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

by Will, George

  Sandburg helped bring poetry out from the parlor with the white curtains and into the streets that churned up the urban grime that soiled the white curtains that were “white prayers” for gentility in an industrial world:

  Dust and the thundering trucks won—the barrages of the street wheels and the lawless wind took their way—was it five weeks or six the little mother, the new neighbors, battled and then took away the white prayers in the windows?

  Sandburg’s Chicago Poems, published in 1916, the year the Cubs moved into what would come to be called Wrigley Field, contain his most famous lines:

  Hog Butcher for the World,

  Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

  Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler,

  Stormy, husky, brawling,

  City of the Big Shoulders.

  Turning, however, from this celebratory tone, he wrote an indictment that begins:

  They tell me you are wicked and I believe them …

  Then, turning again “to those who sneer at this my city,” at this “tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities,” he says:

  Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

  When Frank Algernon Cowperwood, the cunning protagonist of Theodore Dreiser’s boisterous Chicago novel The Titan, emerges, as he does in the book’s first paragraph, from the Eastern District Penitentiary in Philadelphia, he heads for Chicago, where, Dreiser wrote, thirty railroads terminated, “as though it were the end of the world.” Cowperwood arrived in something made there—a Pullman car produced by the Pullman Palace Car Company of George Mortimer Pullman. He owned the town of Pullman, which has long since been absorbed by Chicago’s sprawl.

  Chicago was just the place for a man with Cowperwood’s high ratio of energy to scruples. As his train approached Chicago, he saw “here and there, a lone working-man’s cottage, the home of some adventurous soul who had planted his bare hut thus far out in order to reap the small but certain advantage that the growth of the city would bring.” “Seething” Chicago, with its “snap,” its “swirling, increasing life,” and its “tang of the future,” convinced Dreiser—as it had convinced Henry Adams at the city’s 1893 Columbian Exposition—that “the world was young here. Life was doing something new.” Adams, as he famously recorded in The Education of Henry Adams, recoiled in dismay from this something new. Cowperwood embraced it. As did Dreiser, who was stirred by Chicago to some seriously overwrought sentences:

  This singing flame of a city, this all America, this poet in chaps and buckskin, this rude, raw Titan.… By its shimmering lake it lay, a king of shreds and patches, a maundering yokel with an epic in its mouth, a tramp, a hobo among cities, with the grip of Caesar in its mind, the dramatic force of Euripides in its soul. A very bard of a city this, singing of high deeds and high hopes, its heavy brogans buried deep in the mire of circumstance.… Here hungry men, raw from the shops and fields, idyls and romances in their minds, builded them an empire crying glory in the mud.

  Good grief. Sandburg was pithier: “Here’s the difference between us and Dante: He wrote a lot about Hell and never saw the place. We’re writing about Chicago after looking the town over.”

  Long before Carl Sandburg called Chicago the city of the big shoulders, it was a city of clenched fists. Today, Wrigley Field is called—it is written on the roof of the visiting team’s dugout—“the Friendly Confines.” In 1914, the year The Titan was published, “friendly” was not the first adjective Chicago called to mind. And of queasy stomachs and an uneasy conscience: When, in 1906, Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle depicted the immigrants’ living and working conditions in and around the stockyards and meatpacking plants on Chicago’s South Side, food safety became a federal issue.

  Chicago was no stranger to the rawest aspects of this process of accommodation. In 1886, in the city’s Haymarket Square, at a rally of fifteen hundred men and women demanding an eight-hour day, a bomb exploded, killing eleven, including seven policemen, and injuring one hundred. Consider the impression Chicago made on an impressionable eighteen-year-old from Morton, Illinois, in 1917, the year after the Cubs moved into Wrigley Field. David Lilienthal would, in his long public career, serve Wisconsin’s Governor Philip La Follette on that state’s public service commission, would serve President Franklin Roosevelt as a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and would serve President Truman as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. The journal he kept throughout his life contains an entry for July 31, 1917, concerning “one of the most disgusting things I have ever witnessed”:

  It had rained violently the day before, and here and there were large puddles of water, which had collected in the low places of the street. Around one of these puddles a large group of men had gathered. I noticed them from a distance—men of all classes, some in Palm Beach suits, others in stylish tailor-mades, and a few messenger boys and errand boys. A cab was standing in the puddle also, so I thought this was what had attracted the crowd. I stepped through the throng and was both surprised and shocked to see what these busy men-of-the-world were watching with such evident enjoyment was but a tiny mouse, swimming around in the pool. Whenever he would struggle to a place of safety—a clump of mud, perhaps—someone would stick out his mahogany cane and throw the poor quivering thing back to its death. When this would happen some portly comfortable-looking son-of-a-gun would shift his cigar and chuckle!

  A toddling town, indeed. And one much in need of some friendly confines. But life in the early twentieth century was still rough and raw. The late Julian Simon, an economist, noted that back then “most people in the United States died of environmental pollution—that is, from infectious diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, and gastroenteritis.” Healthy people—who might more accurately have been said to be relatively and temporarily healthy—took arduous and hazardous treks across the city to jobs where they worked long, hard, and dangerous days. So they seized their pleasures where they could. Beginning in 1914, many came to the ballpark on the North Side.

  The history of the Cubs includes several remarkable continuities. Pat Pieper was the Wrigley Field public address announcer from the year the Cubs began playing there, 1916, until his death in 1974, at age eighty-eight. Yosh Kawano tended to the Cubs’ clubhouse from 1943 through the 2007 season. The Cubs’ story also includes many remarkable oddities.

  The Cubs have been beaten by the Pirates 15–0 (1929) and 22–0 (1975), the latter being the most lopsided shutout in major league history, until matched by the Indians’ 22–0 defeat of the Yankees on August 31, 2004. Although the Cubs won the pennant in 1938, their pitcher Larry French managed to lose nineteen games—almost a third of the team’s sixty-three losses. Lou “the Mad Russian” Novikoff, who played for the wartime Cubs from 1941 through 1944, once tried to steal third with the bases loaded because “I got such a good jump on the pitcher.” On September 13, 1942, shortstop Lennie Merullo committed four errors in one inning. A son was born to him that day, and he named him Boots. Two Cubs catchers, George Mitterwald in 1974 and Barry Foote in 1980, each had a game in which they drove in eight runs. And each ended their respective seasons with just twenty-eight RBIs. On September 1, 1961, another Cubs catcher, Cuno Barragan, hit a home run in his first major league at bat. He never hit another. In one period of eleven years, the Cubs had no twenty-game winners but three twenty-game losers (Bob Rush in 1950, Sam Jones in 1955, and Glen Hobbie in 1960).

  On May 2, 1956, Cubs third baseman Don Hoak tied a major league batting record. Unfortunately, he did it by striking out six times in an extra-inning (seventeen-inning) game. In 1968, Cubs pitcher Bill Hands recorded fourteen consecutive strikeouts. Regrettably, he did this as a batter in consecutive at bats. On September 16, 1972, Cubs second baseman Glenn Beckert set a major league batting record by stranding twelve base runners in a nine-inning game. In each of two innings, the third and the seventh, he stranded four. On August 14, 1979, Cubs
right fielder Mike Vail, trying to throw a runner out at the plate, beaned the batboy. Vail was charged with two errors on the play, one for dropping the ball while fielding it and another for the wild throw that hit the batboy. On June 30, 1979, the Cubs tied a major league record by scoring five runs in the bottom of the eleventh inning. Unfortunately, they lost to the Mets, who had scored six in the top of the inning. Think about that.

  The Cubs have often been jokes, and have given rise to more than a few, such as: What does a female bear taking birth control pills have in common with the World Series? No Cubs. And: For most teams, 0 for 30 is called a calamity. For the Cubs, it is called April. The Cubs’ last World Series victory was in 1908, so in a sense this book is being published in the 106th year of the Cubs’ rebuilding effort. Cub fans like to say that any team can have a bad century, but the Cubs have a winless streak older than its century-old ballpark. Still, there is glory to be found if you look back far enough.

  The Cubs’ pre-Wrigley record was 1,219 wins and 754 losses, a nifty 465 games over .500. The 1906–1910 Cubs had the highest five-season winning percentage (.693) in baseball history. The second highest? The Cubs 1905–1909 (.678). Third highest? The Cubs 1904–1908 (.664). From 1948 through the 96-loss 2013 season, the Cubs have won 4,871 times and lost 5,564 times. Thus from 1948—encompassing Truman’s defeat of Dewey, the Marshall Plan, and the reelection of Chicago’s Barack Obama as president—through 2013, they were 693 games under .500, with a winning percentage of .467.

  So, before the Cubs moved into Wrigley, they were what the New York Yankees were to become: a byword for excellence. But from 1940, when the Cubs had their first losing record (75–79) in fifteen years, through 1966—from before Pearl Harbor, through the Korean War, and during the escalation in Vietnam—the Cubs had just three winning seasons. In the best of them, in 1945, the Cubs won the pennant and took the Tigers to the seventh game of the World Series before losing. It is, however, hard for Cub fans to take much pleasure from this tainted glory because the war had thoroughly depleted major league talent. The Cardinals had dominated the first half of the decade; they won the National League pennant in 1942, 1943, and 1944, and won the 1942 and 1944 World Series. In 1945, however, they lost Stan Musial to the navy. How important was that? When Eddie Sawyer, who managed the Phillies after the war, was asked about the best team he had ever seen, he answered: “Musial.” In 1946, Musial returned and the Cubs came back to earth, winning sixteen fewer games (82–71).

  Since moving into Wrigley Field, the Cubs’ most successful stretch was winning four pennants in ten seasons, from 1929 through 1938. Beginning in 1926, the team finished in what was then called the first division—fourth or better in the eight-team league—in fourteen consecutive seasons, winning ninety or more games in six of them. But from 1916, their first Wrigley Field season, through the 2013 season, their record was 7,478 and 7,833, a winning percentage of .488. They had just thirty-nine seasons with winning records. So, the franchise now called the Cubs had a long and often distinguished history, under various names, before the team moved into Wrigley Field.

  Officially, the Cubs’ story began in the nation’s centennial year of 1876, but the preface to the story was written in 1870, when the White Stockings played a full season in, and won the championship of, a ramshackle league called the National Association of Base Ball Players. (Back then, “baseball” was still two words.) The White Stockings did not play in 1872 and 1873, because the city was still recovering from the fire supposedly caused by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking over the lantern. In 1876, however, Chicago pretty much invented what has become Major League Baseball.

  In his book Wrigleyville: A Magical History Tour of the Chicago Cubs, Peter Golenbock, a versatile sportswriter with a flair for oral history, notes that Chicago gave the world such socially transformative developments as the skyscraper, the refrigerated railroad car, the meatpacking plant, and, when Richard Warren Sears met Alvah Curtis Roebuck in Chicago, the mail-order store. Chicago also pioneered the first professional baseball league. This was a start-up by a good ballplayer who was an even better entrepreneur.

  Albert Goodwill Spalding, who did not always live up to his middle name, hailed from Rockford, Illinois, ninety miles west of Chicago. He broke Boston’s heart by exercising a right he would be instrumental in denying to other players for another century. “Boston is mourning,” reported a Boston newspaper on July 24, 1875. “Like Rachel weeping for her children, she refuses to be comforted because the famous baseball nine, the perennial champion, the city’s most cherished possession, has been captured by Chicago.” Spalding and three other members of the Boston Red Stockings had behaved as what would later be called “free agents,” selling their services to the buyer they preferred.

  William Hulbert, a Chicago coal merchant who also was president of the White Stockings, was, like his city, on the rebound and on the make. A Chicago chauvinist, he often said, “I’d rather be a lamppost in Chicago than a millionaire in any other city.” He laid down the law to Spalding: “You’ve no business playing in Boston, you’re a Western boy and you belong right here.” As Peter Levine writes in A. G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball, Bostonians denounced the “dirty quartet of seceders”—a stinging epithet just a decade after Appomattox—but Spalding never looked back. In 1878, he became secretary of the White Stockings and four years later was the team’s owner and president.

  The constitution Spalding drafted for a new league, the National League, which began in 1876, did not include a reserve clause binding each player to his team until the team chose to trade or release him. But such a clause was added four years later. This denial of a fundamental right—the right to sell one’s labor to the highest bidder—would not be rectified for a century, until in 1975 an arbitrator overturned the reserve clause. In 1876, Spalding poached from Philadelphia the first great star of what would become the Cubs, Adrian “Cap” Anson, who played for Chicago for twenty-two years and is in the Hall of Fame. Which is in Cooperstown, New York, because Spalding, who was not always fastidious about facts, fabricated the myth—announced in the 1908 Spalding Guide—that young Abner Doubleday invented baseball there one summer day in 1839 in Farmer Finney’s pasture.

  In 1876, Chicago’s White Stockings, the mighty genesis of the Cubs, won the first National League pennant. Never one to let grass grow under his feet, Spalding retired as a player and began selling sporting goods. “One of his less successful ideas,” Golenbock notes, “was that there be a different-colored uniform for each position. It was a brilliant suggestion for a man selling uniforms.” That was not all Spalding sold. He became the official publisher of various official baseball guides, including the National League Guide. They contained all the official rules of baseball, one of which was that all league games had to use Spalding baseballs.

  You might say that the Cubs franchise peaked a little early: Led by Cap Anson, the White Stockings won pennants in 1880, 1881, 1882, 1885, and 1886. He was called Cap Anson because there was altogether too much of his real name, which was Adrian Constantine Anson, an homage to two Michigan towns where his father spent, we can assume, a happy childhood. Anson was the first major leaguer to collect more than 3,000 hits (3,418), including two home runs on his last day, at age forty-five. Anson’s adamant opposition to allow African Americans to compete was important in establishing the uncodified but real agreement that Major League Baseball would be for white players only. It is, therefore, particularly satisfying that the most popular player ever to call Wrigley Field home is a black man, Ernie Banks.

  In 1882, the American Association was formed to compete with the National League, which it did by allowing something the National League forbade: the sale of beer in the ballparks. Chicago had a particular flair for sin, which worried Spalding. An 1889 editorial in the Spalding Guide said, “The two great obstacles in the way of success of the majority of professional ball players are wine and women. The saloon and the brothel are the evils of baseball at the pr
esent day.” Golenbock notes that Chicago’s shopping center for dissipations was a neighborhood called the Levee because southern gamblers were influential there: “Within the borders of a few blocks there were more than 200 brothels.”

  There are those who argue that because lights came late to Wrigley Field, and because the number of night games is still limited by a city ordinance, the performance of Cubs players has suffered. This is so because they have had too much time in the evenings to play in Wrigleyville’s bars or, for decades, downtown on Rush Street. But long before any ballpark had lights, Spalding decided to have the Cubs do their spring training in Hot Springs, Arkansas, to cure the effects of “winter lushing.” Or as one reporter put it, “to boil out the alcohol microbes.” This was pursuant to Spalding’s insistence that baseball exemplify “American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness; American Dash, Discipline, Determination; American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm; American Pluck, Persistency, Performance; American Spirit, Sagacity, Success; American Vim, Vigor, Virility.”

  “Can play now.” Indeed. (photo credit 1.2)

  Another short-lived rival of the National League was the Players’ League, which included the Chicago Onions. That’s an off-putting name—even worse than the Cleveland Spiders—but it’s justified, sort of, by the fact that the name Chicago derives from a Native American word for a wild onion. Spalding solved this problem of a competitor team by buying 60 percent of it, which got him a ballpark and some players he melded with the White Stockings. Under the, shall we say, relaxed rules of the day, Spalding simultaneously owned stock in another White Stockings rival, the New York Giants.