5 Hall of Fame players that were briefly Chicago Cubs

Only a small handful of athletes are Hall of Famers in any given sport, and even a smaller handful of those players stay with the same team their entire career. Especially in baseball. Only 54 players in the Hall of Fame spent their entire careers wearing one uniform. The rest have played with at least one other team.

Sometimes an all-time great will have a brief and even forgettable stint with a team. You get conversations like, “Hey did you remember those 41 games Ken Griffey Jr. played with the White Sox?” There are several Hall of Fame players that had very brief stints with the Chicago Cubs, some of them less than one season’s worth of games. Here are five of those players.

Chicago Cubs: The Philly legend ended his MLB career on Chicago’s North Side.

One of the National League’s very best right-handed hurlers of the 1950s, Robin Roberts is one of the all-time great players in Philadelphia Phillies history. Roberts managed to win 234 games while pitching to a 3.46 ERA, 3.49 FIP, 1.17 WHIP, 1,871 strikeouts and 1.7 BB/9 in 14 seasons with the Phillies. He went on to pitch several years in Baltimore, then in Houston. In July 1966, at age 39, he signed with the Cubs after being released by the Astros week or so prior.

Roberts appeared in just 11 games (nine starts) and pitched to a 6.14 ERA, 1.5 WHIP and 4.23 FIP in 48 1/3 innings. His final MLB appearance came on September 3 in Pittsburgh where he pitched an inning in relief and gave up four runs. In early October he was released by the Cubs and that was it. Roberts finished his career with a 3.41 ERA, 1.17 WHIP, 3.51 FIP and 74.7 fWAR in 676 games.

No doubt this man will always be remembered as a Phillie, through and through. His #36 is retired by the franchise and based on Baseball Reference WAR (bWAR), he is the second-most valuable player in Phillies history behind Mike Schmidt. It is worth noting that the same year he became a Cub, a much younger pitcher from the Phillies also came over to the Cubs. His name was Ferguson Jenkins.

Chicago Cubs: Only three of his career 534 home runs were in a Cubs uniform.

Another Philadelphia legend, Jimmie Fox spent 11 of his 20 MLB seasons with the Philadelphia Athletics. He also spent seven years with the Boston Red Sox. In addition to his 534 home runs, Foxx hit .325/.428/.609 with a 1.038 OPS, 158 wRC+ and was a 101.8 fWAR player in his incredible career. Foxx also was a three-time MVP winner, two-time batting champion, two-time World Series champion and the 1938 Triple Crown winner.

In June 1942 the then 34-year-old slugger was selected off waivers by the Cubs from the Red Sox. Foxx came to Chicago but did not see much action, only appearing in 70 games. He hit .205 with three home runs in 205 at-bats. He was no longer an everyday player in ’42 and he did not play in 1943. He did return to play again with the Cubs in 1944, but he only appeared in 15 games.  Foxx was released in July of 1944 after recording just one hit in 20 ABs.

Foxx ended his career back in Philadelphia, but with the Phillies in 1945. He was just one year shy of being part of the 1945 Cubs pennant-winning team. Had Foxx not had some health issues that resulted in his decline in his early 30s, who knows what more he could have done.

Chicago Cubs: His brief stint with the Cubs came after a stretch on the South Side

Hoyt Wilhelm appeared in 1,070 games in 21 seasons in the majors. He made his debut at age 29 and pitched until he was just shy of his 50th birthday. “Old Sarge” was able to do what he did for so long thanks to his use of the knuckleball. He appeared mostly out of the pen and pitched to a 2.52 ERA, 3.06 FIP, 1,610 strikeout and 228 saves in 2,254.1 innings in his career.

He played for nine different teams and appeared in more games in a White Sox uniform than any other team. He did however return to Chicago briefly in 1970 to play with the Cubs.

In September 1970, Wilhelm was selected off waivers from the Atlanta Braves. He was an NL All Star earlier that season with Atlanta and things were going well for him. Wilhelm with the Cubs appeared in just three games (3.2  innings) and he gave up four earned runs. His career ERA with the Cubs is 9.82. Three of those runs came on a walk-off three-run homer by Mets infielder Wayne Garrett at Shea Stadium.

Wilhelm was traded back to the Braves in November for Hal Breeden. His final MLB season came in 1972 with the Dodgers.

Chicago Cubs: Irvin was going out as Ernie Banks was coming into his own.

Monte Irvin was a star with the Newark Eagles of the Negro Leagues from 1938 through 1948. He hit .333/.402/.524 over that span. A versatile player who for average and decent pop, he made his debut in the MLB at age 30 with the New York Giants in 1949. He played there until 1955 before joining the Cubs via the Rule 5 draft in November of that year.

Irvin was 37 and winding down. Ernie Banks was 25 and just hitting his prime. The two played together in 1956 on a team that ended up losing 94 games. Irvin still put up solid numbers, hitting .271/.346/.460 with 15 home runs in 111 games. That would be the final year of his MLB career.

While his stint with the Cubs might be forgotten by some, others might remember this photo of him above with him alongside Banks and Hank Sauer. A lot of All Star games and three MVP awards combined with those three guys.

As for Irvin, he lived to be 96 and recently passed away in 2016. He lived a very long life and left a great legacy in the game of baseball.

Sadly nobody on this list is still living as they played a long time ago, but they make for great baseball footnotes. All legends who had a brief sting in Cubbie Blue.