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

by Will, George

  By the time Spalding retired, in 1902, his team had a new owner, Jim Hart, and needed a new name. The team had been called the Colts, or Anson’s Colts, until Anson’s twenty-two years with the team ended. After his retirement, some newspapers had begun referring to the team as the Orphans. Because Hart signed so many young players, the team was briefly called the Spuds. This nomenclature chaos had to stop, but the team could not go back to being the White Stockings, because in 1902 the American League was formed and the name was grabbed by the team on Chicago’s South Side. According to Golenbock, at about this time a group of Chicagoans recommended finding a name that would suggest “bear-like strength and a playful disposition.” And one newspaper’s sports editor began substituting “Cubs” for “Orphans” and “Spuds.”

  Soon the Cubs were generating big headlines. Beginning in 1904, the team had a future Hall of Fame pitcher, Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown. He’d earned his nickname the hard way, by a common nineteenth-century hazard: an accident with a farm implement. The culprit was a corn shredder, against which Brown harbored no grudge: After his baseball career ended, he ran a service station in Terre Haute, Indiana, where customers could gaze upon the shredder while their gas tanks filled. Even though his shredded hand was his pitching hand, he had seasons with 26, 20, 29, 27, 25, and 21 victories.

  The anchor of the team was first baseman Frank Chance. At six feet and 188 pounds—the size of a small middle infielder today—he was, in his day, an imposing figure. At second base was Johnny Evers, the shortstop was Joe Tinker, and the two detested each other because of a dispute about a taxi fare. On September 13, 1905, in an exhibition game played in Bedford, Indiana, spectators were startled to see a fistfight erupt between Tinker and Evers near second base. The Cubs had dressed for the game at their hotel, and Evers had jumped into a hack and headed for the ballpark, leaving Tinker and others to fend for themselves. This led to the fight, which led, the next day, to them agreeing not to speak to each other. They played together, in sullen silence, for seven more seasons. According to one of baseball’s durable myths, they played magically well together, so well that their proficiency at turning double plays became the subject of a famous and god-awful poem, “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon,” published in the July 18, 1910, edition of the New York Evening Mail:

  These are the saddest of possible words:

  “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

  Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,

  “Tinker and Evers and Chance”

  Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

  Making a Giant hit into a double—

  Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble:

  “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

  The poem was written by a reporter with a presidential name, Franklin Pierce Adams, whose editor needed something to fill space. Largely, one suspects, because of this poem, there is space in the Hall of Fame filled, unjustly, by bronze plaques for Tinker and Evers. Their career batting averages, .262 and .270, are rather low for non-pitchers who are in the Hall of Fame without sparkling power-hitting or defensive credentials.

  Facts, those stubborn things, prick the bubble of the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance fable. In their seasons of greatest Cubs success, 1906–1909, their double play totals were 8, 7, 8, and 6, for a less than grand four-year total of 29 and an average of 7.25 per season. In the 2012 season, the thirty major league teams averaged 142 double plays. The Cubs, while losing 101 games, still “turned two” 148 times.

  The 1906 West Side Cubs—or Spuds, as some writers still called them—won 116 games in a 155-game season. From the beginning of August through the end of the season they were an absurd 50 and 8 (with one tie), including winning streaks of 11, 12, and 14 games. The 116 wins are still the major league record, even though the seasons have been 162 games since 1961. The 1954 Cleveland Indians hold the American League record for the most wins in a 154-game season, with 111. The 2001 Seattle Mariners won 116 in a 162-game season. All of which suggest that the 1906 Cubs’ .763 winning percentage may be one of baseball’s most durable records.

  The 1906 American League pennant was won by the White Sox, as the White Stockings were beginning to be called. That year they were also called the “Hitless Wonders,” having finished last in their league in hits, home runs, and batting average (.230). Chicago is a city of ethnic enclaves, and the World Series not only pitted the Cubs against the White Sox but the Germans against the Irish. Golenbock says the Germans favored the Cubs, who had players named Schulte, Sheckard, Steinfeldt, Reulbach, Pfiester, Hofman, and Kling. The Irish supported the Sox, with players named Walsh, Donahue, O’Neill, Dougherty, and Sullivan. The White Sox won the Series, 4 games to 2.

  In 1907, the Cubs again won the National League pennant, helped by twenty-three wins by a melodiously named pitcher, Orval Overall, from a California town named, of course, Farmersville. The Cubs swept the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. In 1908, they won another pennant and again trounced the Tigers, this time in five games, becoming the first team to win consecutive championships. In 1908, the year “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” was first sung, no one suspected that more than a century would pass without the Cubs winning a third title.

  The next season, in a harbinger of things to come, their catcher, Johnny Kling, abandoned baseball to become a professional billiards player. Remarkably, the Cubs won 104 games but finished second, behind the Pirates, who won 110. Soon the Cubs were shedding some expensive players, and players throughout the major leagues were becoming resentful and restless because their salaries were kept low by the lack of negotiating leverage, which was the result of the reserve clause. This gave rise to a rival league, the Federal League, which signed many American League and National League players, including Joe Tinker and Mordecai Brown.

  Charles Weeghman, who owned a slew of Chicago lunch restaurants, owned Chicago’s Federal League team for the two years, 1914 and 1915, before the league collapsed. His midwestern team, on the shores of Lake Michigan and a long way from salt water, was named, perhaps whimsically, the Whales. It won the 1915 Federal League pennant. Encouraged by the Whales’ success and looking to the future, Weeghman had built, on the land purchased from Chicago Theological Lutheran Seminary, a $250,000 ballpark at the corner of Clark and Addison Streets. However, the Federal League had no future and failed after the 1915 season. Before the 1916 season, before the corpse of the Federal League was cold, Weeghman bought an interest in the Cubs and moved them from the West Side Grounds to Weeghman Park, which seated sixteen thousand.

  1915: Horses and horseless carriages. (photo credit 1.3)

  Weeghman had some interesting friends. One of his partners in his early days as a Cubs owner was oilman Harry F. Sinclair, who had been an organizer of the Federal League. In 1922, Albert B. Fall, the secretary of the interior in the administration of President Warren G. Harding, leased to Mammoth Oil Company, one of Sinclair’s subsidiaries, the exclusive right to develop the oil and gas reserves near Casper, Wyoming, beneath a geological formation known as Teapot Dome. The lease was granted without competitive bidding, a fact that seemed suspiciously related to Sinclair’s generous contributions to Harding’s 1920 campaign. Before the dust settled from the many investigations, both Sinclair and Fall went to prison.

  Another of Weeghman’s colorful friends was Arnold Rothstein, a New York gambler. He was widely suspected of being the mastermind behind the Black Sox scandal—the fixing of the 1919 World Series, in which the heavily favored White Sox lost to the Cincinnati Reds. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, are having lunch in a restaurant with a Meyer Wolfsheim, whom Fitzgerald, perhaps reflecting the anti-Semitism of his time, describes as eating “with ferocious delicacy” and wearing cuff links made of what Wolfsheim calls the “finest specimens of human molars.” When Wolfsheim leaves the table, Gatsby tells Carraway, “He’s the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919.” Carraway muses:

 
The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people—with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

  Actually, a remarkable amount about the Black Sox scandal remains speculation, but undoubtedly baseball back then was entangled with unsavory people and practices from the world of gambling. In Rothstein: The Life, Times and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series, David Pietrusza makes it clear that Rothstein—certainly Fitzgerald’s model for Wolfsheim—was intimately involved with the shady dealings of Charles Stoneham, a New York financier and gambler and the owner of the New York Giants. Meyer Lansky, a founding father of organized crime in America, was a young associate of Rothstein’s. Lansky was the model for Hyman Roth, the gangster who in The Godfather: Part II tells Michael Corleone, “I loved baseball ever since Rothstein fixed the World Series in 1919.” Such facts are discordant with the narrative of Wrigley Field as a sonnet of sweetness and light. But they underscore this truth: At the time, baseball was a rough business and not as fastidious as it should have been about the company it kept.

  This was so even before the front row of the box seats at Wrigley Field was occupied by an unsavory fan from the South Side, Al Capone. When Bill Veeck Jr. was a student at Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, he was summoned home by the news that his father, then president of the Cubs, was ill with incurable leukemia. In his 1962 memoir, Veeck as in Wreck, Bill Jr. wrote, “I was determined that he would go out in some comfort and some style,” drinking champagne. And Bill knew that the best of this drink could be acquired by someone who had spent happy afternoons in Wrigley Field:

  I hurried to Al Capone’s headquarters at the Hotel Metropole and told him what I wanted, and why. “Kid,” he said, “I’ll send a case of champagne right over.” The case was there when I got back. Every morning during these last few days of my father’s life, a case of imported champagne was delivered to the door. The last nourishment that passed between my daddy’s lips on this earth was Al Capone’s champagne.

  When Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of baseball, objected to Cubs chatting up Al Capone when he sat in a front row box seat, Gabby Hartnett, a longtime Cub player and manager, supposedly said, “If you don’t want me to talk to the big fellow, Judge, why don’t you tell him yourself?” This looks like one of those suspiciously perfect quotes that journalists refer to as “too good to check.”

  Hartnett was what Chicagoans back then called “an old-neighborhood guy,” by which they meant he never stopped being approachable. If you invited him to dinner, he was apt to come. It was in response to such a dinner invitation that Hartnett met his future wife. Roberts Ehrgott, in Mr. Wrigley’s Ball Club: Chicago and the Cubs During the Jazz Age, reports that when Hartnett was invited to a high school prom, he went. The student who invited him had made his acquaintance when Hartnett visited the baseball team’s practice at St. Cyril High School, where he knew the football coach. During the practice Hartnett peeled off his jacket and hit some fly balls to the team. One of the adolescents shagging flies was James Farrell, who in the 1930s would publish the Studs Lonigan trilogy: Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, and Judgment Day. These deeply depressing novels of ethnic strife, family tensions, and material hardship on Chicago’s South Side during the Depression tell the story of a young man struggling, and failing, to cope with life. But the author of these dark stories of naturalism and realism knew how to light up a prom.

  Golenbock says that under Weeghman in 1916, the Cubs became the first team to adopt the policy of allowing fans to keep balls batted into the stands. This concern for improving the fans’ ballpark experience would become the defining aspect of the Cubs’ ownership under another Chicago businessman who in 1916 also bought a portion of the team’s shares. He was a chewing-gum magnate named William Wrigley.

  Wrigley arrived in Chicago with his net worth—thirty-two dollars—in his wallet and lived to build the Wrigley Building, the first major office building north of the Chicago River, at the southern end of what now is known as Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile. In every fiber of his being, Wrigley was a promoter. Wrigley’s father made soap, which William was on the road selling, from a wagon drawn by a four-horse team with jangling bells on its harness, as he said, “before I was thirteen.” He gave purchasers of his soap samples of free baking soda—until there was more demand for the baking soda than for the soap. Then he began selling the baking soda and giving customers free chewing gum—until demand for the chewing gum became so strong that Wrigley decided to manufacture and sell it. And to promote it with expensive advertising campaigns.

  Wrigley was excessively fond of saying, “Baseball is too much of a sport to be a business and too much of a business to be a sport.” To be sure, the Supreme Court, in a dotty opinion written in 1922 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, had secured Major League Baseball’s exemption from antitrust regulation by declaring that baseball is not a business engaged in interstate commerce. But as the late Jim Murray, a sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times, said, “If baseball is not a business, then General Motors is a sport.” Baseball has always been a business, and one that punishes owners who treat it instead as a hobby.

  In the 1920s, when Chicago’s population grew 25 percent, two-thirds of the city’s residents had been born abroad or were the children of parents who had been. For this polyglot city with so many newcomers, baseball—rooting for the home team in your new hometown—was part of the Americanization process. Learning to talk baseball was part of the catechism of the civic religion. In Chicago, the language of baseball could be learned by listening to the radio.

  Today, when the word “connectivity” describes life in a world in which everything is instantly available to everyone everywhere on portable devices, it is impossible to recapture the magic of radio in the 1920s, when a hotel could claim to be truly posh if it provided a radio in every room. For rural Americans, radio ameliorated the loneliness of empty spaces. For urban Americans, many of whom were not long separated from rural roots, radio assuaged another kind of loneliness: the anonymity of crowds. Listeners to particular programs became members of consumption communities, which were electronic neighborhoods of shared experiences, information, and diversions. This was particularly so for urban women tending to households before the postwar influx of women into the workforce during and after the Second World War.

  The first radio broadcast of a major league game was produced by Pittsburgh’s KDKA in 1921 during the Pirates pennant race with the Giants. In Cincinnati, a radio station broadcast the first game of the 1924 season. Radio stations were multiplying rapidly, from 382 in 1922 to 681 in 1927. The number of radios in use in America rose from 60,000 in 1922 to 1.5 million in 1923 to 3 million in 1924 to 16.6 million in 1932. Stations were ravenous for content, and Chicago stations had, in William Wrigley, a businessman with hundreds of hours of content he was eager to supply without charge.

  When Wrigley decided to give away Cubs baseball to Chicago radio stations, the stations decided the price was right. “By mid-1929,” Ehrgott writes, “most major Chicago stations had made Cub home games their staple, effectively eliminating afternoon alternatives from Chicago airwaves seventy-seven afternoons a year.” The fact that the stations were not interested in paying the costs of broadcasting away games indicates that they were more attracted by free content than they were convinced that a large audience was eager for baseball. But the audience was growing, and not just in the city. One farmer within range of a Chicago station wrote a thank-you note to the Cubs: “Don’t stop it. I have a radio in the field with me. I plow one turn, sit down for a cool drink out of the jug and listen to the score. It’s grand.”

  The 1920s also saw the birth of ballyhoo and the manufacturing of celebrity. This was
a result of the interrelated burgeoning of radio, tabloid journalism, advertising, public relations, and sports superstars like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange, Bill Tilden, and Man o’ War. The age of celebrity was both cause and effect of the most socially transformative technologies of the 1920s: radio and cinema. About radio, William Wrigley was ahead of his time. Most baseball owners saw radio as a threat, fearing that it would cause people to follow the team from the comfort of their couches rather than the grandstands of the home field. Wrigley the chewing-gum marketer saw radio as a way to whet fans’ appetites for a day at the ballpark. His policy about broadcasts was: The more the merrier. At one point, five different stations were carrying home games. One of the play-by-play announcers was a very young Russ Hodges. The career he started in Wrigley Field would have its most memorable moment in New York’s Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951, when he was working for the Giants. Bobby Thomson’s pennant-winning home run—“the shot heard ’round the world”—elicited from him the most famous home-run call in baseball history: “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

  In 1927, the year Ruth electrified the nation by hitting sixty home runs in American League ballparks, the Cubs became the first National League team to pull more than a million fans into their park. In the 1920s, Americans generally, and Chicagoans especially, had an insatiable appetite for sports. This was dramatized on the city’s lakefront in 1927 when more—many more, according to some reports—than one hundred thousand spectators poured into Soldier Field, then just three years old, for the heavyweight fight between champion Gene Tunney and former champion Jack Dempsey. Not all those at ringside with Al Capone were locals. Among the luminaries who were there to see, or be seen, were Bernard Baruch, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Princess Xenia of Russia, and American royalty in the form of captains of industry.