THE 1914 BOSTON BRAVES
Linus van Pelt: “Winning isn’t everything, Charlie Brown . . .”
Charlie Brown: “That’s true, but losing isn’t anything!”
• • •
Six years after the Civil War ended, in 1871, Boston received its first professional baseball team. No, it wasn’t the Red Sox, which would come later, in 1901, but the Boston Red Stockings, a long-lost team nobody’s ever heard of.
Or have they?
The Red Stockings still exist today, but you might not realize it because they play in Atlanta as the Atlanta Braves. Between their inception in 1871 and 1914, the Red Stockings were known for two things: name changes and, after a successful beginning, losing badly. In 1883, they were known as the Beaneaters, a name they carried until 1907, when Bostonians began referring to them as the Doves and after that, the Rustlers, until one name, the Braves, finally stuck through the years in Boston and later when the franchise moved to Milwaukee in 1953 and then to Atlanta in 1966.
Name changes were not uncommon back then. Team nicknames were just that, and they changed often. The Red Sox were originally known as the Boston Pilgrims and the Boston Americans; the Yankees were the New York Highlanders.
What was uncommon was the way the Red Stockings-Beaneaters-Doves-Rustlers-Braves would lose games. Things started off well enough. In two of their first three years of existence, the Red Stockings finished in first place. In 1892, the Beaneaters won 102 games and beat the Cleveland Spiders in the Championship Series. They were first again in 1893 and again in 1897 and 1898.
Then came 1900, when they finished in fourth place, beginning a string of 14 straight seasons of “these-guys-are-the-worst-epic-fail” awfulness. The team finished in last place four straight years from 1909 to 1912 and in the 11 seasons from 1903 to 1913 never posted a winning record and never finished higher than fifth place.
The 1914 season figured to be much of the same. They started the season losing their first three games to the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies, lost 10 of their first 13 games, and before the spring weather arrived were already 10 games out of first place.
Another long summer of losing was on its way.
The Braves were afterthoughts, even in their own city. Two years earlier, in 1912, the Red Sox had built their brand-new ballpark, Fenway Park, while the Braves toiled at the old, run-down South End Grounds. One city, two very different teams.
In their first year at new Fenway Park, the Red Sox won the World Series. In 1914, while the Braves couldn’t win a game, the Red Sox had an upstart rookie pitcher named Babe Ruth, who seemed to have big plans for himself—and the ability to back it up. The Braves had two veteran players, Johnny Evers and Rabbit Maranville, who were once stars and would one day be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but it was hard to notice them when the team was in last place.
On Monday, June 8, the Boston Braves lost 3–2 to Cincinnati, leaving them in last place with a record of 12–28, thirteen games behind the powerful New York Giants. A month later, on July 4, they lost both ends of a doubleheader to Brooklyn, had lost five games in a row, and were now fifteen games behind the Giants.
Season over. Wait till next year. Right?
Then, something began happening.
Two days later, on July 6, the Braves played another doubleheader against the Dodgers and won both games. And then they won again. And again and again. They won six in a row to get out of last place, and then won nine more in a row to finally reach the .500 mark.
Something else happened. The Braves abandoned their beat-up home field in August and struck a deal with the Red Sox, agreeing to play the remainder of their games at Fenway Park when the Red Sox were out of town.
On August 13, the Braves had climbed all the way to second place when they traveled to New York, to the famed Polo Grounds for a showdown with the first-place Giants. The Braves had shaved 10 games off the Giants’ lead. Boston then beat the New Yorkers three straight.
The Giants’ lead was now only 3 1/2 games. Could the team that never seemed to win actually take first place?
That’s exactly what happened on August 25, when the Braves tied the Giants for first place with a 7–1 win in Philadelphia. A new nickname had begun to take hold by this point: the “Miracle Braves.” And that miracle, it turns out, was just getting started.
By the end of the season, the Boston Braves had steamrolled everyone, beating the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers to end the season and winning the National League pennant by an amazing 10 1/2 games! They had gone 68–19 after July 4. No team in baseball history had come from so far behind to win the pennant by so many games—and none have, even to this day.
The pennant was one thing, but the World Series was another, as the Braves would play one of the great teams of all time: the Philadelphia Athletics (yes, the same Athletics that now call Oakland home). The A’s were stacked with great players across the diamond, from the pitchers Chief Bender and Eddie Plank to third baseman Frank “Home Run” Baker. The A’s had already won the World Series in 1911 and were the defending World Series champs, having beaten the Giants in 1913 to become winners once again. This was the team of manager Connie Mack’s famed “$100,000 infield” of Stuffy McInnis at first, Eddie Collins at second, Jack Barry at short, and Baker at third. This was an A’s team that seemingly couldn’t lose.
The truth was, they couldn’t win. The Miracle Braves, still the hottest team in baseball, destroyed the A’s in four straight games, winning the World Series.
The nickname was an appropriate one. Nobody could explain it. The Miracle Braves had been losers from 1903 to that strange summer of 1914, when they suddenly beat everyone and won the World Series. The next year, the Braves finished second, then third in 1916. Just as suddenly, they went back to losing. By 1917, they were the same old Braves, finishing 25 games out of first. They didn’t have a winning record again for another 15 years, failed to make the World Series again until 1948, and didn’t manage to win another World Series until 1957, four years after leaving Boston and moving to Milwaukee.
Over the years, there would be other miracles; In 1967, the Boston Red Sox reached the World Series after having not enjoyed a winning season since 1957. In 1969, the New York Mets went from having never had a winning season to winning the World Series. The Boston Braves, however, were the first. It didn’t make sense then, and it doesn’t make sense now, but for one summer, they were the best team in the world.