Red Line doubleheaders (part I)

It’s become something we do here at THT.

For each of the last two years, the Chicago contingency at The Hardball Times has a special day at the ballpark—because it’s a special day at two ballparks. We get together and catch a day game on the North Side of town and then sojourn to the South Side for a night game.

It’s an easy trip, as both Wrigley Field and Sox Park are just west of Chicago’s Red Line “L.” (Even with this year’s Red Line construction on the South Side, it’s still a really short walk from the nearby Green Line stop not far from U.S. Cellular Field.) While the interleague crosstown classic where the Cubs and Sox play each other gets more attention, the Red Line double-header gives you two games and four teams a day, a nice little perk of life in Chicago.

This year, for example, the THT gang got to see both Chicago squads lose in unusually cool weather on Friday, June 7. Last year we went during warmer August weather on a Saturday.

Chicago has long had two baseball teams, of course. And while the schedule is set up to assure that they are almost never home at the same time, there are typically a few times in the year when both are in town at the same time. Often it’s impossible to see them both at the same time. They might both be playing day games or night games, for instance.

This year’s THT shindig got me wondering about the history of these games. How often has their been a day game on one side of town and a night game on the other? What are its highlights? How often has there been a double-header involved? Has Chicago ever hosted a pair of double-headers in one day?

Let’s look up these questions. Before we look at a true Red Line double-header—day game on one side, night game on the other—we first have to look at how often both teams played in Chicago on the same day.

The early years: an initial eruption

From 1901 to 2012, there have been 406 occasions where both Sox and Cubs played at home on the same day. They were never so likely to do as in those very first few seasons. In 1901, the Cubs and Sox played at home on the same day 24 times. From July 12 to Aug. 4 alone they did it 13 times. In 1902, they did it 16 more times&mdash. That’s 40 times in two years, a tenth of the times they’ve ever done it.

There is a simple explanation for this. Back then, the AL was the upstart league trying to prove itself. The NL was its rival, not yet its partner. The Sox had the better team—they won the first AL pennant in 1901—so they played in Chicago up against the Cubs frequently.

In the 1902-03 offseason, however, the two leagues came to a truce, agreeing to work together instead of fighting one another. Not so coincidentally, the Cubs and Sox hosted games on the same days just 12 times in 1903 and then nine times in 1904. They still had joint home game dates about 7-10 times a year, but nothing like the 1901-02 explosion.

Decline of mutual home games

Even this wouldn’t last, however. In 1912, the Cubs and Sox had nine mutual home games, for a total of 124 through 12 seasons. It would be a long time before they had as many as nine days like this again. In 1913, they set a new low with just six dates where they both played at home. In 1914, it fell further, to three days. That became common.

What’s more, the nature of the double home date changed. It used to be that the two clubs would host entire series opposite each other. Now, it was more like a one-day affair. The last day of a Cubs home stand would be the opening game of a Sox home stand, or vice versa.

And even those games became increasingly sparse. In the 1910s, there were 46 times both Cubs and White Sox played at home on the same day, but in the 1920s it happened just 24 times. Only once in the 1920s was there back-to-back days with each team at home: the last two days of the 1925 season. Conversely, the 1923 season became the first one without a single day where both squads played at home.

The dormant years

And then it stopped. Completely. On Sept. 3, 1933, the Cubs lost to the Cardinals, 3-1, while the Indians trampled the Sox, 14-3— and then there were no more mutual home game dates for a long, long time. Not for the rest of the 1930s and not for the entire 1940s. Not until July 1, 1958, did it ever happen again. What the heck happened? Why did it stop entirely?

Well, a few ideas can be offered. First, these games clearly had become rarer and rarer for quite some time. Ending these games was less a break with the past than it was the continuation of an ongoing trend.

Second, let’s look at the timing. 1933 was the bottom of the Great Depression. Teams were desperate for cash as fewer fans wanted to waste their dwindling income at the ballpark. The Cubs were one of the best teams of this period, and despite that saw their attendance drop by almost two-thirds from 1929-33. Heck, after winning the 1932 NL pennant, they lost 400,000 fans in 1933. That isn’t normally how it plays out.

A Hardball Times Update
Goodbye for now.

As bleak as it was for the Cubs, they still easily outdrew the Sox, who had two years under a quarter-million fans from 1932 to ’34. With turnstile clicks down so badly, the teams didn’t want anything to happen to reduce the number of fans coming in. Thus, the days of mutual home games came to an end.

There’s one other factor to be noted: the rise of the double-header. I wrote about this a few years ago at THT, and the short version is that the double-header really entered its golden age during the Depression. Apparently, teams sought two-for-one deals as a way to bring more fans out to the park.

As double-headers became more frequent, it became far less likely that both Chicago teams would host games on the same day. After all, more double-headers means more off days. It also means clubs are more likely to schedule rainouts on days where there is already a game than on a free day (when the other squad might be in town).

So the teams never played in Chicago on the same day.

The aborted return

Finally, the pattern came to an end in July of 1958. Why go back to the old ways? Again, it’s hard to say exactly. I will note that if the golden age of double-headers began with the Great Depression, their long, slow phase-out began in the late 1950s. So, with fewer off days and more one-game days, a mutual home-game date became more likely. Besides, the Great Depression was long since a memory.

At any rate, these double home-game dates were pretty rare. It happened once in 1958, once in 1959, and twice in both 1960 and 1961. It picked up a little after that, and in July, 1962, baseball schedule-makers did something long forgotten in Chicago. From July 12-14, 1962, for the first time in about 40 years, both the White Sox and Cubs hosted a series at the same time. It wasn’t just a one-off date, it was a full series.

Alas, rather than being the harbinger of a new era, schedules for Chicago teams quickly reverted to the 1933-58 era. From 1964-74, there were only seven days both teams played at home at the same time, including five straight years where it never happened from 1964 to ’68.

Red Line double-headers: 1970s onward

In the mid-1970s, the comeback began and essentially never has gone away. Only twice in the last 42 seasons has Chicago been deprived of at least one time a year when both teams played at home on the same daet: 1982 and 2010.

It’s actually picked up over time. There were just 20 of these games in the 1970s, 46 in the 1980s, 70 in the 1990s, before dipping a bit to 62 in the 2000s. It peaked with 14 such days in 1999, the most in any season since 1902. From 1958 to2012, there have been 224 days both teams have been in town at the same time.

Here is how these days break down by decade:

Decade	Both
1900s	105
1910s	 46
1920s	 24
1930s	  7
1940s	  0
1950s	  2
1960s	 14
1970s	 20
1980s	 46
1990s	 70
2000s	 62
2010-12	 10

All this brings up another question: why don’t the Cubs and White Sox push back against the schedule-makers on this, if that’s probably what happened way back when?

There’s a similar underlying trend in all this: attendance. Back in the day, the Chicago teams wanted to end these overlapping days due to attendance fears, but that really isn’t as big an issue any more. The new era of two home games in one day began in the mid-1970s. That’s also when attendance began to pick up all across baseball. It was stuck around 15,000 a game for 20-25 years across the big leagues but began a rise in the mid-1970s.

This was when you had the Baby Boomers coming of age with more income, and there was an overall national shift to spending more money on entertainment. The same years baseball’s attendance went up, Jaws and Star Wars shattered box office records. (Previously, the biggest grossing flick was Gone with the Wind, way back in 1939.) The Super Bowl became a national secular holiday. Rock ’n roll, just a decade removed from when the Beatles were the only band that could play stadiums, entered the era of arena rock.

Look back at Chicago for a second. Prior to the 1970s, the combined attendance for the Cubs and Sox had never been more than 2,454,230 (a figure that happened in 1960). That mark was bested each year from 1971 to 1973. In fact, from 1977 onward, there has been just one full season in Chicago history where the Cubs and Sox haven’t topped their 1960 total. The old ceiling is below the modern-day floor.

Ultimately, playing on the same day doesn’t hurt the clubs, so it keeps on happening.

Red Line double-header: day game and night game

The above tells us when the Sox and Cubs are in town the same day. But for a true Red Line double-header, you need to have sufficiently staggered start times. What you really need are a day game at one end of town and a night game at the other.

Neither park had lights until the Great Depression. In fact, no baseball park did. Night baseball came to the South Side in 1939 and to the North Side nearly a half-century later, in 1988.

The first true Red Line double-header came on Friday Sept. 18, 1959. That was a strange time to do it. The Sox were on the verge of clinching their first pennant in 40 years while the Cubs were playing out the string in another dismal season. Just 971 showed up for the weekday afternoon game at Wrigley Field while 37,352 flooded into Comiskey Park that night. Given how absurdly one-sided attendance was that day, it’s amazing the Cubs didn’t protest loud enough to prevent schedule-makers from letting this happen again.

From 1959 to 2012, there have been 164 Red Line double-header days with a day game on one side off town and a night game on the other. That’s three-fourths of the times both teams have been at home on the same day. Here’s the list from above, but with the chart now also showing how many Red Line double-headers there have been per decade.

Decade	Both	Red
1900s	105	 0
1910s	 46	 0
1920s	 24	 0
1930s	  7	 0
1940s	  0	 0
1950s	  2	 1
1960s	 14	13
1970s	 20	18
1980s	 46	43
1990s	 70	46
2000s	 62	35
2010-12	 10	 8

You can see the impact of night games at Wrigley. Even since that’s happened, there are more occasions when you can’t see both teams play, even if they’re both at home on the same day. It makes sense if you think about it.

Obviously, they’ve almost all been Cub day games and White Sox night games, but not always. The first reverse Red Line double-header—South Side day game and North Side nightcap—came on June 7, 1990. They’ve happened sporadically since then, 11 times in all. Even now, 25 years after Wrigley got its lights, the Cubs still play far more day games than any other team.

There is plenty more to look at with these Red Line doubleheaders, but this column has gone on long enough. We’ll pick it up again later.

References & Resources
Info for this article primarily comes from Retrosheet.org. Attendance figures come from Baseball-Reference.com.


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bucdaddy
10 years ago

In 1983, I had a newspaper beat covering the Pirates. On Sept. 21, I watched the Cubs beat Pittsburgh, 7-6, at Wrigley, and that night one of the Pirates’ P.R. guys asked if I wanted to go see the Chisox play the Twins at old Comiskey (second game of a DH), so I got my story filed and off we went to see the Sox beat the Twins, also 7-6. I looked up the box score of that game, because I had no memory of it (other than it was cold and I was underdressed), and was delighted to see that it was quite exciting. The score was 2-1 after 6 1/2 innings, but the teams scored in every half-inning after that. CWS won on a walk-off double by Scott Fletcher that scored Tom Paciorek.

keith waters
10 years ago

I am not sure you should write “the THT gang” seeing as how one “the” is already there.

John Barten
10 years ago

The The Angels Angels of Anaheim!

Jim
10 years ago

Chris, if you can, help me out.  Last week, I believe in one of your dayversary items, you mentioned the date of the last doubleheader scheduled.  Could you tell me again?  Sorry, I forgot to write it down.

Thanks

Paul G.
10 years ago

So how did the Federal League’s Chicago Whales work into all this?

Chris J.
10 years ago

Jim – sorry, but I don’t remember that item at all.  They still often have about one scheduled doubleheader a year.

scott
10 years ago

Paul, I was wondering that too.  Here’s what I found (this was done quickly so there may be an error or two…):

all 3 teams: 7 days
Cubs and Whales: 49 days (27 in ‘14, 22 in ‘15)
Sox and Whales: 46 days (21 in ‘14, 25 in ‘15)
Cubs and Sox: once (9/5/15)

Dates all 3 teams played the same day:
1914 – 5/10, 5/31, 7/5, 9/13
1915 – 5/2, 5/30, 10/3
All of these dates were Sundays.

Interestingly, of the 355 days during the 2 seasons (178 in ‘14, 177 in ‘15), no team was at home on 59 days – nearly 1/6th of the time!

It would be interesting to see how many days St Louis and, especially, New York/Brooklyn had 3 (or 4!) teams at home on the same date.

Frank
10 years ago

There was an “unofficial” reverse double header earlier in 1990. Due to the lockout that year, both teams were scheduled to open the season on the same date (April 9th). The Sox played the Brewers, and got the game in, but the Cubs-Phillies started, but weren’t able to get the game in (Retrosheet has Lenny Dykstra homering in the 3rd). A couple of buddies and I decided on the fly to hit both games that day.

Mike
10 years ago

What a great way to spend a day.  Being in St. Louis, I had never thought of it.  It’s on my bucket list.

Chuck
10 years ago

My buddy and I have done a few two-state doubleheaders: Cubs in Chicago at 1205pm, Brewers in Milwaukee at 605pm. That can happen only on Saturdays, with the Fox start times. If the Cubs game comes in under 3-1/2 hours, we can almost certainly see first pitch up Wisconsin.

Last month, I took a fun trip: drove from Chicago to a hotel in Toledo Monday night; Tuesday, saw the Mud Hens at 1030am, then went to Cleveland for the Tigers-Indians tilt at 705pm; Wednesday, drove to Erie for an 1100am Seawolves game, then back to Toledo for another Tigers-Indians game at 705pm (and I caught a foul ball on the fly!); Thursday, six hours at the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame, then drove back home to Chicago.  Hell of a trip.  You should try it sometime.