The 1960 Roster Book

I was able to pick this one up for a very reasonable price. So now my Roster Book / Media Guide collection spans 51 seasons.

This was the spring edition, put out before the season started.



A couple things from these two pages caught my eye....



Billy Williams is listed among the rostered players, but his uniform number is 24.



The number he ended up with, which was eventually retired by the Cubs, was number 26.



Listed among the players with the spring squad was a promising rookie named Ron Santo. The number he is listed with is #17.



Santo would end up with #10.

The 1960 season was one of the last for the National League with 154 games. When expansion came in 1962, the season was extended to 162 games. The 154 game schedule was balanced, with each team playing the others 22 times.



But here is a real oddity, at least as far as I'm concerned. There were five different times during the season when the Cubs had a one game series with a team. They were always on a Monday or Tuesday and three of the five involved the Reds.

The one game series were on April 19 (at STL), May 17 (at PIT), July 25 (home CIN), August 30 (home CIN), and September 13 (at CIN). It just strikes me as very odd that at team would travel to a city for only one game and then move on. I wonder why they did that?

The schedule that I liked the most was the one I knew as a kid, when there were two divisions in the National League, with six teams per division. You played 18 games against your division rivals (90 games total) and 12 against the teams from theother division (72 games). The last month of the season was always against division rivals, meaning a team usually had control of its own destiny.

Here is what the Cubs 1971 schedule looked like.



Check out September.



The Cubs had home and away series against every single Eastern Division team. If you wanted to win the division, you had to have a strong September.

Sadly, the Cubs never did.