One of the most common question Cubs fans ask themselves is: "How did we go this long without winning a World Series?"
We've previously explained the Cubs track record in the amateur draft. But what about the years between 1908 and the first amateur draft in 1965? What explains that 57-year dry spell?
Four words: Their minor league system
In the days before each big league team owned farm teams, every minor league club was run independently. Major League scouts would simply check out all the minor league clubs looking for the best players, and it was up to the minor league team owner to "sell" his players for the best offer. For instance, read here how the owner of San Francisco Seals begged the Cubs to buy Joe DiMaggio (photo).
One of the first teams to realize they could better control the situation by owning their own minor league teams was the St. Louis Cardinals. One of the last teams to realize this was the Chicago Cubs. By 1940, the Cardinals owned 32 minor league teams. The Cubs owned zero. Between 1940 and 1968 the Cardinals won the World Series five times. I don't need to tell you how many the Cubs won.
When his baseball people finally convinced PK Wrigley (photo) to buy some farm teams, he insisted that all of the teams be financially independent and run like a business. He was much more concerned about how much money the farm teams were earning than the quality of players they provided to the big league club. Therefore, when the best Cubs prospects developed, they were offered up to the highest bidder...even though they were Cubs prospects. The Cubs lost dozens of prospects to teams who were willing to pay more for Cubs players than Wrigley was.
But even after he realized this wasn't a prudent course of action, Wrigley still didn't invest the kind of money necessary to make the farm system helpful to the big league club.
The Cubs had the smallest staff of scouts in baseball, and they had virtually no instructors in the minor leagues. In the late 40s and the 1950s, they had exactly one minor league pitching coach…a roaming instructor who went from team to team. The results were predictable. Between Bob Rush (who wasn’t even that good) in the late 40s and Ken Holtzman (photo) in 1965, the Cubs didn’t produce a single quality starting pitcher from their farm system. Those twenty seven years (1948-1967) just so happens to coincide with the worst teams in Chicago baseball history.
In addition to that, until Wid Mathews was hired as GM in 1950, the Cubs didn't have anyone in the minor leagues teaching fundamentals to the position players. Mathews finally hired Rogers Hornsby, who had been one of the greatest hitters of all-time, but he couldn't teach at all. He couldn't understand why everyone wasn't as naturally great as he was.
Throughout the 1950s the Cubs had the worst minor league system in baseball. They didn't like to pay big bonuses, and when they did, they sent those bonus babies into a farm system that didn't train them. The play ers that did make it (Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Ron Santo), fell into their laps out of sheer luck.
Other teams tried to sign Ernie Banks, but he was loyal to his Negro League team, the Kansas City Monarchs. The only reason he went with the Cubs was because his manager Buck O'Neil advised him to do it--and Banks trusted O'Neil. It's doubtful that either O'Neil or Banks realized that the Cubs only wanted him because they needed another black player to room with their only black player (Gene Baker) on the road.
Ron Santo was offered much more money by other teams, but he signed with the Cubs anyway because he felt loyalty to the only Cubs scout on the West Coast; the first person that discovered him. The Reds offered Santo $80,000. The Cubs offer was insulting by comparison ($20,000), but he took it anyway out of loyalty. Billy Williams was so painfully shy that he had to be talked into playing baseball...and almost quit before he reached the big leagues.
So why have the Cubs gone 100 years without winning a World Series? Geez...I don't know. Must be bad luck, right?
