OLD TOWN — The Cubs' appearances in the World Series have been so few and far between, they're almost too historic for the Chicago History Museum.
Peter Alter, a historian at the museum, said it has few items such as jerseys, bats and gloves from the Cubs' World Series appearances, though it does have some items that have been passed down by their fans over the years that found their way to the museum, and a few stunning photographs as well.
"If we had it, we'd trumpet it," Alter said. "There's not that much."
One recently released image from the Cubs' last World Series appearance against the Detroit Tigers in 1945 is on prominent display, across the main lobby from the admission counter at the museum, 1601 N. Clark St. Ticket windows have also been augmented with Cub bunting.
The museum, however, has a wonderful array of classic photos from the Cubs' appearances in the World Series, going back to their last championship in 1908, and it was kind enough to share them here with DNAinfo.
The museum has a permanent baseball exhibit for both the Cubs and the White Sox. It has programs for all the Cubs' World Series played at Wrigley Field, which Alter pointed out included their run from 1929 through 1938, when they won the National League pennant like clockwork every three years, as well as 1945.
Sox fans will note that the only World Series trophy, adopted by Major League Baseball since the Cubs' last appearance, is on the Sox's side of the exhibit.
The museum does have a few items key to games that got the Cubs to the World Series. That permanent exhibit features the bat and ball Gabby Hartnett hit in the famous "Homer in the Gloamin'" that landed the Cubs in the 1938 series.
And there's a scorecard from the 1908 makeup game played between the Cubs and the New York Giants that determined the National League pennant. That, of course, resulted from the famed "Merkle Boner" game late in the season, in which the Giants apparently won a game, but the Cubs' Johnny Evers insisted the Giants' Fred Merkle, on first base at the time of the walk-off game-winning hit, raced directly off the field to the Giants' clubhouse and never touched second.
Evers tracked down the ball, subsequently seized and thrown into the crowd by the Giants' "Iron Man" Joe McGinnity, tracked it down again (or a ball of some sort), brought it back to umpire Hank O'Day and touched second base to convince O'Day to rule Merkle out on a force play.
The game was ordered replayed from the start at the end of the season, which found the teams tied with the same record otherwise, and the Cubs won what was in effect a playoff game to gain the World Series — which resulted in their last world championship to this day.
Not on display, until here and now, the museum also has a shot of the Detroit Tigers' fearsome Ty Cobb playing in that World Series against the Cubs, as well as Babe Ruth, in street clothes, shaking hands with Hack Wilson before a 1929 World Series game at Wrigley. Ruth would be back three years later to hit his "called shot."
And Alter said there's another piece hidden away that Cub fans might not want to be reminded of. The museum has a copy of a deposition given by Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte in 1920, during a grand jury investigation into the Black Sox scandal of the previous year.
According to Alter, Cicotte suggested the Sox got the idea to throw the World Series from the Cubs, who he said got $10,000 to lose to the Boston Red Sox the year before in the 1918 series.
That, of course, was the Bosox' last series before the "Curse of the Bambino," brought on by the trade of Ruth to the New York Yankees, after which Boston didn't win another World Series until 2004 — engineered, of course, by Theo Epstein, now of the Cubs.
By the way, Alter noted that the Cubs did not play the 1918 World Series at Wrigley Field. Instead, they played at the then-grander Comiskey Park, the White Sox' "Palace of Baseball" on the South Side, because it had a larger capacity.
Alter said the museum's last major baseball and sports special exhibit took place in 2003 — the year the Cubs lost the National League Championship Series to the Florida Marlins after being up 3-1 in games.
So maybe it's just as well that there's no major Cubs exhibit this year. Not to be superstitious or anything.
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