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

by Will, George

  Between 1925 and 1929, when many stations were broadcasting Cubs home games, Cubs attendance surged 140 percent. In 1929, the year in which the stock market crashed, fifteen days after the Philadelphia Athletics beat the Cubs in the fifth and final game of the World Series, the Cubs’ home attendance was 1,485,166. This was more than any major league team would draw until the Depression and the Second World War were over, more than the Cubs would draw while winning the 1945 pennant (1,036,386), and more than they would draw until the almost-magic year of 1969 (1,674,993).

  In the 1929 Labor Day doubleheader, a morning and then an afternoon game, with the Cubs charging separate admissions, an estimated 81,000 fans packed Wrigley Field, probably the largest number of fans to visit a ballpark on a single day until 82,871 flocked to Cleveland Municipal Stadium—“the Mistake on the Lake”—for an Indians-Athletics doubleheader on June 20, 1948. On April 9, 1993, the Colorado Rockies, an expansion team, drew 80,227 to its first home game, which was played in Mile High Stadium, then the home of the NFL Denver Broncos. All of which was almost equal to the St. Louis Browns’ home attendance for the entire 1935 season: 80,922.

  For the 1929 World Series, the Cubs’ management enlarged Wrigley’s seating capacity by adding 8,000 bleacher seats, looming halfway across Waveland and Sheffield Avenues. The Cubs also packed Wrigley Field by putting spectators on the field. Ehrgott reports that during the 1920s, “one of every four National League customers passed through Mr. Wrigley’s turnstiles.” And this was before Mr. Wrigley’s ballpark had a second deck. The right-field bleachers were “a country fair–style structure of scaffolding and planks whose first row met the playing field behind a cyclone fence only 320 feet from home plate.” On weekends, up to 4,000 customers—as many as some major league teams were putting in their seats on normal days—watched the Cubs not from the seats, which were full, but standing on the outfield grass, behind ropes held by the Andy Frain ushers, resplendent in their blue-and-gold uniforms.

  One benefit for these standing-room spectators was that they could chat with the outfielders. And they could give the Cubs a home field advantage: When the visiting team hit a long fly ball, the fans would move back, pulling the rope with them, thereby expanding the field of play for the benefit of the Cubs’ outfielders. And when the Cubs hit a fly ball close to the rope line, the crowd would surge forward a few feet, turning a probable out into a home run.

  One of William Wrigley’s better ideas—it illustrated his flair for promoting his products—was to give away admission to Wrigley Field to hundreds of thousands of people every year. The idea was Ladies’ Day, announced in newspaper advertisements like this one:

  LADIES’ DAY

  Mothers

  Daughters

  Sisters

  Wives

  Grandmothers

  You are again to be the invited guests of the Chicago National League Ball Club.

  It’s official Ladies’ Day at the prettiest baseball grounds in the world.

  ADMISSION FREE

  The number of women who were admitted free in the 1920s and early 1930s probably did, as Ehrgott says, exceed some teams’ paid attendance each season. In 1930, the twelve Ladies’ Days drew 240,000 women, many dressed to the nines in hats and fine frocks. Those who had to stand behind ropes in the outfield, the grandstand being full to overflowing, could feel their heels sinking into the turf. That year, the St. Louis Browns’ season attendance was 152,088; the Pirates drew 357,795; and the Reds, 386,727.

  “I spend $1.5 million a year for advertising,” Wrigley explained. “I manufacture chewing gum and give samples away to the public. I own a ball club in the National League and I give away samples of baseball.” Recipients of free samples developed a taste for both products. The Cubs estimated that on Sundays, when the team drew its largest crowds and women paid, like everyone else, 35 percent of the fans were female.

  On Friday, June 27, 1929, approximately 30,000 women showed up for free admission, leaving room for only about 15,000 paying customers. After that, the Cubs limited Ladies’ Day tickets to 17,500.

  But the Cubs still ran ads in the Tribune saying, “The Chicago National League Club wants every woman to acquaint herself with the joys and thrills of baseball.” Some ads offered reassurance to the timid: “You don’t need an escort.”

  There were, however, occasions when people needed protection from the ladies, who could be disorderly in their rush for admission to the ballpark and for choice seats. Wrigley, who said, “It is easier to control a crowd of 100,000 men than of 10,000 women,” told this story: “One Friday, shortly after the gates were open, and there were 45,000 spectators inside and thousands outside, an usher came upon a little old woman who was crying. He assured her that he would find her a seat somewhere. ‘I don’t want a seat,’ she sobbed. ‘I want to get out. I came to visit my daughter, who lives near here. Before I knew it I was caught in this terrible mob and swept inside.’ ”

  Which is why a Chicago newspaper ran the following doggerel:

  I saw a wounded baseball fan tottering down the street,

  Encased in bandages and tape, and bruised from head to feet;

  And as I called the ambulance, I heard the poor guy say:

  “I bought a seat in Wrigley Field, but it was ladies’ day.”

  In July 1926, the Chicago Tribune carried this little item:

  WHIPPED FOR STAYING OUT LATE, GIRL RUNS AWAY

  Violet Popovich, 15 years old, 4516 E. Harrison Street, was whipped for going to a movie with a boy and staying out late last Sunday night. Monday she ran away from home and yesterday the Fillmore Street police were asked to find her.

  Violet ran away from home—such as it may have been; she spent much of her childhood in an orphanage—at age fifteen. At seventeen, when she started calling herself Violet Valli, she became a dancer in a chorus line. At eighteen, she married. And along the way she became rather too interested in the Cubs. Or at least some of them. And some ballplayers who were not Cubs. Ehrgott found that a Chicago paper had reported that before she met Billy Jurges, Valli had been “friendly” with at least one other major league player, one with a Cubs uniform in his future: Leo Durocher, then a Cincinnati Reds infielder.

  When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel that added fuel to the slavery controversy, he supposedly (this comes from Stowe family lore) addressed her as “the little lady who started the big war.” Violet Valli was the spark that lit the fuse that led to the most famous event in the history of Wrigley Field, an event that almost certainly did not happen.

  Leo Durocher: Nice guys need not apply. (photo credit 1.4)

  Not that that matters. The fact is that most baseball fans believe that Babe Ruth actually hit a “called shot” during the 1932 World Series. So it is part of the ballpark’s story, even though no one will ever really know whether Ruth pointed to designate the spot in the center-field bleachers where, a moment later, he hit the pitch thrown by the Cubs’ Charlie Root.

  Ruth hits the “called shot.” Or not. (photo credit 1.5)

  A good tutor about this episode is Leigh Montville, who, in his 2006 biography, The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth, begins the story with “Violet (What I Did for Love) Valli—the Most Talked About Woman in Chicago.” That is how she was billed during her scheduled twenty-two-week vaudeville show. In 1932, she was twenty-one and smitten with Billy Jurges, twenty-four, the Cubs’ shortstop. His affections may once, or occasionally, have been as ardent for her as hers were for him, but his were decidedly less constant.

  So on July 6, 1932, Violet, packing a .25-caliber revolver, went to the room at the Hotel Carlos where Jurges lived during the season. Having written a farewell note telling her brother that “life without Billy isn’t worth living,” she intended to kill Billy and then herself. Jurges admitted her to his room, and when she began to execute her plan, he disarmed her, but not before taking two bullets: one in the ribs, the other in a han
d. He and she, together for one last time, were rushed to the same hospital.

  The judge presiding over a dispute about possession of some inconvenient letters between Valli and Jurges—and perhaps another Cubs star—made clear his judicial priorities: “I want to keep this case under my jurisdiction to prevent embarrassment to the Cubs so that their chances of winning the pennant will not be harmed. I don’t want this thing to worry Jurges.”

  The Cubs had another worry: They needed a shortstop without a bullet wound. So they signed Mark Koenig. He had played that position five years earlier on what many people consider the best team in baseball history, the 1927 Yankees. He had hit a triple and scored when Ruth hit his sixtieth home run. Koenig had been released by the Tigers in the spring of 1932 and was playing for the San Francisco Seals when the Cubs called. He promptly joined the team, and his .353 batting average for the Cubs helped them win the pennant by four games over the Pirates.

  But before the World Series began, the Cubs’ players voted on the distribution of the team’s World Series payout and awarded Koenig only a half share. The winner’s share of the 1932 World Series would turn out to be $5,231.77, and each of the losers would get $4,244.60. Koenig’s former teammates on the Yankees were not amused, and they expressed their (somewhat opportunistic) indignation in what used to be called “bench jockeying.” Ruth, exuberant in most things, was especially so in excoriating the Cubs as cheapskates. Ruth did this even though there was no love lost between him and Koenig; Ruth had grappled with the shortstop in a clubhouse fight when Koenig made a disparaging remark about Ruth’s new wife, Claire.

  The Cubs, Montville writes, responded to the Yankees’ insults “with questions about [Ruth’s] parentage, his increasing weight, his racial features, his sexual preferences, and whatever else they could invent.” In the rough-and-tumble world of baseball back then, the word “nigger” was bandied about casually. “It was,” says Montville correctly, “all familiar baseball stuff for the time, but with an exaggerated edge.”

  The Yankees won the first two games, in New York, and arrived at Wrigley Field for Game 3 to see a strong wind blowing out toward right field. In the top of the first inning, with two runners on, and after two lemons had been thrown at him from the stands, Ruth homered off Charlie Root. In the third, Ruth flied out to deep right center. In the fifth, with the score 4–4, the bases empty, and Root still on the mound, Ruth took a first pitch for a called strike. Then, Montville writes, Ruth looked toward the Cubs’ dugout and “put up one finger, as if to say, ‘That’s just one strike.’ ” Ruth might have been responding to a Cubs pitcher, Guy Bush, who was standing on the top step of the dugout. After Root threw two pitches that were called balls, Ruth took a second called strike and this time held up two fingers. “He then pointed,” says Montville. “Where he pointed is a question, but legend has it that he pointed to dead center field.” What we do know, and perhaps all that we know for sure, is this from Montville:

  Cubs catcher Gabby Hartnett later said that Ruth said, “It only takes one to hit.” [Lou] Gehrig, in the on-deck circle, said Ruth said to Root, “I’m going to knock the next one down your goddamned throat.” A pair of 16mm home movies discovered more than half a century later seemed to indicate that Ruth might have pointed at the Cubs bench and at Bush rather than dead center field (maybe Ruth wanted to knock the ball down Bush’s goddamned throat?), but both films were taken from angles that left room for doubt.

  Be that as it may, Ruth hit Root’s next pitch, a slow curve, up into the wind and out of the park between the center-field scoreboard and the right-field bleachers. Montville says that as Ruth rounded third in front of the Cubs’ dugout, he held up four fingers: Four bases? Four games? Gehrig knocked Root’s next pitch out of the park, and the Yankees won Game 3, 7–5. The next day they completed their sweep, 13–6.

  Only one reporter among the throng of newspaperman at the game said in his story that before Root delivered the pitch, Ruth pointed to where he was going to hit it. But the Scripps Howard News Service, for which Joe Williams wrote, headlined his story “Ruth Calls Shot.” So there.

  The truth is that the truth will never be known. But as Montville says, Ruth had a showman’s boisterous habit of promising to hit home runs for this or that person or occasion, and often did. On some later occasions, Ruth claimed that he called his shot in Game 3 of the Series. On other occasions, he said that “only a damn fool” would do such a thing. The next spring, however, he attended a New York cocktail party hosted by the most famous sportswriter of the day, Grantland Rice. There the wife of the most famous political columnist of the day, Walter Lippmann, asked Ruth what had happened the previous autumn. In his 1955 autobiography, The Tumult and the Shouting, Rice recounted Ruth’s response, but without Ruth’s tangy language, which Montville supplies for our less decorous age:

  “The Cubs had fucked my old teammate Mark Koenig by cutting him for only a measly fucken half share of the Series money. Well, I’m riding the fuck out of the Cubs, telling ’em they’re the cheapest pack of fucken crumbums in the world.… [Root] breezes the first two pitches by—both strikes! The mob’s tearing down Wrigley Field. I shake my fist after that first strike. After the second I point my bat at these bellerin’ bleachers—right where I aim to park the ball. Root throws it and I hit that fucken ball on the nose, right over the fence for two fucken runs. ‘How do you like those apples, you fucken bastard?’ I yell at Root as I run toward first. By the time I reach home I’m almost fallin’ down I’m laughing so fucken hard—and that’s how it happened.”

  Montville notes that Ruth’s memory was not perfect: The count was 2–2, not 0–2, and there was no one on base. Mrs. Lippmann and her spouse quickly left the party, and Rice asked Ruth, “Why’d you use that language?” Ruth replied, “You heard her ask me what happened. So I told her.”

  Montville offers a further bit of evidence that something special happened in Game 3 to make the Cubs irritable. Guy Bush was the Cubs’ starting pitcher in Game 4. When Ruth came to the plate in the first inning—even though there were runners on first and second and no one out and the Cubs were facing elimination from the Series—Bush used his first pitch, a fastball, to hit Ruth. But if, the day before, Ruth had pointed to center field after the second pitch from Root in the fifth inning, the third pitch probably would have come at his head. Really.

  Take a long look at the hard glare coming at you from the photograph on this page. Does that seem like the sort of fellow who would have tolerated disrespectful behavior from anyone, even Babe Ruth? Charlie Root was a pitcher who, a Brooklyn baseball writer said, seemed to throw at Dodger hitters “for the sheer fun of it.” Because Root seemed to go through life with his chin jutting in defiance, Cubs manager Charlie Grimm nicknamed him Chinski. Root was so thoroughly not amused by the whole “called shot” story that he turned down an offer to play himself in the movie The Babe Ruth Story.

  Charlie Root: Would Babe Ruth provoke him? (photo credit 1.6)

  Root’s accomplishments during sixteen seasons with the Cubs rank him as the fourth-best pitcher in the team’s history, behind only Mordecai Brown, Grover Cleveland Alexander, and Ferguson Jenkins. Root holds the team record for career wins (201) and innings pitched (3,137.1). Yet he is remembered only for one pitch.

  One fan at this memorable game was a twelve-year-old named John Paul Stevens who would grow up to serve thirty-five years as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. At age ninety-three, in 2013, he was still a Cub fan and still convinced that Ruth did indeed point to a spot in the bleachers and hit a ball there. Stevens was also cheerfully resigned to the fact that he might be more often remembered for having been at Wrigley that day than for having been on the court all those years.

  Seated along the first-base line on this myth-making day, behind the Yankees’ dugout, was the governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who then was thirty-eight days from being elected president. FDR made the ceremonial first pitch from among the box seats. At hi
s side was his host, Chicago’s Democratic mayor, Anton J. Cermak, the city’s only foreign-born mayor. The two were a study in contrasts.

  While FDR was a Hudson Valley patrician, Cermak had been born in 1873 in Bohemia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, about twenty miles from Prague. The day he turned one year old, he was on Ellis Island. His family found its way to Illinois, where, as a boy, he worked in coal mines near Joliet. When he was sixteen, he moved to Chicago and rose through the ranks of the city’s Democratic machine, earning the nickname “Tough Tony” and throwing large picnics for supporters, at which he illegally sold one-dollar mugs of beer from one hundred barrels donated by a North Side bootlegger. He was elected mayor in 1931. Cermak had opposed the nomination of FDR, preferring the candidacy of another up-from-nothing ethnic politician, New York’s former governor and FDR rival, Al Smith, the party’s 1928 nominee. Cermak would, however, again be with FDR 137 days after witnessing Ruth’s home run.

  At about nine-thirty P.M. on February 15, 1933, in Miami, Florida, FDR, now the president-elect, stepped off a yacht on which he had been fishing in the Bahamas. He delivered a short speech to onlookers, among whom was Cermak, who was in Miami to talk patronage with James A. Farley, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Then FDR gestured for Cermak to join him at his open touring car. Also in the crowd was another immigrant, Giuseppe Zangara from Italy, who had a boiling hatred of politicians. He was only five feet, one inch tall, but he stood on a bench, drew an eight-dollar pistol, and fired five shots toward the car. A woman in the crowd hit his gun hand and the crowd overwhelmed him, but not before his bullets struck Cermak and three other bystanders.

  The assumption is that Zangara’s target was Roosevelt, and there is no contrary evidence. Chicago being Chicago, however, there are rival theories. One turns on the fact that on December 19, 1932, the mayor sent two detectives to the office of Frank Nitti, who had become ascendant in Chicago crime when Al Capone was sent to prison on charges of tax evasion. Nitti had no gun but was shot three times by the detectives, one of whom supposedly shot his own hand and then claimed that Nitti shot him and the detectives fired back in self-defense. Nitti survived. Cermak headed for Florida.