Schooled on the Series.

• Author: Barrett, Wayne M.
• Position: SPORTS SCENE

"THE 100-DAY PROJECT," celebrating the first 100 days of class, is an annual kindergarten assignment at the elementary school that our children attend. It involves creating a craft or poster adorned with 100 items of the student's choosing. Of course, these types of activities inevitably involve the parents. So, it was with due diligence that I helped our daughter create an image of our house using 100 thumbtacks: our elder son cultivate a meandering vine ripe with 100 (plastic) grapes: and our younger boy concoct 10 construction paper ice cream cones, each replete with 10 M&M's. ("Ten times ten equals 100," he explained, showing an early propensity for math.) Helping the kids is great fun but, by the third time around last fall, I felt ready to prepare--and present--a 100-Day Project of my own. Luckily, my daughter's third-grade teacher knows an overgrown kid when she sees one, and so extended me an (asked-for) invite to speak to her class. The result was "100 World Series Champions," a two-sided poster with a listing of the winners and losers--broken down by franchise and using the appropriate team colors--of the Fall Classic. To my surprise, her young charges seemed quite interested in the subject matter. A few of the boys knew, for instance, that there was no World Series in 1994 because of a players' strike. What they didn't know, however, was that, 90 years prior to the strike, the World Series was cancelled when John McGraw, manager of the National League champion New York Giants, refused to allow his club to play the pennant-winning Boston Pilgrims since he did not consider the five-year-old American League to be a worthy opponent, even though Boston had beaten the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first-ever World Series the year before.

I was sure to inform the class that McGraw eventually would get his comeuppance. Although the Gotham Nine (as some newspapers called the Giants then) would capture the 1905 World Series (defeating the Philadelphia Athletics), both Philly and Boston exacted their revenge when the Giants became the only club in the history of the Senior Circuit to lose the Series three years in a row (1911-12-13)--to the A's and the renamed Red Sox.

The 1912 triumph, earned in the 12th inning of the seventh game, was the first of four that decade for the Bosox, culminating with the oft-cited 1918 title. For the A's--whose nine Series crowns rank second only to the New York Yankees' 26--it was the first of four...