5 most pulsating pennant race finishes in Chicago Cubs history

Let’s face it Cubs fans: the Brewers aren’t going anywhere. With their weekend sweep of the Dodgers in Los Angeles, Milwaukee has now won 10 straight and moved into a flat tie for first place in the NL Central as of July 21.

Fortunately, the Cubs aren’t going anywhere either. True, their 6-1 loss to Boston on Sunday involved a bullpen meltdown. But the Cubs are still 10-5 this month, and they have held or shared the division lead since April 4.

That all means that we should brace for a fight to the finish, possibly resolving with which team emerges with baseball’s regular season record. The Cubs, Brewers and Tigers are engaged in a fist fight for that distinction, currently.

With the Cubs and Brewers still due to face one another eight times this season, and with both teams having distanced themselves from the division also-rans, it appears almost certain that the division title will go to whichever team can outlast the other down the stretch.

That puts the spotlight on the season-ending weekend of Sept. 26-28, when the Cubs will host the St. Louis Cardinals at Wrigley Field. Ninety miles north of Wrigley, at the same time, the Brewers will host the Cincinnati Reds.

Two-team showdowns such as the one developing between the NL Central co-leaders are rare in Cubs history, but they have happened.

Here’s a look back at five such nail-biting finishes, each of which wasn’t settled until the season’s final series. One word of explanation at the outset: You won’t read anything here about 2016 because that divisional race was a relative runaway. Nor will you be required to relive 1969. Our sole focus here is championship races that came down to the final few games.

5 craziest pennant race finishes in Chicago Cubs history

1908: The Merkle Replay

The events leading up the Cubs’ pennant-clinching 4-2 victory over the New York Giants Oct. 8, 1908 are so deeply etched in baseball history that they hardly need repeating in detail. Those unfamiliar with the particulars of the Merkle Game or its aftermath should read up.

In this space, suffice to say that a rookie Giants first baseman named Fred Merkle failed to run from first to second base on what appeared to be a game-winning hit on Sept. 23 of that season, for which oversight he was declared to have been forced out when Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers retrieved the ball and touched second.

The Giants partisans stormed onto the Polo Grounds playing surface, making it impossible to continue play. The Cubs claimed a forfeit because the Giants couldn’t clear the field, the Giants claimed a victory on the basis that the game ended when the winning run scored, negating the need for Merkle to touch second. The umpires declared it a tie.

At the time, the Giants led the Cubs by six percentage points in the standings. But, the Cubs won eight of their last nine while the Giants went 8-5. By the time the Cubs season finished on Oct. 4, they led New York by a game and a half, the Giants having a three-game home series remaining with sixth-place Boston. The Giants won all three creating a dead-even tie at 98-55. The teams were ordered to settle the matter by replaying the Sept. 23 tie, in effect although not on the record, creating the first ‘playoff’ in major league history.

The Cubs won that game 4-2 with Three Finger Brown defeating Christy Mathewson. Frank Chance had three hits including a double and drove in two runs. The Cubs went on to beat the Detroit Tigers in a five-game World Series, their last world championship until 2016.

To this day, it is possible to get into a quite vigorous argument with Giants fans over whether their team was robbed of that pennant.

1935, Streaks of September

In late August, the defending World Series champion Cardinals ran off a streak of eight consecutive victories to open a narrow lead over the Giants with the Cubs two and one-half games back. In September, the champs turned up the heat, going 17-6 as the league’s four Eastern teams -- New York, Brooklyn, Boston and Philadelphia – visited St. Louis.

That kind of run ought to have opened daylight between the champs and the challenging Cubs, but it did not. At the exact instant that the Cardinals got hot, the Cubs went nuclear. They swept all four Eastern visitors in four-game series by scores adding up to 119-42. The highlight, an 18-14 victory over the Dodgers on Sept. 14 in which Fred Lindstrom and Gabby Hartnett led an 18-hit attack, broke a deadlock with the Cardinals and inched the Cubs into the NL lead.

But, there remained a critical detail, a five-game season ending series between the contenders in St. Louis. Carrying an 18-game winning streak into that series, the Cubs won the opener 1-0 behind the pitching of their ace, Lon Warneke. They made it 20 straight in the pennant-clinching first game of a Friday double-header, then took the second game 5-3 for good measure.

Having run their September streak to 21 straight, the Cubs lost the series final two games, but by then it didn’t matter.

1945: Winning by Losing

The Cubs spent almost all of the 1945 war season near first place, and they finally laid claim to the lead by sweeping a July 8 doubleheader from the Phillies at Shibe Park.

Their most serious challengers were the defending World Series winners, the Cardinals. For the season’s final two and one-half months, the Cubs held off the Cardinals, but they did so in a most unusual way.

Between late August and season’s end, the NL’s two leaders squared off a dozen times, and the Cardinals won nine of those 12 games. That should have given St. Louis an essential edge, and it would have except for one detail. While the Cubs couldn’t beat the Cardinals, the Cardinals couldn’t beat anyone else.

On Aug. 26, the Cardinals completed a three-game sweep of the Cubs at Wrigley to draw within two games of the league lead. Over the next month, however, the Cards managed only a 13-9-1 showing against the NL’s six weaker teams, while the Cubs ran off an 18-6 record against those same six teams. The result: Despite dominating the Cubs down the stretch, the Cardinals came to the season’s final weekend still three games behind in the standings.

The Cards closed at Cincinnati, the Cubs in Pittsburgh. The Cards won their series opener 5-3, but it didn’t matter because Cubs mid-season pickup Hank Borowy beat the Pirates 4-3 to secure the pennant.

2007: Cubs vs. Brewers, part 1

Without a division title since 1989, the Cubs spent much of the summer stalking the Brewers. Milwaukee’s margin hovered between zero and three games for the first half of the summer, but when the Brewers lost a mid-August series to Cincinnati while the Cubs beat St. Louis, Chicago edged in front.

The rivals shared or traded the division lead several times over the next three weeks, the Cubs finally pulling ahead to stay when first inning home runs by Alfonso Soriano and Aramis Ramirez helped Steve Trachsel beat the Astros 6-2.

Over the next two weeks, the Cubs went 10-5, the Brewers only 7-8. On the final Saturday of the regular season, Rich Hill shut out Cincinnati 4-0 to officially eliminate the Brewers and lock up the division title.

2018: Cubs vs. Brewers, part 2

Not all baseball stories have a happy ending. In 2018, the Cubs and Brewers reprised their two-team pennant race of 11 years before, and this time the Brewers emerged on top.

Between mid-May and mid-July, Milwaukee held the division lead. But, on the final weekend before the All-Star break, the Brewers lost five straight in Pittsburgh and the Cubs seized the initiative, moving a game and a half ahead. The Cubs held that lead right into the final weekend, although rarely by comfortable margins.

That final weekend saw the Cubs – leading Milwaukee by one game – at home against the Cardinals while the Brewers hosted Detroit. Both teams won their Friday games, but on Saturday, while the Brewers were again taking down the Tigers 6-5, Miles Mikolas held the Cubs to one run and five hits.

That left divisional matters in a 94-57 dead heat with one game to play, and they were not resolved when the Cubs and Brewers both scored Sunday wins. Although both clubs were assured of a post-season spot, the rules at the time required a one-game playoff at Wrigley Field to determine the NL Central champion.

Lorenzo Cain’s eighth inning single broke a 1-1 tie, Ryan Braun added an insurance run and the Brewers advanced as division champions. The Cubs were shunted into the wild card game against Colorado, and the Rockies won 1-0 only to lose three straight division series games to the Brewers, who in turn lost a seven-game NLCS to the Dodgers.