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

by Will, George

  The science of economics has developed—and, say some economists, refuted—the efficient market hypothesis, which holds that it is impossible to consistently beat the securities market. The theory is that information travels quickly, and hence it is rapidly assimilated and incorporated into the price of stocks. The assumption, more elegant in theory than descriptive of reality, is that the prices of stocks generally reflect all the information that is available about them. Hence markets cannot be beaten, because they are “informationally efficient”; every participant knows as much as all other participants. Therefore over time, and not very much time, no stock or financial security trades significantly too cheaply or too expensively.

  What has the efficient market hypothesis to do with the team that calls Wrigley Field home? Just this: The Cubs have done what should be almost impossible.

  The efficient market hypothesis holds that no one, or at any rate no one who is paying attention and is diligently trying to maximize his income, should be consistently beaten by the market. Applied by analogy to baseball, the efficient market hypothesis would hold that information about best practices, if available and understandable to all participants in the baseball “market,” should produce a tendency toward equality in the competition for wins. Improvements in the conduct of the baseball business should become apparent to, and quickly adopted by, everyone paying attention.

  We have seen this happen in recent decades regarding the “moneyball” practices. Consider the metrics by which Billy Beane’s small-market Oakland Athletics found underpriced talent. To oversimplify radically, Beane looked for players whose high on-base percentages made them parsimonious with baseball’s most precious commodities: outs. You are not beaten until you have made at least twenty-seven of them. So a team composed of players with high on-base percentages will be diligent about not beating itself. Beane’s practices were observed and emulated even before the movie Moneyball made a drama out of a book that was as much a business treatise as a sports story. It was about how to price assets.

  What successful teams do, they do in public. They do it under the intense, unblinking scrutiny of competitors, fans, and baseball journalists. Furthermore, teams operate within Major League Baseball’s structure, which is designed to encourage competitive balance. Teams are regulated by a complex and always evolving collective bargaining agreement with the Major League Baseball Players Association, the union. Given these facts, you would think there would be no secrets, or none that remain secret for very long. Therefore, you would assume that under the efficient market hypothesis, as applied to success in baseball, which is measured in wins, no team could consistently “beat the market” by always winning—or losing. This is the assumption, even allowing for the differences in teams’ resources that are permitted by Major League Baseball’s economic model.

  Under this model, there are substantial disparities in income deriving from intractable advantages and disadvantages associated with local broadcast revenues. No matter how intelligently the Pittsburgh Pirates and Kansas City Royals acquire and act on baseball’s constantly evolving and enlarging fund of information, those two teams have relatively few television viewers in their areas and thus can buy fewer baseball assets than the Yankees, Dodgers, and other teams with gobs of money to put behind their use of universally available information. But even adjusting for such advantages, similarly situated teams should, over time, have similar results, meaning: No team should consistently beat the market, or the portion of the market competition most similar to it. And—you were wondering how this pertains to the Cubs?—no team should be consistently beaten, year after year, by similarly situated teams. But the Cubs are. The metric by which the team’s management, for many decades, chose to measure success was fan contentment, disconnected from success on the field. So on the North Side, the efficient market hypothesis was superseded by the Wrigley Field effect.

  For several millennia—from the beginning of architecture until the second half of the nineteenth century—the height of buildings was limited by the load-bearing strength of stone. That is why Paris, London, Rome, and other old cities look as they do. Arguably, the first skyscraper was Chicago’s ten-story Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885. Tall buildings were the result of a fortuitous congruence of two technologies and, in Chicago, an opportunity. The technologies were structural steel and the elevator. The opportunity was the open space provided by the great Chicago fire of 1871. The creation and evolution of Wrigley Field, however, involved no new technologies or material. Rather, it was born to be utilitarian, in the service of fun and games. It has not only survived but has become revered and emulated because it is so old it seems new.

  Architectural antiquities are hard to come by in a nation whose largest city in 1776, Philadelphia, had a population of probably less than thirty thousand—smaller than a Wrigley Field sellout. Still, the phrase “American architectural antiquity” fits Wrigley Field, which is older than Manhattan’s two most iconic skyscrapers, the Chrysler Building (1930) and the Empire State Building (1931). Wrigley is older than the glistening white temple of American law, the U.S. Supreme Court Building (1935). Wrigley is older than the Lincoln (1922) and Jefferson (1943) Memorials. It is older than the Hoover Dam (1936), the Golden Gate Bridge (1937), and the heads of the four presidents carved on Mount Rushmore, which were completed in 1941. As Wrigley Field turns one hundred, two years after Boston’s Fenway Park reached that age, the average age of the other twenty-eight ballparks is about seventeen years.

  Wrigley Field exemplifies something Winston Churchill understood. On May 10, 1941, a German air raid on London badly damaged the House of Commons, which moved its sessions to the House of Lords, in another part of the Palace of Westminster, on the bank of the Thames. On October 23, 1943, Prime Minister Churchill delivered a brief but lapidary speech concerning reconstruction of the Commons. “We shape our buildings,” he said, “and afterward our buildings shape us.” For that reason, he added, the House “should not be big enough to contain all its Members at once without overcrowding,” and “there should be no question of every Member having a separate seat reserved for him.” In a House of Commons large enough to accommodate everyone, most debates would be conducted in the depressing atmosphere of an almost-empty chamber. (As any viewer of C-SPAN knows, this is the case in both the House of Representatives and the Senate most of the time when the House and Senate are in session.) But, said Churchill, good parliamentary dialogue—quick, informal, conversational—“requires a fairly small space, and there should be on great occasions a sense of crowd and urgency.” Besides, vitality of the House of Commons, and its hold on the nation’s imagination, “depend to no small extent upon its episodes and great moments, even upon its scenes and rows, which, as everyone will agree, are better conducted at close quarters.”

  A good baseball park should reflect a comparable sensitivity to the relationship between space and usage. It was, after all, a great Chicago architect, Louis Sullivan, who said that “form ever follows function,” and this axiom explains the beauty of old clipper ships and old baseball parks. Two other relevant axioms are self-evidently true, meaning they are accepted by all minds not clouded by cheerfulness. They are: Most new ideas are bad. And most improvements make matters worse. Both axioms were validated by the construction, in the 1960s and 1970s, of “dual-purpose” stadiums, used for both baseball and football. They were, of course, satisfactory for neither. This failure was predictable because—really, this is not complicated—the two sports’ playing fields have different shapes.

  Wrigley Field is primarily, and now exclusively (not counting concerts and other occasional uses and abuses), a baseball venue. For many years, however, it was the home field for Chicago Bears football games. Even as Wrigley Field turns one hundred, and even though the last NFL game was played there in 1970, it has still hosted the second-largest number of regular-season NFL games—365 of them. Only Giants Stadium, in northern New Jersey, which opened in 1976, was the s
ite of more (495 through 2010), and only because it was also the home field for the New York Jets.

  In the days before football succumbed to unlimited substitutions in the service of the modern mania for specialization, Bronko Nagurski played fullback on offense and tackle on defense for the University of Minnesota, from 1927 through 1929. In his senior season he became the first and last player to be named an all-American at two positions. From 1930 through 1937, he played for the Bears, who won NFL championships in 1932 and 1933. When the Second World War siphoned away many players, he came back for the 1943 season and the Bears won another championship. About six feet, two inches and 230 pounds, he would have been a normal-sized running back today. In his day, however, he was enormous. A much-told and perhaps even true story is that in a game in the close confinement of Wrigley Field, he galloped through assorted Washington Redskins and was not stopped until he crashed into the brick outfield wall. Returning to the huddle prior to the extra-point try, he said, “That last guy hit me awfully hard.”

  There. That is the last that shall be said here about football.

  After people who probably liked neither baseball nor football were finished with the folly of dual-purpose stadiums—only the “coliseum” in Oakland remains in baseball—there was a merciful pause. Then something happened that we are constantly being told cannot happen: Someone turned the clock back.

  The three most important things that have happened in baseball since the Second World War were Jackie Robinson taking the field in Brooklyn in 1947, free agency arriving in 1975, and Oriole Park at Camden Yards opening in 1992. This last was an act of heroic nostalgia but, then, baseball fans are disposed to live with cricks in their necks from looking backward. Which is why Major League Baseball owes a debt to a willowy woman from Mississippi. To those who said, “You can’t turn back the clock,” Janet Marie Smith responded, “Well, we’ll just see about that.”

  Mississippi State University in Starkville has sent to the major leagues many baseball players, the greatest of whom was Will “the Thrill” Clark, the brash and talented hitter who, when he was playing in San Francisco, had a musical message on his telephone answering machine that announced, “The Thrill is gone.” But Mississippi State’s greatest gift to baseball has been the woman who understood how baseball could put more thrills in fans’ experiences by learning from its oldest ballparks.

  Born in 1957 in Jackson, Mississippi, she went to Starkville, where serendipity reared its lovely head. The School of Architecture, in which she enrolled, was then at the edge of campus, as was the baseball field. Aspiring architects and ballplayers mingled, and Smith began to acquire the baseball habit. After graduating with an architecture degree, she lived primarily in New York City from 1979 through 1984, working on Manhattan’s Battery Park City and, in her spare time, earning a City College master’s degree in urban design. During these years she took herself out to ball games at Yankee and Shea Stadiums, where she found in the crowds some respite from the anonymity of city life. Her next destination was Los Angeles. “I did not love the city but I did love Dodger baseball,” she says. Dodger Stadium was, she notes, a rare public space in a famously dispersed city where she could experience the “energy” of concentrated people.

  Eager to move back east and to find a project there, she visited Philadelphia, then Baltimore—the city she had picked when she was assigned, at City College, the task of dissecting a city’s urban design opportunities. One day she found herself at an Orioles game in old Memorial Stadium, where a fan talked to her about rumored plans to build a new ballpark downtown as part of the Inner Harbor redevelopment. It would be the first time since the Fenway Park–Wrigley Field era that a baseball-only venue would be built in a city’s downtown. The Oriole official driving this project was Larry Lucchino, who grew up in Pittsburgh before Forbes Field was replaced by the dual-purpose Three Rivers Stadium, which the Pirates shared with the NFL’s Steelers for thirty years. Lucchino hired Smith, and together they fended off the idea of tearing down the nineteenth-century brick warehouse—one thousand feet long and fifty feet wide—that extends along the outfield and is a signature of Camden Yards’ urban setting.

  Wrigley Field was one of the places she, Lucchino, and others visited as they planned Camden Yards, and she came away from Chicago eager to build Camden Yards using steel trusses of the sort that feature in Wrigley Field (and Fenway Park), because they would distance Baltimore’s gem from the slab-of-concrete style of multipurpose venues. She especially liked how Wrigley’s restrictions on inpark advertising “allow you to soak in the green.” She also thought the rooftop seats across Waveland and Sheffield added to the “social experience.” Those seats were echoes of the days, long ago, when fans outside many ballparks stole glimpses of games by climbing lampposts or peering through knotholes in fence planks.

  Since participating in the creation of Camden Yards, Smith has worked on Atlanta’s Turner Field, Fenway Park, and Dodger Stadium, helping to design the special eating, drinking, and socializing places that ballparks seem to require because, Smith says, “Americans today cannot sit still for two and a half hours.” (For today’s games, they would have to sit for almost three hours.) Wrigley Field, which, fortunately, has scant space for such fripperies, requires fans to consider the game sufficient for their happiness.

  Twenty major league parks have opened since Camden Yards did, sixteen of them in downtown settings. Those sixteen have changed how people use cities. And the cities, by forcing the ballparks to conform to the urban context, have changed how the game is played, for this reason: Baseball is the only sport that does not specify the dimensions of the playing area, leaving latitude for different sizes and shapes of outfields. So, Smith says, when a ballpark is built in an existing urban neighborhood, the city is the tenth player on the field. This is notably so in the new ballpark most influenced by Wrigley Field.

  In 2000, when AT&T Park, as it is now named, was new, San Francisco’s then mayor, the amiable rapscallion Willie Brown, said the park felt as if it had been there for a couple of decades. Which is exactly what Larry Baer had in mind when he and his colleagues set out to replicate the feel of Wrigley Field as a neighborhood institution. Baer, president and chief executive officer of the extraordinarily successful Giants franchise, was present at the creation of the team’s jewel of a ballpark. One of his challenges was to convince the neighborhood that bringing forty thousand or so people into it eighty-one times over six months would actually be pleasant. He says “the best $50,000 we spent” was for a model of the park and the neighborhood. He carted this around to meetings to assuage anxieties and even whet appetites for the pleasures of congestion caused by hordes of cheerful people. Baer was explicitly selling the idea of Wrigleyville West, and the neighborhood bought it.

  The Giants shoehorned the ballpark into just 12.5 acres, hard by the bay in the city’s China Basin section. This is the smallest patch of land for a new ballpark since Wrigley Field was built. None of the ballparks built since the Second World War occupy less than 35 acres, counting the space for parking. Some occupy 65 or 70 acres.

  The small space dictated what the Giants wanted: an interestingly asymmetrical playing field. They particularly wanted right field to be so close to the water that long home runs would splash into it, landing among kayakers seeking souvenirs. Major League Baseball officials did not like the idea of a right-field foul line just 309 feet long. They thought cheap home runs would make a mockery of the game. But the Giants knew that few home runs—at least, few since their left-handed Hall of Famer Willie McCovey retired, in 1980—are pulled directly down the line. Besides, the right-field wall is 25 feet high. And to get over it, balls have to be driven through the thick ocean air. Furthermore, the outfield quickly deepens to 421 feet in right-center field. As a result, fewer home runs are hit to right field in AT&T Park than in any other major league park. And the Giants build their teams to fit their ballpark, collecting hitters who drive the ball into the deep left-center-fie
ld and right-center-field gaps for doubles and triples. Thus an exciting offense was made necessary by a ballpark configuration that itself was made necessary by the small footprint available to it.

  If you are going to plunk a ballpark down smack-dab in the middle of a mature city, you are not going to have significant space for parking, but the Giants were right to not fret about this. The day the ballpark opened, Baer counted eight transportation modes—besides private cars, which did not bring even a plurality of fans—that fans used to get to the game. They walked, took taxis or buses or light rail or commuter rail, rode boats (from the East Bay) or bikes, or skated on Rollerblades.

  Fans coming to Wrigley Field have the usual urban transportation options, but the most important is the El, the network of elevated trains that disgorge fans at Wrigley’s right-field corner. Getting there really is part of the fun. The song says, “Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd.” Being with the crowd is, in and of itself, exciting because it is immersion in a temporary but regularly reconstituted cohort of the like-minded and high-spirited. This cohort acquires much of its mass before the game, from mass transit. The congestion of the El’s cars compacts people into a kind of organism.