Fielder Jones and his Chicago White Sox didn't have a chance, according to the experts.
In the days leading up to the 1906 World Series, the conventional wisdom said the player-manager's team was overmatched.
The crosstown Cubs had won 116 games for a stunning .763 winning percentage. They had gone 44-6 in the season's final 50 games. Nobody could touch them.
Doubts surrounded the light-hitting Sox. Injuries plagued them. In August, the Sox put together a 19-game winning streak. Critics were unimpressed.
"Everybody said it would collapse," wrote Chicago Daily Tribune sportswriter Hugh Fullerton.
On the eve of the Series, the Sporting News referred to the "crippled White Sox" and noted the Cubs pitching staff was better rested. The St. Louis-based publication suggested the outcome was foreordained.
In Chicago, the Cubs were confident.
Player-manager Frank Chance told reporters he might start his second-string pitchers. Outfielder Jimmy Sheckard scoffed at the Sox hurlers. Although they had tossed 32 shutouts, Sheckard said he would bat .400 against them.
"They thought they were just going to walk over the White Sox," David Larson, who researched Jones' career for the Society for American Baseball Research's biography project, told IBD.
Amid all the pregame honk stood a dissenter. Philadelphia A's manager Connie Mack considered Jones one of the best strategists and fiercest competitors in baseball. And the team reflected that fierceness.
"A surprise is in store" for the Cubs, Mack said.
Jones had "unbridled optimism in his team," Richard Lindberg, a Chicago historian who helped rebuild the White Sox archives, told IBD.
Jones had scouted the Cubs. He detected a weakness against good left-hand pitchers and spitball pitchers. The Sox had both.
And they had one savvy manager.
Fielder Allison Jones came by command naturally. Born Aug. 13, 1871, in Shinglehouse, Pa., his parents named him after a great-uncle who led a Union cavalry regiment in the Civil War.
The details of Jones' youth are sketchy, but one of his first jobs was working as a surveyor in western Canada. When a recession hit, he moved to Oregon where his older brother lived.
Jobless, Jones earned a spot on Portland's minor league baseball team. Five years later, Brooklyn drafted him for the big leagues.
As a rookie outfielder for the Dodgers in 1896, he batted .354. Defensively he was exceptional. Statistics analyst Bill James in his book "Win Shares" rated Jones A+ in fielding.
Before Jones' fourth season began, he broke his leg and was never the same. His batting average fell to .274 for the rest of his career.
In 1898, he married Mabel Schaney and ran a general store in the off-season in Bolivar, N.Y.
He had a secret health problem -- a bad heart. Baseball never learned of it, and he refused to let it stop him.
After playing on two straight pennant-winning teams in Brooklyn, Jones joined the White Sox in 1901. Jones made it three in a row. He led the Sox to the American League title with a .412 on-base percentage, second best in the league.
By 1906, Jones had gained a reputation as an innovative manager.
He used his bullpen more than most managers did. He shifted his outfield to match batters. By some accounts, he was among the first to employ the infield wheel on bunts -- having the corner infielders charge in while the others shifted.
He was intelligent. Once in spring training, the players played a trick on him, luring him into a checkers game against a state champion. The joke was on them. Jones beat the champion in two of three games.
"He was extremely competitive in everything he did," his great-granddaughter Sherian Duncan Groce of Portland, Ore., wrote in an e-mail to IBD. "He didn't like to lose."
When Game 1 of the World Series dawned, Jones unveiled a surprise.
Chance sent Three-Finger Brown, his ace, to the mound. Brown led the National League with a dazzling 1.04 earned run average.
Jones was expected to counter with his ace lefty, Doc White.
Instead, Jones handed the ball to Nick Altrock, a sinkerball lefty. Of the four Sox starters, Altrock was third in earned run average, third in winning percentage and fourth in shutouts. And he came through with a 2-1 triumph.
Jones tapped White for Game 2. When the Cubs drilled the off-season dentist, Jones pulled him after three innings.
Yanking an ace that early in the Dead Ball Era "was very unusual," said Larson.
But the move let Jones use White out of the bullpen to save Game 5.
Then Jones turned to White again, starting him in Game 6 against Brown. The Sox knocked Brown out of the game with eight hits in less than two innings while White contained the Cubs for an 8-3 win.
The Sox had clinched the Series, four games to two, in one of the greatest upsets in baseball history.
And Cubs outfielder Sheckard, who had bragged that he would hit .400 off the Sox, went zero for 21 in the six games.
It was Jones' boldness, preparation and strategy that turned an injured, below-.500 team in June into world champions in October.
"I think it was probably the single greatest job of managing in baseball history, and that's going out on a limb," Lindberg said.
Jones left baseball after the 1908 season to develop his timber holdings in Oregon.
He returned to the sport in 1910 to coach Oregon State (then Oregon Agricultural College) to a conference championship.
By 1914, he was back in pro ball, managing the Federal League's St. Louis Terriers. Then he took over the American League's St. Louis Browns in 1916.
Jones quit the Browns in midseason in 1918. His health was declining, but there was another reason. "He knew that the players were throwing ballgames," Larson said.
Despite his outstanding defense as an outfielder, roles in four first-place finishes and the best winning percentage of any White Sox manager, he never received more than 2% of the Hall of Fame vote.
He died March 13, 1934, of heart disease.
Source: Investor's Business Daily
