by Will, George
The venue is more important in baseball than in any other sport, for two reasons. The first is that baseball, with nine defensive players thinly dispersed across an eye-pleasing swath of green grass and reddish-tan manicured dirt, is best seen in person rather than on television. Clark Griffith is a Minneapolis lawyer and a grandson of the Clark Griffith who owned the Washington Senators a century ago. His grandfather was the wit who said, “Fans like home runs and we have assembled a pitching staff to please our fans.” The grandson notes that a baseball field is larger than any other field in team sports not involving animals, meaning it is smaller than a polo pitch.
Second, because baseball is a game of discrete episodes rather than of flow, like basketball or soccer or hockey, baseball allows contemplation and conversation and a general awareness of where you are. Or at least it allows it when baseball owners do not take leave of their senses and try to replicate, with loud music, the excruciating experience of being in an NBA arena. The NBA experience—strobe lights, lasers, smoke, and cacophonous music—is like being held prisoner in a Wurlitzer jukebox. The prevalent music at Wrigley is supplied by an organ. This instrument provided the only sound at movies when they were a rival entertainment during the first decade or so of Wrigley’s existence. The Cubs became the first major league team with an organ when they installed theirs at Wrigley in 1941. It is still all the sound track a game needs.
William Zinsser, a gifted writer of short essays, is a New Yorker who gloomily anticipated the coming of the new Yankee Stadium and the Mets’ new Citi Field because he assumed that they would “feature the latest advances in audio-visual assault.” He said he had quit going to Mets games when the din made it impossible for him to talk with whomever he was with. Baseball, he wrote, has its distinctive sounds but it is also “a game of silences. Every half inning it invites its parishioners to meditate on what they have just seen and to recall other players they once saw play.” This is why he thought “memory was the glue that held baseball together as the continuing American epic.” And that is why music, other than that supplied by Wrigley Field’s organ, dissolves the glue.
This also means that Cubs hitters do not have “walk-up” music—songs, or snippets of them, that are played each time a batter approaches the plate. The Cubs experimented with this, and the players liked it, but the Wrigley Field sound system was too primitive to make it a success. On the North Side, primitivism has served civilization, so far. At a baseball park, the loudest noise should be supplied by the spectators.
For twelve seasons, mostly with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Ralph Branca was a successful right-handed pitcher with a career record of eighty-eight wins and sixty-eight losses, including a twenty-one-win season in 1947. He is, however, remembered for one pitch. Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants hit it over the head of a former Wrigley Field favorite—Andy Pafko, a member of the 1945 Cubs’ World Series team—and into the Polo Grounds’ left-field stands to win the 1951 pennant. Branca should, however, also be known for his bittersweet 2011 memoir, A Moment in Time: An American Story of Baseball, Heartbreak, and Grace. In it he recalls the pleasure of playing major league baseball in a normal city neighborhood:
Walking through Flatbush, you came upon Ebbets Field like you’d come upon a local candy store, a Jewish deli, or an Italian grocery. Ebbets Field was in and of itself a local character—unassuming and unpretentious. Yankee Stadium was and is monumental. The Polo Grounds was bizarrely sculpted, with an endless center field and imposing overhanging stands. Ebbets Field wasn’t bizarre. It was comforting and ordinary. It was a happy resident in a residential neighborhood.
For a century, Wrigley Field has been like that. As it enters its second century, however, the residential neighborhood is, if not unhappy, certainly uneasy, and those who love the ballpark worry that its unassuming character might perish.
On April 14, 2013, the Cubs’ management announced an agreement whereby the city would permit the team to proceed with $500 million worth of improvements to the ballpark and its immediate environs. Earlier that day, the Cubs had lost to the San Francisco Giants. The Cubs had blown a lead; the go-ahead run had scored on a balk; and Cubs pitchers had tied a major league record by throwing five wild pitches in an inning, which at least distracted attention from the four walks they surrendered in that inning. Some incorrigible skeptics said that the most important part of the agreement was that the Cubs henceforth would be allowed to sell beer for an extra half inning, through the end of the seventh, which would enable future fans to be feeling no pain when the late innings were disappointing. But perhaps there will be many more games at Wrigley Field when fans will be delighted because, the home team being ahead, they will not get to see the bottom of the ninth inning.
The Wrigley family’s connection with the Cubs ended in 1981, when the team was bought for $205 million by the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune newspaper, among other things. The other things included WGN, a “superstation” available throughout the nation that needed programming. The Cubs were attractive for this purpose, particularly because television has never been fastidious about filling time with excellence. Even when the team was unsuccessful on the field, it was a rollicking success at filling three or more hours of WGN’s time. Ratings varied somewhat with success on the field, however. In 2007, the Tribune Company was bought by Sam Zell, who inexplicably thought that would be a good time to go into the newspaper business. It wasn’t, but Zell’s peculiar decision marked him as born to own the Cubs. When his empire came unglued, the Cubs were for sale.
Since 2008, for the first time since William Wrigley died, in 1932, the Cubs have had ownership as serious as baseball has become as a business. The Ricketts family of Omaha continues to run Ameritrade, the online broker business founded by Joseph Ricketts, who built the family fortune. But today Tom Ricketts, one of Joseph’s four children, runs the team. He has some other financial interests, but Cubs baseball is his vocation, in the original meaning of that word: It is his calling.
For one summer, Tom lived over a bar—the Sports Corner Bar, which is still there, in a new iteration—at the corner of Sheffield and Addison. He met his wife in Wrigley Field’s center-field bleachers. He was sitting with his father on one of the rooftops across the street when he convinced his father that buying the Cubs would be a good idea. He said owning the team would be like owning “a 50-year zero-coupon bond.”
To put that in plain English for those of us who are not conversant with the complexities of financial instruments: Like such a bond, the Cubs will become more valuable over time. The old rule, which is not quite true but is true enough, is that you do not make money getting into baseball; you make money getting out. That is, the value of a franchise grows over time. That will remain true, if the future is like the past, which it generally is until the moment when it isn’t. The Tribune Company bought the Cubs from the William Wrigley Jr. Company for $20.5 million in 1981. In 2009, the Ricketts family paid the Tribune Company $845 million for the team.
Fortunately, it has become more feasible to make money by being in baseball. This is so for various reasons. One is the increased revenue sharing among the teams. Another is the explosive growth of television rights fees because technology now enables viewers to tape the programming they like and watch it when they like, fast-forwarding through commercials—but they cannot do that with live sports. One of television’s purposes is to sell beer and pickup trucks to young men, who are (in televisionspeak) a “coveted demographic” for sports broadcasting.
So, Joe Ricketts was convinced by son Tom, and the family acquired a franchise with a troubled history. It also bought a ballpark that is Illinois’s third-most-popular tourist attraction, after Chicago’s Navy Pier and the city’s Museum Campus, which includes the Field Museum of Natural History, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium. The team the family bought was not in good shape, and neither was Wrigley Field. The problems with the former were many and were written in numbers: The Cubs were th
irty-six games under .500 through the first three years (2010–2012) the Ricketts owned them. Wrigley Field had three problems. First, large and potentially lethal bits of it would be falling on fans’ heads were it not for nets rigged to catch the crumbling concrete. Second, the ballpark was not configured for modern players’ needs, from batting cages to video of their at bats in the game under way. Third, the ballpark had to be operated under commercial and political restrictions that limited its ability to generate revenues sufficient to make the Cubs competitive. The restrictions included limits on advertising signs and on the number of night games. The latter limits are partly to assuage the anxieties of Wrigleyville residents, and partly to please the bar owners who have communicated to the local alderman their desire to limit the nights when fans do all their beer drinking inside Wrigley Field.
To Cub sentimentalists—and they are too numerous for the team’s own good—it probably seems tacky to talk about making Wrigley Field more efficient at generating money. To them, this is akin to discussing how to sell the naming rights to Chartres. But what the Cubs do is play professional baseball. So, sentimentalists: Get over it.
During its ninety-ninth year, Wrigley Field sometimes generated more news for the business pages than for the sports pages. The issue was refurbishment, not just to remove those unsightly and disconcerting nets but also to allow the Cubs to maximize revenues. A major bone of contention was a proposed 6,000-square-foot video board—later reduced to 4,600 square feet—that would inconvenience those whom the Cubs annoyingly call “our rooftop partners”—the people who sell seats atop buildings across from the ballpark.
For many years before 2004, these people had been pocketing all the profits from stealing the Cubs’ product—the entertainment value of Major League Baseball—and selling this product to fans, many of whom could purchase admission to Wrigley Field but preferred the rooftop festivities. In 2004, the Cubs and the “rooftop partners” struck a twenty-year deal under which the Cubs receive 17 percent of what their partners make. It is unclear by what peculiar theory of property rights these “partners” acquired a claim on a portion of the value of what the Cubs produce. John Locke, who had a lot more to do with the invention of this republic than Abner Doubleday had to do with the invention of baseball, said that one acquires property in, for example, land by mixing one’s labor with it, thereby improving it. Lockean theory links the acquisition of any property to one’s own labor. How, one wonders, do the “rooftop partners” gain their property interest in Cubs baseball? By what labor do the “rooftop partners” gain this property interest, other than the “labor” of owning the buildings and constructing bleacher seats from which their customers can watch the team that the “rooftop partners” did nothing to build? This may be of merely academic interest, but by 2013 it was interfering with the Cubs’ attempts to compete with teams that were nourished by newer, more money-generating ballparks.
The rooftops are sports bars with nice views, and Tom Ricketts has invested in one just to see what the business is about. It is about grossing $25 million a year, which is what the rooftop partners report. It is conceivable that the real figure is north of $30 million. One rooftop that was bought for $36,000 in 1980 is comparable to another that in 2011 sold for $4.8 million. In May 2012, a USA Today reporter watched a game from a Sheffield Avenue rooftop. But the one he watched was a Chicago Bulls NBA play-off game. There were many empty seats in Wrigley as the Cubs played the Texas Rangers—it was a makeup game for one postponed because of bad weather—but on the rooftop, “the bar was packed” with Bulls fans high-fiving one another as the Bulls upset the Miami Heat. The reporter noted, “These patrons might have paid $70–$150 for their rooftop view, but they still preferred watching the Bulls on plasma TVs [to] the Cubs in person.”
In 1988, when the Cubs finally turned on the lights, sensible Cub fans said: It’s about time. The resistance to night games came not just, and understandably, from residents of the neighborhood but also from fans who seemed attached less to the Cubs than to the idea of the Cubs as a kind of baseball Williamsburg—a quaint evocation of a bygone era. In 2013, when the question was whether the Cubs would be allowed to install the video board in left field and other signage, Tom Ricketts said the ball club could succeed if, and only if, it could treat Wrigley Field as a revenue-generating institution rather than as a “museum.” He said the new signs would produce $20 million a year, a sum that could purchase some helpful on-field talent. And only talent would reverse a troubling trend: In the previous three seasons, 2010 through 2012, Cubs attendance had declined by about 3,000 tickets a game, to 35,600. Multiply 3,000 by the price of a ticket plus a hot dog and an Old Style, and multiply that by 81. Serious money is at issue.
As commonly used when speaking of sports, the word “professional” simply means “not amateur.” Professional sports are, the Oxford English Dictionary says, “engaged in for money.” But another common usage of “professional” means “expert,” implying adherence to exacting standards. There has been professional baseball, in the first sense, for more than a century and a half. But Major League Baseball has become markedly more professional, in the second sense, in recent decades. It is not a coincidence that this has occurred as the sums of money at stake have grown much larger. Baseball has always generated, pitch by pitch and game by game, season after season, a vast sea of data. Only recently has this been gathered and used systematically. And new ballparks have been built to accommodate baseball’s increased professionalism.
These ballparks have weight-training and exercise machines, supervised by strength coaches, innovations that would have horrified many generations of baseball people, if the possibilities had even occurred to them. Until relatively recently—well after the Second World War—baseball’s conventional wisdom held that the way to get into condition to play baseball was to play baseball. A corollary dogma advised players to avoid weight training, lest they become “muscle-bound” and lose flexibility.
New ballparks have multiple batting cages in tunnels beneath the stands and close enough to the dugout so that players can hone their swings between at bats and pinch hitters can limber up. New ballparks have video facilities, often close to the dugout, where even during the game players can see video of their recent at bats, or of the opposing pitcher’s offerings, or of the way that day’s home plate umpire is defining the strike zone. Wrigley Field at one hundred has none of these things. The only batting cage is under the outfield bleachers and must be reached by walking across the playing field, so it cannot be used during a game. It is simply more difficult for Cubs players than for any of their National League rivals to—in the players’ patois—“get their work in.” This means that because of Wrigley Field’s cozy configuration, the team is at a competitive disadvantage. This defect will have been rectified by the time Wrigley is 102 years old.
Wrigleyville has an agreeable middle-class feel to it, but the median price of a home in the neighborhood is almost $1 million. It is difficult to image that a 175-room boutique hotel adjacent to the ballpark, plus a spruced-up Sheffield Avenue used as a pedestrian mall on game days, will damage property values. But beyond being respectful of the neighborhood, and assuaging its anxieties, the challenge for Ricketts is to preserve the Wrigley Field of 1914 while making it suitable for the fans—and the players, managers, and coaches—of 2014.
When Wrigley was built, ballparks were simple edifices for providing paying customers with vantage points—mostly bench seats, sometimes folding chairs—from which to watch a game. Each ballpark had only one significant revenue stream: ticket sales. Players expected from the ballpark only a satisfactory playing surface and, maybe—in some cities, visiting players put on their uniforms at their hotels—places to dress before the game and to shower after it. Today, however, baseball—the game itself—has become much more demanding of the players, who in turn demand more of their workplace. Fans demand comforts beyond peanuts and Cracker Jack, including entertainment between innings
and even Internet access. The ballpark itself is a complex machine for generating better player performances, more satisfying fan experiences, and rivers of revenue to buy better players who will keep the fans coming through the turnstiles and tuning in to the teams’ broadcasts.
A proper twenty-first-century ballpark offers Wi-Fi because most of the fans settle into their seats with smart-phones in their pockets, and more and more fans also have electronic tablets in hand to serve their insatiable appetites for information. Suppose the guy sitting next to you cannot remember the name of the Cub player who was traded for himself? Piece of cake. Noodle around with Google and you will come to Dickie Noles, who on September 22, 1987, was traded by the Cubs to the Tigers for a player to be named later. On September 26, in the ninth inning, the Tigers brought him in to pitch to the Blue Jays’ Juan Beniquez with the bases loaded. Beniquez hit a walk-off triple. The Tigers soon designated Noles to be the player named later and shipped him back to the Cubs.
If the woman to your left wonders what game might have been the greatest ever played at Wrigley Field, Google “May 2, 1917, Wrigley Field.” For nine innings on that day in the Cubs’ second year in Wrigley Field, Cubs pitcher James “Hippo” Vaughn and Reds pitcher Fred Toney, a former Cub, tossed no-hitters, something that had never happened before and has not happened since. In the tenth inning, the Reds’ leadoff batter got a hit, and then some bad Cubs defensive plays (one of them on a ball hit by Cincinnati’s Jim Thorpe, the decathlon champion at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm) led to a Reds run. The Cubs did not score in the bottom of the tenth. The game lasted just one hour and fifty minutes.
Why do so many of us care so much about professional sports teams and, hence, about the buildings in which they practice their craft for pay? One answer is: We are more tribal than we, in our modern vanity, like to acknowledge. Which means Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was right about what he called “the liberal expectancy.”