Shown: JUNE: Chicago (light blue) rockets into a dynasty. Blowout epitome.

In his second of seventeen seasons as Chicago's field leader, Adrian Constantine Anson, better known as Captain Anson, had assembled a fast team of young athletes and drilled into them his fundamentals of baseball. They burst out of the gate with a 14-3 record and then scored a mammoth twenty-one consecutive victories that ended the pennant race in June. Besides Anson, only one other player was over twenty-four years old, yet this team holds the major league record for the highest single-season winning percentage of all-time.

Anson's fundamentals demanded the Harry Wright principle of backing up teammates on throws and the Mike "King" Kelly principle of running full tilt to second base on flyballs. Anson liked ten foot leads and stealing as soon as the opposing catcher lost control of the ball. Perhaps most importantly, Anson showed that you didn't have to be Harry Wright to stand on the sidelines to direct a team. Chicago nearly always had two - or more - players on the sidelines screaming encouragement despite the protestations of opposing clubs. Anson also taught his boys to read between the lines of the rule book looking for ambiguity. Today, every Little Leaguer knows "the base runner has the right of way", but in 1880, that was Cap Anson's opinion. Opponent base runners were held and tripped regularly and in plain sight and in nearly every game the big Captain rushed an unqualified umpire with his booming voice and red face "kicking" and "bulldozing" his argument. Soon, every team had a captain vocally proficient. In August of 1884, future Hall-of-Famer Ned Hanlon was replaced as captain of Detroit because a rookie that just made his debut, Frank Cox, had a louder voice.

Anson was also the best long hitter in the National League. The first ten wins of the streak came on the road, the key series a three game set in Worcester to close out that eastern trip. Worcester's Brown Stockings were in second place thanks to a rookie pitcher named Lee Richmond who had started all of Worcester's games and sported a 14-7 record. Richmond had already become the first left-hander in major league history to get ten wins in a season and would finish the year with thirty-two. No one had ever seen such speed from any left-hander, much less one with a low-sidearm delivery. Four days before the start of the first Chicago-Worcester game Richmond pitched the first perfect game in major league history. On top of that he was a college student. He missed two starts to take his final exams at Brown University. Fans were in a frenzy to see him pitch. He was called the first "rookie phenom".

Richmond had graduation services at noon the day of the Chicago opener. The Worcester team paid the railroad extra to have a special train get him to Worcester by game time. It was said no left-hander could him so Anson took no chances. He dropped his lefty swinging lead-off batter, Abner Dalrymple, to the ninth spot in the batting order - and made him bat right-handed. The only other lefty batter, George Gore, was benched despite having an MVP-type year. Dalrymple and Gore had both been practicing batting right-handed for a week. Fred Goldsmith, a pitcher who batted right-handed, took Gore's spot in centerfield. It was a questionable move. "Goldy" dropped two flyballs - one in the fourth inning and one in the sixth - which led to five unearned runs and a 6-5 Worcester lead. But "Goldy" himself tied the game in the eighth with an rbi-single and, after his fourth hit of the game in the tenth inning, scored the winning run when rookie shortstop Tom Burns slapped a single to right. The next day, the holiday "Bunker Hill Day" in New England, Worcester second baseman George Creamer made a bad error to put Chicago four runs up in the first inning. Harry Stovey and Charlie Bennett later slugged Worcester to an eight run comeback before Chicago took that game too. Forty miles south and not to be outdone, Providence's ace pitcher John Ward tossed the second perfect game in major league history.

Richmond was exhausted by the third game, June 19th. Rightfielder Fred Corey actually switched places with Richmond and pitched the third inning for Worcester. Richmond returned in the fourth inning but gave up a triple to Chicago pitcher Larry Corcoran. Corcoran was naturally ambidextrous and nearly always batted lefty, but batted right-handed on this occasion, and his hit ignited an error filled three run rally. Corey relieved Richmond again later in the game but Anson won it for Chicago 8-7 with a rbi-double in the ninth inning.

With a snappy ten game streak to their credit, Chicago came home to two thousand happy fans and creamed the Troy Haymakers three games. These humdrum blowouts highlighted another aspect of Chicago's streak: Chicago was able to avoid injuries while other teams were positively decimated. Without gloves there were split hands and broken fingers every day. Chicago's Frank Flint was a steel handed catcher who rubbed his hands in a secret mixture of lemon juice, alcohol, and rock salt after every game. He had missed just four games in two years. He excelled at a strategy of the time of intentionally dropping a third strike with runners on base. Then he'd pick up the ball and fire it around the horn, often for double plays. In the 3-1 May 20th victory over Cleveland, Flint started a 2-5-4-3 triple play after letting a third strike bounce off the ground with the bases loaded.

Anyway, the Troy Haymakers were without their starting catcher, Bill Holbert. One week earlier a foul tip smashed his antique mask (his "bird cage") and closed shut his right eye. In that same game the skin of reserve catcher Bill Harbidge's hand ripped open. Rushed back into the lineup, Holbert had his thumb broken by a Mickey Welch fastball. Now team captain Bob Ferguson was holding tryouts before every home game for a catcher. In Chicago, Ferguson hired Fred Haley, a fresh-meat nobody from a local team near the ballpark. In game one Welch had to throw all off-speed pitches. With nobody on base Welch could throw the heater but the ball invariably ricocheted off the grandstand. With runners on base Haley threw horrendously and Chicago swept the series outscoring Troy 26-9. Joe Straub, a German immigrant Milwaukeean who spoke no English, was used in game three. Haley did punctuate his short two-game major league career by throwing Cap Anson out at third base on a steal attempt in game one.

With the streak at thirteen, four thousand fans turned out to get a glimpse of Lee Richmond's Chicago debut. Once again Anson scuttled the lineup and had Dalrymple and Gore both bat righty at the bottom of the order. Richmond was able to hold Chicago to only four runs a game for the first two games but received only one run from his offense and Chicago's streak lurched to sixteen. Demoralized in the third game, and losing 8-0 in the fifth inning, Richmond tried to delay the game as rain seemed immanent. He tried to walk Fred Goldsmith but Goldsmith swung and missed at everything. Finally Goldy struck out, but Doc Bushong, the Worcester catcher, took his time retrieving the ball and Goldsmith jogged around the bases with a dropped third strike homerun. Amid booing and hissing, Worcester manager Frank Bancroft ordered his men to finish the game square.

The streak featured only two other close games, both against Providence, the 1879 champions. One was a sixteen inning tie played June 4 (visible on the graph to the left) when the streak was just one win long. The final score was 1-1. Acting Providence manager and pitcher John Ward demanded and received a cessation of play due to "darkness" after Chicago's Ned Williamson led off the seventeenth inning with a triple. Seven times that game Providence runners reached third, yet the Chicago defense, known as the "Stonewall Defense", kept them to one tally. Two times Chicago threw out a runner at the plate including Ward himself in the fourteenth inning. In the sixth Providence tried Harry Wright's old 1869 trick of the delayed double steal. Joe Start, the runner on third, broke for the plate after Emil Gross, the runner on first, got caught off the bag. Start was put out 2-4-2-5. The New York Clipper, probably the best baseball weekly at that time, noted: "Let's see the base ball nines of old try that."

With no Sunday baseball in Chicago until 1892, Monday, July 5th was the scene of the second close game of Chicago's streak in front of a holiday crowd of about nine thousand. Fans circled the field so heavily that the ground rule for balls going into the crowd was a single instead of the usual double. In the top of the eleventh inning Dalrymple pulled one over the fence down the short right-field line for a game winning rbi-double.

Finally, In Cleveland, five days later, Chicago was subdued by Jim McCormick and shut out, 2-0. It was a scoreless duel until the bottom of the ninth inning when Cleveland's superstar rookie Fred Dunlap homered over Gore's head in center field. Although Fred Goldsmith would finish the season with a 28-3 record, two of his three losses included the loss before the streak and the loss that ended the streak.

The adoption of the two-man pitching tandem of Corcoran and Goldsmith from the Springfield, National Association, club is probably the real reason Chicago was able to win so steadily in a year when the opposition was so tough. In July the National Association itself finally folded and the number of major league teams completed its decline from seventeen in 1879 to eight in 1880. Chicago's domination is all the more impressive when you consider that the average level of talent due to contraction was on the increase. On August 6th, Troy debuted the Tim Keefe - Mickey Welch rotation and for 1881 Providence opened the season with something of a three man rotation.

Anson, falsely and routinely credited with inventing the pitching rotation, actually abandoned the practice in 1884 when Goldsmith began to be ineffective. Within weeks Corcoran's arm blew out. In 1885 Anson, with future Hall-of-Famer John Clarkson went back to the one-man staff and won two pennants. The Chicago streak is the only fifteen game winning streak in major league history to occur without the aid of a homerun or with the aid of games against the weakest two teams in the league. The streak generated little notice from sportswriters and opposing teams because five years earlier the Boston National Association team won their first twenty-six games of the year. Ten years earlier, the Cincinnati Red Stockings won, by some accounts, one-hundred consecutive games.