A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred

Copyright © 2014 by George F. Will

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

Text credits appear on
this page
.
Photo credits appear on
this page
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Will, George F.
A nice little place on the North Side : Wrigley Field at one hundred /
George F. Will.
pages cm
1. Wrigley Field (Chicago, Ill.)—History. 2. Chicago Cubs (Baseball team)—History. I. Title.
GV417.W75W55 2014
796.357068773′11—dc23
2013036084

ISBN 978-0-385-34931-4
eBook ISBN 978-0-385-34932-1

Ivy illustration by Fred Haynes
Cover photograph: Victoria Will

v3.1

TO BUD

AND SUE SELIG

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

First Page

Notes

Bibliography

Text Credits

Photo Credits

About the Author

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
—CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI

Acknowledgments

My assistant Sarah Walton is She Who Must Be Obeyed, not because she is imperious but because she is infallible. Helping with the preparation of this book has quickened her interest in baseball but diminished her affection for the Chicago Cubs. A good exchange. Todd Shaw, my research assistant, brought to the elimination of errors in this book a perfectionism rarely seen on the diamond at Wrigley Field.

On June 20, 1941, the poet Robert Frost, then sixty-seven, recited for the first time in public his poem “The Lesson for Today.” Its last line is perhaps his most famous:

I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Frost died in 1963, and this line is carved on the headstone of his grave in Bennington, Vermont. My lover’s quarrel is less spacious than Frost’s. Mine is with the Chicago National League Ball Club. The world is what it is and has been very good to me. The Cubs, however, are another matter. They have been generally disappointing and often annoying for most of my life, which began forty-seven days before Frost announced his quarrel. Why, then, have I, like many millions of similarly vexed and irritated fans, continued to love this team? There are, no doubt, many reasons. Or, because reason rarely regulates love, let us say there are many factors that explain the durability of my affection, and that of others, for the Cubs. Surely the most important ingredient in the chemistry of this peculiar loyalty is the place where the team has played its home games for a century. Wrigley Field really is a nice little place. Granted, few people would care about it if the Cubs
did not play there. But a lot fewer people would care about the Cubs if they did not play there. What follows is a short stroll through the braided histories of the place and the team, both of which are facets of one of America’s singular cities. I will begin with my beginning.

I was born on Sunday morning, May 4, 1941, in Champaign, Illinois. The
Chicago Tribune
that morning reported that on Saturday the Cubs had been “characteristically docile” through the first five innings while losing to the Brooklyn Dodgers, 4–3, in Ebbets Field. On Sunday the Cubs crossed the East River and lost to the New York Giants, 9–4. It was their third loss in a row. Had I been paying attention then, this book might not have been written. But one thing led to another, as things have a way of doing, and in 1948, when I was still not as discerning as one should be when making life-shaping decisions, I became a Cub fan. The Catholic Church thinks seven-year-olds have reached an age of reasoning. The church might want to rethink that.

The 1948 Cubs may have been the worst squad in the history of the franchise, finishing in eighth place—which in those days was last place—and 27½ games out of first. The dreadful team inspired a Norman Rockwell cover on the September 4
Saturday Evening Post
. Titled
The Dugout
, it featured a dejected and embarrassed Cubs dugout, behind which fans jeered. Their well-named manager was Charlie Grimm. He was, however, known as “Jolly Cholly” Grimm because he was so cheerful. Why was he?

On August 30, 1948, the Cubs’ owner, Philip K. Wrigley,
ran an ad in the
Tribune
, which thirty-three years later would buy the Cubs from Wrigley’s estate, to apologize for the team.
The ad told the unvarnished truth: “This year’s rebuilding job has been a flop.” You might say that. The last-place Cubs’ record was 64–90. The 1940s, my first decade, was the first losing decade the Cubs ever had. Since then, the Cubs have not had a winning decade. Since May 4, 1941, and through the 2013 season, they have lost 693 more games than they have won. What could compensate Cub fans for such a performance on the field? The field. Wrigley Field. This little book is about a little space. It is not, regardless of what some unhinged enthusiasts say, a sacred space. Wrigley Field’s footprint on a city block is a tad smaller than that of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The enthusiasts think the ballpark is a kind of cathedral, and that Wrigley Field is to baseball what Rome is, or was once said to be, to religion: All roads lead there, or should.

This book is, in a sense, about a frame around a picture. The point of Wrigley Field is to display baseball games. People go to museums of fine art to see the paintings, not the frames that display them. Few people admire the pedestal more than the statue. Many people do, however, decide to go to Chicago Cubs games because they are played within this lovely frame. And just as a frame can serve, or be inappropriate for, a particular painting, ballparks can display ball games well or poorly. It is frequently noted that Wrigley Field is lovelier than the baseball often played on the field. It is a hypothesis of this book that the ballpark is part cause and part symptom of the Cubs’ dysfunctional
performance. How can this high-quality building be partly responsible for the low quality of what has gone on in it? Read on.

The story of the ballpark is braided with the story of the baseball team, and of a city. The ballpark has not been merely a passive ingredient in the Cubs’ story. It has shaped what it has framed. And if
architecture is inhabited sculpture, Wrigley Field has shaped the scores of millions who have, episodically and briefly, inhabited it. Ernest Dimnet was a French abbé who frequently traveled and lectured in the United States. His business was soul, and he said: “
Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.” This is perhaps especially true of architecture that does not set out to work upon the soul—architecture that is unself-consciously utilitarian, as Wrigley Field is. It has been well said that architecture exists not for the structure itself but for the space the structure creates by enclosing it. The space Wrigley Field encloses—the playing field—created Wrigley Field. Because space dictated the configuration of the building, it can be said that baseball built it. Which is why people care about the corner of Clark and Addison Streets.

The home plate entrance to Wrigley is at that corner.
Clark, along the third-base side of the ballpark, is named for General George Rogers Clark, the son of Virginia landowners, who at age twenty went west in search of land and adventure, finding much of both. He distinguished himself in the Revolutionary War by projecting the new nation’s power into what became the Northwest Territory, including the state of Illinois.

A highlight of the Cubs’ first year at Clark and Addison. (
photo credit 1.1
)

It is known that, but not why, Addison Street, along the first-base side of Wrigley Field, is named for Dr. Thomas Addison of Guy’s Hospital in London. He identified a form of anemia that now bears his name—Addisonian anemia. Please, let there be no tart remarks about the appropriateness, over the last half century, of the Cubs being associated with the anemic. Additionally, Addison’s anemia is not Addison’s disease, which afflicted John F. Kennedy.

Balls hit over the right-field wall land on Sheffield Avenue, named for Joseph E. Sheffield, a go-getter who, like many who made the Northwest Territory prosper, came from New England—from Connecticut. In the 1830s, he started a farm and nursery and bought some of the land
that became the Lincoln Park neighborhood on the North Side, about halfway between what now is the Loop to the south and Wrigley Field to the north. But the basis of Sheffield’s wealth was the business that made Chicago boom: railroads. Sheffield was a founder of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad and a builder of the New Haven and Northampton Railroad back in Connecticut. By 1914, many railroads were bringing people, and the produce of the prairies, to Chicago.

Balls hit over Wrigley Field’s left-field wall land on Waveland Avenue. This name was chosen by Sheffield, the developer and subdivider, because on stormy days some of his land on the portion of the avenue near Lake Michigan was inundated.

There are no waves in central Illinois. There the land is flat, so some people consider the vistas dull. But, then, there are those who consider baseball dull, and as sportscaster Red Barber once said, baseball is dull only to dull minds. The highest hill in Champaign County is not much more than a pitcher’s mound, but it’s quite high enough. The vast spaces of America’s Great Plains are well configured for endless baseball diamonds, with foul lines extending to far horizons. Thanks to the slow work of glaciers over many millennia, much of the land of central Illinois is astonishingly
black, fertile, and valuable. It is also heavy, and for the first farmers who settled there, it was very difficult to plow. But in the 1830s, in the village of Grand Detour, a young blacksmith took up the challenge of designing a self-scouring steel plow to turn the heavy soil. He succeeded, and today his name is on big green machines all over the world: John Deere. And on little green machines, like the riding mowers that trim suburban lawns. And urban infields and outfields.