No Chance: '39 Yankees and '06 Cubs Dominated the Scoreboard

Through Sunday, the Oakland Athletics have scored an average of two runs more per game than their game opponents. With still over 60 percent of the schedule yet to be played, the A's are very unlikely to sustain that pace. Should that happen, however, they would be in the close-in suburbs of the exclusive neighborhood of the three teams in baseball history--the 1939 New York Yankees, the 1927 Yankees and the 1906 Chicago Cubs--that most dominated the scoring in their games.

No Chance: '39 Yankees and '06 Cubs Dominated the Scoreboard

Although they were "only" 106-45 that year, many baseball historians and researchers consider the 1939 Yankees as having had the greatest single season of any team in major league history, and not the far-more-famous 110-win 1927 Yankees (the team with the Babe and his 60 home runs and Gehrig) or the far-more-recently-famous 1998 Yankees (winners of 125 games including the post-season and featuring the incomparable Jeter and Rivera in their youth). Giving up just 556 runs, the '39 Yankees were not just the only American League team that season to allow fewer than 600 base runners to cross the plate against them, they were the only AL team to allow fewer than 700. (The Indians gave up exactly 700 runs.) With outstanding pitching and defense--particularly up the middle--the Yankees led the league in complete games, shutouts, saves, lowest on-base percentage and batting average against them, not to mention earned run average. And despite the completely unexpected loss of Lou Gehrig, who was forced from the line-up very early in the season with amyotrophic lateral schlerosis, the Yankees led the league in scoring with 967 runs--9 percent more than the runner-up (in both the standings and in scoring) Red Sox.

All told, the 1939 New York Yankees scored a phenomenal 411 runs more than their game opponents, an average of 2.7 runs per game. They won 41 of their 106 games by a blowout margin of five runs or more. The closest any major league team came to the Yankees in outscoring their opponents were the National League pennant-winning Cincinnati Reds, who scored an average of 1.1 run per game more than they gave up. The Cleveland Indians were the closest any American League team came to the Yankees in run differential, outscoring their opponents by just .63 runs per game. The more famous 1927 Yankees, for comparison, averaged 2.4 runs per game more than their opponents--the second highest per-game scoring advantage in modern major league history. But only two other times in the ten years Ruth and Gehrig started together in the Yankees' Murderers' Row did the Bronx Bombers even approach outscoring their opponents by two runs per game--in 1931 (at 1.98) and in 1932 (at 1.8).

The 1939 Yankees were the bravura final act of the most dominant four-year stretch in baseball history, averaging 103 wins per the 154-game schedule since 1936. They had won four straight pennants, all of them so decisively that the AL races were effectively over by September. They dominated every facet of the game. In all four of those years they were first in the league in scoring. In all four of those years they also led the league in fewest runs allowed. In 1936 the Yankees outscored their game opponents by 334 runs, in 1937 by 308 runs, in 1938 by 256 runs. From 1936 to 1939, the Yankees scored 51 percent more runs than they surrendered, averaging 2.1 runs per game more than their opponents. And they won four straight World Series, during which they outscored their National League opponents by 61 runs in 19 games, a 3.2-to-1 per-game scoring advantage.

A third-of-a-century before, in 1906, the Chicago Cubs led the National League in scoring with 704 runs--substantially more than the 625 runs scored by the runner-up  Giants--and in allowing only 381 runs against them, 89 fewer than the Pirates. Their favorable run differential of 323 runs meant they outscored their game opponents by 85 percent, an even higher percentage than the 74 percent more runs scored by the 1939 Yankees, and in fact the highest percentage in modern baseball history. Because this was the dead ball era, however, and there were 25 percent fewer runs scored in 1906 by the same number of major league teams playing the same-length schedule, the '06 Cubs averaging 2.1 runs per game more than they surrendered pales in comparison to the '39 Yankees' 2.7 runs-per-game average.

The achievements of the 116-win 1906 Chicago Cubs are sometimes diminished by virtue of their playing in the dead ball era. The fact that they were heavily favored to crush the cross-town Hitless Wonders White Sox in the World Series but fell to them relatively meekly in six games certainly did not help the '06 Cubs' reputation. From 1906 to 1910 the Cubs made the case for being the most dominant team in National League history over any five-year period. They won four pennants in five years, averaging 107 wins per 154-game schedule; the only season they won fewer than 100 was in 1908 when they missed by one; with exceptional pitching and defense (Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance, anyone?) they gave up the fewest runs in the league four times in those five years; and although they led the league in scoring only once, they were a close second the four others years, 1907-10. All told, the Cubs averaged 1.45 runs per game more than their game opponents over those five years, again a pale comparison to the 1936-39 Yankees.

Major league baseball has not lacked for great teams in single seasons or teams that were dominant in their league over five or more seasons since the Second World War. At the same time, however, the disparity in player-talent level has narrowed, which means the competitive gap between the dominant teams since then and the rest of the league has also narrowed; even the worst teams are not as bad relative to the rest of the league as was the case for most of the first half of the 20th century. And changes in game strategy and roster makeup, particularly increasing reliance on relief pitching leading to greater specialization in bullpens, have greatly diminished the possibility of any team dominating the scoreboard in the way the 1939 Yankees and 1906 Cubs did, let alone the extent to which those teams did over four or five years.

Of the most recent "dynastic" teams, only the 1998 Yankees, who led the league in scoring and fewest runs allowed, have approached a 2-to-1 advantage in runs per game, with their scoring differential of 309 runs amounting to 1.9 runs per game more than their game opponents. Last year, the World Series champion Red Sox outscored their game opponents by 1.2 runs per game and the National League pennant-winning Cardinals outscored theirs by 1.15 runs per game.

Four Teams / Two Months / No Consecutive Losses

Before losing back-to-back games for the first time since June 20 and 21, the Dodgers went nearly two months without consecutive losses.  Four teams that did play at least two months without losing two in a row--the 1906 Cubs, 1911 Athletics, 1931 Athletics, and 1938 Yankees--were all at the start or in the middle of dynastic seasons.

Four Teams / Two Months / No Consecutive Losses

Precisely because major league baseball seasons are so long, even the most dominant teams in history endure a slump or two on their way to a pennant-race romp.  More impressive, perhaps, than long winning streaks are when clubs can sustain a level of performance excellence where they are virtually unbeatable for an extended portion of the baseball season, and even then back-to-back losses are not unusual.  On their way to setting an AL-record (since broken) 114 wins in 1998, for example, the Yankees' longest winning streak was 10 games, and they endured stretches of four losses in five games, six in eight (including a four-game losing streak), and eight losses in twelve games (including two three-game losing streaks).  The 110-win Ruth-Gehrig Yankees of 1927, who never spent a day out of first place, lost seven of thirteen games in one stretch and had a four-game losing streak in another.  Neither team went even a month without enduring back-to-back losses.

But four teams that were at the heart of dynasties by measure of winning successive pennants by decisive margins, excelling in all facets of the game, and dominating their league were virtually unbeatable for consecutive months.  One of the most impressive winning stretches was by the 1938 Yankees--the only one of Manager Joe McCarthy's seven pennant-winners with either Gehrig or DiMaggio (or both) on the roster not to win 100 games; they won 99.  (McCarthy's 1943 pennant-winning Yankees won 98 games, but Gehrig was tragically gone and DiMaggio and a host of his teammates were in the service in the first season that World War II had a big impact on major league rosters.)  Favored with obviously superior talent, the McCarthy Yankees almost every season went on an impressive summer surge to put a stake through the hopes of would-be contenders for the American League pennant.

The 1938 Yankees, however, actually found themselves in the midst of a real pennant race with Cleveland and Boston through July.  But from June 23 through August 30, the Yankees won 54 of 67 games (.806) to open up a 15-game lead, never once losing more than one game at a time.  You read right:  for more than two months that year--68 days to be precise--the longest losing streak the Yankees endured was one game--13 times.  The Yankees did not lose consecutive games again until the last day of August and the first day of September.  For the season, the Yankees outscored their opponents by 36 percent (scoring an average of 6.2 runs-per-game to their opponents' 4.5), but during the 68 games they played between June 23 and August 30 (one of which ended in a tie), the Yankees scored 77 percent more runs than they surrendered (528 to 299) for an average score of 7.8 to 4.4.  Twenty-six of their 54 wins were by blowout margins of five runs or more, including all nine games of a winning streak from June 25 to July 4, and in 21 of their victories they held the opposing team to two runs or less, including five shutouts.

The team that interrupted the earlier Ruth-Gehrig Yankees' reign of terror with three consecutive run-away pennants from 1929 to 1931 was the Philadelphia Athletics.  Connie Mack's second dynasty (not to be confused with his first from 1910 to 1914) had each of their pennants essentially secured by the beginning of August.  In 1929, the Athletics won 39 of their first 50 games (.780)--never losing more than one at a time--between the start of the season on April 17 and June 15, before enduring their first two-game losing streak just two days shy of two months.  In 1931, after opening the season with five losses in their first seven games, the Athletics went two full months without losing consecutive games, posting a 41-8 (.837) record from April 22 to June 23, including 17 in a row in May.  That two-month stretch, however, left Philadelphia only 2-1/2 games ahead of the Washington Nationals, and it wasn't until 17 wins in 18 games from the middle to the end of July that Mack's men put the pennant out of reach for Washington, not to mention McCarthy's Yankees.  With stellar pitching and the most imposing line-up any side of New York's, the Athletics outscored their opponents by a phenomenal 80 percent (323 to 179) during that two month stretch in 1931.

Baseball's two earliest dynasties of the modern era--the 1906-10 Chicago Cubs and 1910-14 Philadelphia Athletics, both winners of four pennants in five years--also had one of their teams go at least two months without consecutive losses.  In 1911, defending their American League title from the previous season, the Athletics found themselves 2-1/2 games down on August 1 after losing two straight to the first-place Tigers, but followed up with a 39-14 (.736) record from August 2 to October 3 to assume a commanding 12-1/2 game lead before they next lost back-to-back games.  Although never losing two in a row during that stretch, the Athletics were not quite as unbeatable as the other teams discussed here; in a stretch of 22 games extending from August 10 to September 4, Philadelphia was only 13-9, never winning more than three in a row (even if all their losses were singletons).

The most impressive two-month stretch belongs to the 1906 Cubs, who kickstarted their dynasty with a major league-record 116 wins, getting better as the season went on.  After losing consecutive games on July 22 and 23, before which they had not lost two in a row in more than seven weeks since being swept in a May 30 double-header, the 1906 Cubs were in first place with a superb 61-28 (.685) record, on pace to win 105 but only four games ahead of the keeping-up Pittsburgh Pirates.  From July 24 to the end of the season on October 7, however, the unstoppable Cubs lost only eight games, never more than one at a time, while winning 55 (.873) to establish the highest single-season winning percentage (.763) of any team in modern baseball history.  They did not lose two in a row again until the worst possible time--Games 5 and 6 to the White Sox in the only all-Chicago World Series to date.

Including their back-to-back losses in July, Manager Frank Chance's "peerless" Cubs went 88-21 (.807) after their double-header loss on May 30.  Like Mack's second Athletics dynasty and McCarthy's continuance of the Yankee dynasty, the Cubs excelled in every aspect of the game; they certainly had better defense than the Athletics and arguably better defense than the Yankees.  In the final 76 days of the season, during which they played 64 games (the final one ending in a tie) and suffered only eight losses, the Cubs scored more than two-and-a-third times as many runs (308 to 129) as their opponents, and nearly a third of their opponents' runs (32 percent) came in the eight games the Cubs lost.  (On the season, they outscored their opponents by 84 percent.)  The Cubs won 104 or more games in three of the next four years, and 99 in 1908--the year of the "Merkle Game"--when they finished out the season winning 41 of their final 51 (.804), never losing more than one at a time, between August 17 and the tacked-on-to-the-end-of-the-season Merkle Make-Up Game on October 8.

Did teams like the 1951 New York Giants that had spectacular runs allowing them to overcome significant deficits to win the pennant or their division title typically do so without enduring back-to-back losses?  That will be the subject of my next posting.