The Chicago Cubs are in town for a first-place Central Division showdown with the Cardinals. It’s the Cubs’ first visit of the 100th season since their last World Series win.

As the Cubs and their fans are no doubt tired of hearing, it’s a record of futility unsurpassed in the annals of the national pastime.

The Cardinals also mark a centennial, one lesser known but still sobering: The 2008 season is the 100th anniversary of the losingest team (49-105) in modern (post-1900) franchise history.

Those 1908 Birds were the last Cardinals team to lose 100 games.

By some lights, 1908 was the greatest season in the baseball history. Fortune magazine editor Cait Murphy argues so in her estimable book, “Crazy ‘08,” a colorful and incisive account of arresting pennant races, hi-jinx on and off the field and legendary heroics by baseball greats.

The Cardinals have an unhappy and unfamiliar role in this epoch: They were doormats on a titanic scale.

In a recent e-mail exchange, Ms. Murphy told us: “How bad were the Cardinals in 1908? They scored only 371 runs the entire season, a record that will surely never be broken. Their best pitcher lost 25 games, even though his ERA was 2.03. They finished 50 games out of first place.”

She added, “The Cubs had Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. The Cards had O’Rourke-to-Gilbert-to-Konetchy.”

The Cubs, meanwhile, waltzed their way to a third-straight World Series appearance, where they racked up a second-straight win over Ty Cobb and his Detroit Tigers.

The 1908 Cubs were one of the most dominant teams in baseball history. Since then?

Well, you could look it up. The Baby Bears and their fans have suffered 99 seasons of frustration, while Redbird rooters have seen 17 World Series appearance — and 10 wins — since hitting bottom in 1908.

But Cards and Cub fans have more in common than those raw statistics would suggest. After occupying the cellar in 1908, another 18 years would pass before the Cardinals won their first pennant. And there have been other dry spells as well; Cardinals’ teams have moldered Series-less for decades at a time — the 1950s, 1970s, 1990s.

And while the Cubs still are waiting for another World Series win, with no appearances in the Fall Classic since 1945, they still have a winning record against the Cardinals.

In Chicago, the names Jenkins, Banks, Williams, Santo and Sandberg are as glorious as Musial, Flood, Gibson, Smith and Pujols are here — for good reason. And then there’s Harry Caray, Lou Brock and Bruce Sutter, Hall-of-Famers with pedigrees shared by the two teams.

The fact is, the different post-season fortunes of the two clubs has mattered not a whit to the intensity of their rivalry, nor to hopes and dreams of their fans. The explanation for that may lie in another centennial celebrated this year.

In 1908, the legend goes, a Tin Pan Alley lyricist named Jack Norworth was riding a New York subway train when he saw a sign reading, “Baseball Today — Polo Grounds.” He dashed off a lyric that was set to music by a fellow named Albert Von Tilzer.

Norworth then handed it his wife, Nora Bayes, to sing. It became a sensation and, during the seventh-inning stretch, still expresses what the true Cards and Cubs fan wants most. It starts like this:

Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd. . . .

(The photo above depicts Robison Field, home to the St. Louis Cardinals from 1893 to 1920. It was situated at Natural Bridge Rd. and Vandeventer Ave.)