pitcher,” should have been better: he lost five 1–0 games and was taken out of another tie after throwing ten shutout innings.

Even as a kid with his cheesy 1980s mustache, Greg Maddux had the arm (and the brain) to pitch like a veteran master.

But it all started to sour in 1973, along with the rest of the bunch that never did win; Fergie fell to 14–16 and after the season was traded to the Rangers, for whom he won 25 games in ’74. Despite spending two years with the Red Sox in between Rangers stints, he never did play in the postseason, and when granted free agency by Texas after the 1981 season, he was contacted by Dallas Green to see if he had anything left in the tank at age thirty-nine.

He did, though it didn’t help the Cubs finish higher than fifth. Jenkins went 14–15 but with a fine 3.15 ERA that ranked 11th in the NL. The next year age caught up with him and his ERA jumped to 4.30, and though he was in training camp with the eventual 1984 NL East champion Cubs, he showed nothing in several spring appearances and was released.

That very summer, a skinny high school kid from Las Vegas was the Cubs’ second-round pick in the amateur draft. Greg Maddux didn’t look like a ballplayer (in fact, he barely looked old enough to go to high school, much less have graduated; the picture taken of him for his first Cub spring training camp made him look so young that some fans jokingly dubbed it “his Bar Mitzvah photo”), but he blazed through the Cubs farm system and was in the major leagues two years later, making his debut as, of all things, a pinch runner in the 18th inning of a game suspended on September 2, 1986, finished the next day. He remained in the game to pitch and gave up a game-winning homer to Houston’s Billy Hatcher, who had a knack for delivering clutch hits.

That was one of the few low moments Greg Maddux had as a Cub. Put in the rotation the next year at age twenty-one, his numbers were poor (6–13, 5.87) but his bulldog attitude began to show, and the best example of this occurred on July 7. San Diego’s Eric Show hit Andre Dawson in the face with a pitch that day, sparking a brawl in a game Maddux had started. The next inning, Maddux struck out the first two batters and then hit Benito Santiago—giving the hint that he felt Santiago was responsible for calling the pitch that hit Dawson.

The next year Maddux exploded onto the national scene by going 18–8 and making his first All-Star team. He helped the Cubs to the 1989 NL East title by winning 19 games, but he got pounded in the NLCS; it took him until the mid-1990s and several tries with Atlanta before he pitched well in the postseason.

Cubs fans will never forget or forgive then-GM Larry Himes for letting Maddux walk via free agency after the 1992 season, when he won the first of his four consecutive Cy Youngs. He wanted to stay, but the Cubs tried to lowball him on a contract and he went to the Braves, having his finest years there, before returning to the Cubs for a curtain call in 2004. Maddux, not the pitcher he once was, went 16–11 with a 4.02 ERA. He was supposed to be a key cog in the Cubs repeating as a postseason team but that didn’t work out, as they blew a certain wild-card berth in the season’s final week. Two years later, Maddux threw six five-hit, one-run, no-walk innings against the Cardinals at Wrigley Field on July 29, 2006, leaving the field to one of the loudest ovations ever at the old ballyard; two days later he was sent to the Dodgers, helping LA achieve a postseason berth. After a stint with the Padres, he wound up back with the Dodgers in 2008, and pitched against the Cubs in the Division Series with 355 regular season wins in his pocket at age forty-two. He announced his retirement from baseball on December 8, 2008.

“This is a tremendous honor and I would like to thank the entire Cubs organization for putting Fergie and me in such exclusive company,” Maddux said that day in 2009 when #31 was retired in Chicago—it was also retired two months later in Atlanta. “I won my first big league game with the Cubs in 1986 then won my 300th with them in 2004. It’s a special organization with outstanding fans and I’m appreciative of the honor.” Maddux honored both cities by going into the Hall of Fame with a logo-less cap on his plaque.

Retiring the number is ironic because if #31 had been taken out of circulation after Fergie retired, it never would have seen a second Hall of Fame tour of duty.

The uniform was worn by six other players after Fergie’s departure: Tom Dettore (1975–76), who on April 14, 1976 was responsible for allowing what is generally considered to be the longest home run in Wrigley Field history, an estimated 600-foot shot hit by Dave Kingman, then of the Mets , on April 14, 1976 (Dettore would pitch only three more major league games before being released); Joe Coleman (1976); Jim Todd (1977); Davey Johnson (1978), the only non-pitcher to wear #31 after Jenkins; and Ray Fontenot (1985–86), the Cubs’ second-best Fontenot. Six others: Kevin Foster (1994, 1997–98), Bobby Ayala (1999), Brad Woodall (1999), Mike Fyhrie (2001), Donovan Osborne (2002) and Mark Guthrie (2003) sported it in the Maddux interregnum between 1992 and 2004.

Before the arrival of Fergie, there were only three players to wear #31 for more than two seasons, all pitchers: Bob Chipman (1944–49), a swingman who both started and relieved and who is one of the few pre-1960 Cubs to wear a single number for his entire tenure with the team; Turk Lown (1956–58), who also wore #35 in his first stint for the Cubs from 1951–54; and the aforementioned Bob Buhl (1962–66), who was one of the players traded to the Phillies for Jenkins. Buhl had helped lead the Milwaukee Braves to the 1957 NL pennant with an 18–7 season, but he was a .500 pitcher (51–52) in his four full Cubs seasons (plus one game in 1966). His most notable accomplishment in a Cubs uniform was a negative one: he went 0-for-70 as a hitter in 1962, the most at-bats by anyone in a season in major league history without registering a single hit.

MOST OBSCURE CUB TO WEAR #31: John Goetz (1960). Taking advantage of an early 1960s roster rule allowing teams to carry a few extra players in the season’s first month, the Cubs gave Goetz the only four appearances of his major league career in April. They probably wish they hadn’t. He was pretty bad, allowing four runs in an 18–2 loss to the Giants, and five in a 16–6 loss to the Cardinals, upon which he was sent back to the minors. Goetz hailed from a town that must have had something to do with his family: Goetzville, Michigan.

GUY YOU NEVER THOUGHT OF AS A CUB WHO WORE #31: Davey Johnson (1978). Five years after he set a record for homers by a second baseman (43, with the Braves in 1973), the Cubs acquired Johnson from the Phillies, hoping he could recapture some of that power. His ’73 season proved to be one of the biggest flukes in baseball history: Johnson never hit more than 18 homers in any other season. He did, however, hit 26 home runs for the Tokyo Giants in 1976 before coming back stateside and enjoying a bounceback season for the Phillies. He came to Chicago in August 1978 and hit well enough in brief duty with the Cubs—.306 in 49 at-bats—but after the season he retired and soon embarked on a long managing career.

Fergie Jenkins finished his career where he never should have left. In 1983, he picked up his 167th win as a Cub.

Here’s To The Winners

If you have one game you need to win and you could pick any Cub throughout history to pitch it, who would you choose? Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown is a pretty good call. Maybe Orval Overall? They each won twice in the last World Series in which the Cubs emerged victorious, but that might be going back too far. Besides, they didn’t wear numbers. If you need a Cub on the hill for a must-win game, that’s got to be #31.

Between Fergie Jenkins and Greg Maddux, they combined for exactly 300 wins in a Cubs uniform: 167 for Fergie, 133 for Mad Dog. This pair of aces at #31 makes that uniform number dominate just about every pitching category. With #31 retired, math tells us that most of this and many other uniform leading categories for #31 will one day fall, but it will be a long hard slog getting past this pair of aces. And it will never pass the number in the category of style points.

Uniform #	Wins
31	472
30	309
32	291
36	289
34	277
49	268
46	266
17	246
38	235
33	226
37	220
40	213
48	205
22	189
39	153
13	153
18	147
45	134
16	124
43	115