This newsletter is slowly traveling through the Best 50. That’s my list of history’s 50 greatest ballclubs, as ranked by my new book, Baseball’s Best (and Worst) Teams. Today’s story focuses on No. 11, the 1925 Pittsburgh Pirates.
Here’s a quick boilerplate explanation that I’m appending to every story in this series:
I compiled the Best 50 by analyzing 2,544 major-league teams from 1903 to 2024. Those clubs have been ranked by their team scores (TS), which are plotted on a 100-point scale. (A given club’s all-time percentile is the percentage of the other 2,543 teams that it outperformed.)
See my book for an explanation of my TS calculations. The book also offers separate breakdowns of the best and worst clubs for every decade and franchise, comprehensive profiles of the Best 50 (including position-by-position lineups and much more information than you’ll find in this newsletter), and similar summaries of the 10 worst teams of all time.
Now on to today’s profile.
-
Team: 1925 Pittsburgh Pirates
-
Team score: 90.381 points
-
All-time rank: 11 of 2,544
-
All-time percentile: 99.61%
-
Season record: 95-58 (.621)
-
Season position: First place in National League
-
Final status: World champion
The Pirates hadn’t won a National League pennant since 1909, yet they were constantly in the hunt during the early 1920s. They finished fewer than nine games behind each year’s leader from 1921 to 1924, whittling the margin to three in the latter season.
The breakthrough finally came in 1925, though it was far from smooth. Pittsburgh stumbled badly out of the gate, dropping nine games behind first-place New York by May 21. But the Pirates abruptly sprang to life, winning 26 of their next 36 games to tie the Giants atop the standings at the end of June.
Offensive firepower was the key to Pittsburgh’s revival. The Pirates scored double-digit runs on seven occasions during their 36-game streak. Seven of their eight position players finished the season with batting averages above .300 — the laggard hit .298 — and four Pirates drove home more than 100 runs.
Pittsburgh cruised with a 56-33 record over the season’s final three months, outdistancing the Giants by 8.5 games.
Get the complete lowdown on the 50 greatest (and 10 weakest) clubs of all time
The smart money favored Washington in 1925’s World Series, and why not? The Nationals were the defending champs, and their pitching staff was clearly superior to the Pirates’ rotation. The first four games confirmed the expectations, with Washington outscoring Pittsburgh 14-7 and jumping to a lead of three games to one.
But the Pirates followed their regular-season template. They rallied from adversity to force a Game Seven, which was staged in a persistent rainstorm. “The spectators could scarcely see the ball through the curtain of misty rain, and the outfielders were mere outlines, vague and shadowy,” wrote Damon Runyon.
A pair of eighth-inning doubles secured Pittsburgh’s 9-7 victory. Pinch hitter Carson Bigbee tied the game at 7-7, then right fielder Kiki Cuyler drove home the two winning runs. “This hit will go into history as one of the outstanding markers in the progress of the diamond game,” exulted the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times.
A new installment will arrive in your email each Tuesday and Friday morning
Historians refer to Pittsburgh’s 1925 right fielder as Kiki Cuyler, though contemporaries generally called him by his given name. “The clean-living, good-natured Hazen Cuyler,” as a local newspaper dubbed him, was a line-drive machine who burst into the majors with 165 hits and a.354 average in his rookie season of 1924. He somehow improved those impressive stats to 220 and .357 in ’25.
Thirty-five-year-old Max Carey had been playing for the Pirates since 1910, yet he remained the club’s speedster at his advanced age. The center fielder batted .343 and led the National League with 46 stolen bases.
The mainstays on the left side of Pittsburgh’s infield — shortstop Glenn Wright and third baseman Pie Traynor — combined for 227 RBIs and solid glovework. Wright snagged a liner on May 7, then quickly stepped on second base and tagged an oncoming runner for an unassisted triple play. “That was one of the easiest plays I ever made. I couldn’t help it,” he said. Traynor set an NL fielding record in 1925 for double plays by a third baseman. The mark would stand for 25 years.
The Pirates topped the NL in most offensive statistics in 1925 — notably with a team batting average of .307 — but their pitching staff was not of the same high quality. The ace was Lee Meadows, an 11-year veteran who set a personal record with 19 wins. Meadows would be remembered as the first big-league player in the 20th century to wear glasses on the field.