Chicago Cubs

The Chicago Cubs are a professional baseball team from Chicago that plays in the National League Central division of Major League Baseball. Their home games are held at Wrigley Field on the city’s North Side. They share Chicago with the American League’s White Sox. Originally called the White Stockings, the franchise was founded in 1870 and remains one of just two original National League clubs from the league’s inaugural 1876 season.

The team has been known as the Chicago Cubs since 1903. Over the club’s history, they have appeared in 11 World Series. In 1906, the Cubs set a modern-era record by winning 116 games (116–36) and posting a winning percentage of .763, but they lost that World Series to the White Sox in six games. The Cubs then won back-to-back World Series titles in 1907 and 1908, becoming the first major league team to play in three consecutive Fall Classics and the first to win two.

More recently, the Cubs won the 2016 National League Championship Series and the 2016 World Series, ending a 71-year pennant drought and a 108-year championship drought—both record dry spells in MLB history. The 108-year wait was also the longest championship drought in any major professional sports league in the United States and Canada. Since divisional play began in 1969, the Cubs have reached the postseason 12 times through the 2025 season. The team is often called “the North Siders,” a nod to Wrigley Field’s location in Chicago, in contrast to the South Side White Sox, who play at Rate Field.

Through 2024, the Cubs have played more games than any other MLB franchise, with an all-time regular season record of ().

The Cubs began in 1870 as the Chicago White Stockings, playing at West Side Grounds. In 1876, they joined the National League as a charter member. Before their NL debut, owner William Hulbert signed star players including pitcher Albert Spalding and infielders Ross Barnes, Deacon White, and Adrian “Cap” Anson. The White Stockings quickly became a top team: Spalding won 47 games, Barnes led the league with a .429 batting average, and Chicago won the first NL pennant, then the sport’s top prize.

After back-to-back pennants in 1880 and 1881, Hulbert died, and Spalding—who had retired from playing to start Spalding sporting goods—took over the club. With Anson as player-manager, the White Stockings won a third straight pennant in 1882, and Anson became the game’s first true superstar. In 1885 and 1886, after winning NL pennants, the White Stockings faced the champions of the short-lived American Association in an early version of the World Series.

Both years they met the St. Louis Brown Stockings: the series tied in 1885, and St. Louis won in 1886. This sparked one of sports’ greatest rivalries. Overall, the Anson-led Chicago club won six NL pennants between 1876 and 1886. By 1890, the team was known as the Chicago Colts, or “Anson’s Colts,” reflecting Cap’s influence.

Anson became the first player to reach 3,000 career hits. In 1897, after a 59–73 record and a ninth-place finish, the club released Anson as both player and manager. His departure after 22 years led local reporters to call the team the “Orphans.”

After the 1900 season, the American Base-Ball League formed as a rival league. The old White Stockings nickname (later shortened to White Sox) was taken by a new American League team to the south. In 1902, Spalding—who had revamped the roster into one of the era’s best—sold the club to Jim Hart. That same year, the Chicago Daily News called the franchise the Cubs, referencing the youth of the roster; the name became official five years later.

During baseball’s dead-ball era, Cubs infielders Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance became famous as a double-play combination thanks to Franklin P. Adams’ poem “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon,” first published in the New York Evening Mail on July 18, 1910. Key pitchers included Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown, Jack Taylor, Ed Reulbach, Jack Pfiester, and Orval Overall. With Chance as player-manager from 1905 to 1912, the Cubs won four pennants and two World Series titles in five years.

Though they lost the 1906 World Series to the “Hitless Wonders” White Sox, they set a record with 116 wins and a .763 winning percentage. With mostly the same roster, Chicago won back-to-back World Series in 1907 and 1908, becoming the first club to play in three straight Fall Classics and the first to win two. The Cubs would not win another World Series until 2016, the longest championship drought in North American professional sports. The next season, veteran catcher Johnny Kling left to play professional pocket billiards.

Some historians believe his absence cost the Cubs a third straight title in 1909, as they finished six games out of first place.