Chicago Cubs: The all-time tournament

A tournament pitting the eight greatest teams in Chicago Cubs history against one another. The format involves seven performance measures.

The history of the Chicago Cubs franchise is not only the longest among major league teams –dating to the founding of the National League in 1876 – it’s also one of the most uneven.

For most of the club’s existence, the Cubs have produced baseball that ranged from bad to dreadful. Just to pick one stretch, between 1947 and 1997 – a span of 51 seasons – Cubs fans enjoyed plus-.500 records only 11 times.

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And although the franchise performance has certainly improved under new ownership – the Cubs have a .504 winning percentage since being purchased by the Ricketts family – it’s also true that the last owner before Tom Ricketts to produce a career winning record was William Wrigley, who died in 1931.

Still on those too-few occasions when the Cubs have been good they have often risen to greatness. For nearly a full century – from 1906 until 2001 – the Cubs held the unchallenged record for most victories in a single season with 116. At .763, that same team still holds the post-1900 record for the highest single-season winning percentage.

That, in turn, means that a hypothetical “tournament” featuring the greatest teams in franchise history still pits some strong entrants against one another. It also encompasses the expanse of professional baseball history in this country.

Among the eight best teams ever to take the field for the Cubs, one did so all the way back in the 1880s – when the team wasn’t even yet known as the Cubs. Yet an equally valid case can be made that the best Cubs team in history represented the North Side just a handful of years ago, during that once-in-a-lifetime 2016 championship season.

What follows is one vision of what an all-time Chicago Cubs franchise tournament might look like.  Each series is decided on the basis of seven criteria: you can think of each as a ‘game.’ Here are the seven:

Game 1: Regular season winning percentage.

Game 2: Post-season winning percentage

Game 3: Team OPS+

Game 4: Team ERA+

Game 5 (if necessary): Team WAR

Game 6 (if necessary): Defensive runs saved or, if unavailable, fielding percentage.

Game 7 (if necessary): Hall of Famers or likely future Hall of Famers.