I will come back and edit this again as I wrote it while taking a synthetic morphine as I recover from the surgery on my quad tendon. Yesterday was tough--once the block wore off, I was in pain. Today hasn't been quite as bad, but every time I try to back off on meds, the pain goes up... between the meds and an ice machine that keeps cool water on my leg, I am making it.
George F. Will, A Nice
Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (New York: Crown Archetype, 2014), 223 pages including a bibliography, index and a few photos.
Baseball is as encrusted with clichés as old ships are with
barnacles.
-George Will
(page 105)
Watching a
baseball game at Wrigley’s Field is a delight.
In
2011, I took the train from Michigan to Chicago, then took the Red
Line out to Wrigley Field to watch the Houston Astros beat the Chicago
Cubs. I was rooting for the Cubs and
would have liked to have seen them win, but those who go to watch baseball at
Wrigley’s attend mostly for the experience. “People go to museums of fine art
to see the paintings, not the frames that display them,” Will writes. “Many people do, however, decide to go to
Chicago Cubs games because they are played within this lovely frame… It is
frequently noted that Wrigley’s Field is lovelier than the baseball that is
played on the field.” (13). This leads
to all kinds of jokes about the Cubs: “What
does a female bear taking birth control pills have in common with the World Series,”
someone will ask. “No Cubs.” Or, “for most teams, 0-30 is called a
calamity. For the Cubs, it is called April.
(29) The old ballpark turned 100 years
old in 2014 and George Will, who grew up in Illinois and is a Cub fan, wrote a history
of the park to celebrate the event and to explore why people love the Cubs and
Wrigley’s Field. As Will notes early in
the book, "Reason rarely regulates love." (11) And with the Cubs, it’s all about love as
their attendance is the least sensitive to performance in all baseball. (134) People come whether or not they are
winning. Ironically, their attendance is
four times more sensitive to beer prices than performance which is why only two
teams (the Pirates and Diamondbacks) have cheaper beer. (136)
The Cubs are an
old organization and at one time (pre-Wrigley’s Field) they were a
powerhouse. In the 1880s, with Cap
Anson, they had many championships. It’s
just that they’ve had a bad century, winning their last World Series in 1908. Will gives the history of the team that was
first known as the Chicago White Stockings and under the leadership of Albert
Goodwill Spaulding (baseball’s first entrepreneur) helped invent Major League
Baseball. (31). Goodyear published yearly “Spalding Guides” to Major League
Baseball. In his 1908 edition, Goodyear (who Will noted “was not always
fastidious about facts”) created the myth of Abner Doubleday inventing baseball
in the summer of 1939 in Farmer Finney’s pasture in Cooperstown, NY. (33) After being known as the White Stockings, the
team went by a number of names (Colts, Orphans and Spuds). In 1902, after the creation of the American League,
there was another team in Chicago that was using the name “White Sox’s,” so
they looked for a new name and decided on Cubs as it represented bear-like
strength with a playful disposition. (36)
Another interesting fact that Will provides: The American League was founded in 1882 and
its main difference at the time was it allowed beer sale at ball games. (34)
In 1914, the Cubs
built their new stadium with the home plate at the corner of Addison and Clark Streets
at the site of a former Lutheran Seminary. (20)
Ironically, Addison Street was named for Dr. Thomas Addison, who
identified "Addison anemia," providing more comic material for the
Cubs. (15) Two years later, William Wrigley,
who had made his fortune with chewing gum, brought into the Cub organization.
(45). Wrigley was a promoter who was fond of saying, "Baseball is too much
of a sport to be a business and too much of a business to be a sport. (46) His was the first club to allow people to
keep balls that were hit into the stands and unlike other teams, who saw radio
broadcast as a threat, he allowed stations to broadcast the games free of
charge. (47-48). He reached out to women and built a strong
female fan base. Under his family
leadership, the motto was if the team was bad, “strive mightily to improve the
ballpark.” (87) The Wrigley’s tried to
create a ballpark for the whole family and would advertise for people to come
out and have a picnic. The joke was that
the other team often did. (83)
Will goes into
detail about the Cub’s 1932 World Series loss to the Yankees and the game when
Babe Ruth “called the shot” before he hit a home run over center field. As he notes, it probably didn’t happen the
way it has been portrayed. Ruth, and the
Yankees, were upset with the Cubs over a player (Mark Koenig) they’d traded
from the Yankees late in the season. The
team decided that Koenig would only get ½ of a share of the World’s Series
proceeds for the team since he didn’t play all year for them. This increased the tension between the teams
and most likely Ruth’s pointing the bat at the Cub’s dugout. The game was also interesting because of who
were in the stands. Franklin Roosevelt
was there (just 38 days before being elected President along with a 12 year old
boy (John Paul Stevens) who would go on to be a Supreme Court Justice. (55-6)
Will tells many
other stories about the Cubs and the field.
This includes providing the background to the book and movie, The Natural. (65-67); how Jack Ruby was
a vendor at Wrigley’s before moving to Texas where he shot Lee Harvey Oswald
(90); of Ray Kroc selling paper cups to Wrigley’s before starting McDonalds
(91); and Ronald Reagan broadcasting Cub games in Iowa via teletype. (93).
Wrigley’s field
was the last major league ballpark to install lights. Will notes that one of the reason was the
local bars, who liked day games so that the fans would stop off at the bar for
drinks and food after the game was over.
It is also one of the few stadiums to hold on to the organ and to shun
more electronic means of music and scoreboards. Other topics that Will covered included race
relations and baseball in Chicago. Some
of the earlier leaders of the team were racists, which is ironic since the most
famous Cub was Ernie Banks, an African-American. Another famous Cub was Manager Leo Durocher,
known for saying “nice guys finish last.”
This is another myth that Will shatters, noting that Durocher was
speaking of the Giants and said, “All nice guys. They’ll finish last” and journals “improved
on his quote.” (108) He also noted that
Durocher didn’t like Ernie Banks. “You
could say about Ernie that he never remembered a sign or forgot a newspaperman’s
name,” Durocher said. (112)
The last part of
the book is mostly philosophical as Will explores the role tribalism plays into
our love of sports, the beauty of which “is its absence of meaning.” (188)
I don’t always
agree with George Will’s politics, but I share a love of baseball and enjoyed
reading this book. I had picked it up a
few months ago and it was just what I needed as my concentration was greatly
reduced due to my torn quad tendon. If
you don’t mind Will’s myth-busting, you’ll find this book to be a gem.
