In the midst of the Depression, the average yearly American worker’s salary was $1250. We really have no way of tracking how much baseball players were making before 1934, but after the New Deal passed, publicly held companies were forced to reveal all salaries in excess of $15,000.

In 1934, the Cubs had exactly two players in the $15000+ club: slugger Chuck Klein ($30,000), and Charlie Grimm ($18,361). Two years later, Gabby Hartnett, the biggest Cubs star of the 1930s, joined the club with a whopping $19,385 salary.

Meanwhile, P.K Wrigley was wisely putting his money where it could do the most damage. During one fateful season during the Depression, he hired an “Evil Eye” expert to "put the whammy" on the opposition.

That's not a joke.

According to Bill Veeck, who worked with the Cubs at that time, Wrigley had witnessed the "Evil Eye" achieve incredible success in the wrestling ring, and wanted him to recreate that success with the Cubs. When Wrigley brought this up at a team meeting, none of the people working for him wanted to embarrass the boss by pointing out how stupid he was to fall for this obviously staged gimmick, so no one stopped him from making the hire.

Instead, they told him to keep it quiet--to make sure the rest of the league didn't find out. The Evil Eye's salary was $5000 (about 25% of star player/manager Gabby Hartnett's salary that year), and he was promised an additional $25,000 if the Cubs won the pennant.

At first he sat in the pitcher's line of vision and tried to "put the whammy" on him from there. Soon he discovered that nine innings was a real long time, and Wrigley Field could be a real cold place, so he requested to put the whammy on the play-by-play ticker in the privacy of the boss' warm office instead.

Needless to say, it didn't work out so well. The Cubs didn't win the pennant that year (1939), and the “Evil Eye” idea was scrapped after that season.

Is it possible that the "Evil Eye" put "the Whammy" on the Cubs by mistake? That sure would explain a lot.