At the Park

It is a confrontation of efficiency and esthetics, of high finance and tradition.

The losers have been some of the great baseball parks of America. Ebbets Field, where the beloved Bums of Brooklyn played; Sportsman’s Park, home to the St. Louis Browns and Cardinals; the Polo Grounds, with its runway center field and resident flock of pigeons, cutting a tum against the hot New York sky; Crosley Field in Cincinnati, with its elevated warning track at the outfield wall, forever tripping unsuspecting fielders. All are gone.

The winners are the new, multi- purpose edifices, most with carpets for grass, computerized movie screens for scoreboards, escalators, and elevators. Cold, impersonal, reflecting neither a game nor a neighborhood, they are as standard as a paper clip, and just as lovable.

Modem stadia are the cathedrals where the new baseball is worshiped. Young athletes with coiffed hair, high-powered agents, and guaranteed contracts have replaced the baggy-uniformed ballplayers who had to fight every day for a job. Experts tell me the game has never been better, that job security and talents sold at auction are the democratic way. The bill, they say, is paid by television, and television needs a dependable studio for prime-time shows. Giant arenas with artificial surfaces permit nightly use and allow games to be played even after long rain delays. They call it progress.

Maybe so. But this is not a quarterly report, only one fan’s soliloquy. And, admittedly, a yearning for a more simple time, when players read The Sporting News before The Wall Street Journal, when “Take me out to the ball game” meant an afternoon in the sun. I accept that that time is gone. I do not need to be reminded by plastic grass, by shivering in the rain till midnight because it is still possible to play, or worse, by suffering through indoor baseball.

Thankfully, a few vintage parks remain: Comiskey Park, home of Chicago’s American League White Sox, opened in 1910; quirky Fenway in Boston and Tiger Stadium in Detroit both opened on the same April afternoon in 1912. And best of all, Wrigley Field, on the north side of Chicago, where the National League Cubs play. Young Wrigley opened in 1914.

It is best because it has remained most true to that other time. Wrigley’s field is grass, its stairs and ramps are unmotorized, its scoreboard is controlled by men who change big numbers as each run crosses home plate. And most antique, play stops when the sun sets. Lights have never been installed because the Wrigley family, owner of the Cubs from 1921 until 1981, felt an obligation to the area, a solid, residential neighborhood.

While it would be an exaggeration to suggest that time stops at Wrigley, evidence indicates it moves slowly there. This quality is uniquely suited to baseball. More than any of our other sports, it does not bend to time or schedule. Things happen very quickly, then slowly, affording a fan the opportunity not only to enjoy the action, appreciating the talents of the athletes on the field, but to let his mind wander, to compare their skills with those of their predecessors. Does Tim Raines get as good a jump on the ball in center field as Willie Mays did? ls Ozzie Smith really a better shortstop than Marty Marion?

Wrigley is the perfect stage. Standing at home plate one morning before a game this summer, I was struck by the visual grace of the empty park. Double-deck grandstands escort the foul lines nearly all the way out in right and left fields before the top deck falls away, exposing the lower tier to the sun. The outfield wall begins in the corners, runs straight for a few yards, then dips in to accommodate the bleachers. Those open stands begin low at both ends and build gradually, higher and higher, one block of seats becoming two, until they form the base for the huge scoreboard.

Lines, rising and falling in perfect harmony, set off by brilliant colors: the lush green of the grass, a mixture of five strains from Kentucky to protect against blight; the brownish-red of the base paths, pitcher’s mound, batting area, a blend of sand and clay from New Jersey. Unlike many of the new sports facilities, where sections of yellow and blue and orange seats are keyed to ticket prices, all Wrigley’s seats are green, because parks are supposed to be green. (The exact shade of green depends on when a new batch of plastic flip-ups replaced the original wooden-slatted seats, still in service back under the upper deck.) The outfield wall, eleven feet high and constructed of red brick, is, of course, thickly covered with vines of bittersweet and ivy.

 • • •

Part of the beauty of Wrigley is its balance. The dark, heavy grandstands give way to the open outfield. Because that great expanse of light on the grassy surface is uninterrupted by the hovering clutter of light towers, the eye glides smoothly up to the bleachers and scoreboard.

Another factor is the park’s scale. Even with the top deck of stands, added in 1926, Wrigley is manageable to the mind. Nothing seems so far from anything else. Never is a figure—player or fan—rendered less than human, as happens in Seattle’s Kingdome, Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, and the others. Human scale continues past the bleachers, along Waveland and Sheffield avenues and beyond, through a forest of three- and four-story houses surrounding this village of manicured grass, climbing ivy, and little green seats.

“It is, I think, just about the most beautiful ball park in the world. I’ve seen a lot of them in my time, and not a one comes close.”

Those sincere but hardly unbiased words come from Cotton Bogren, whose professional relationship with Wrigley Field spanned forty-seven years, from 1936--when he began working in the clubhouse, running for sandwiches and washing uniforms--until 1982, when he retired as head grounds keeper.

“They’re not baseball parks, they’re stadiums,” continued Bogren. “To me they look like tombs, big hunks of steel. When you go to Cubs Park, or to Fenway or Sox Park, you’re in the game. You can hear the players curse the umpire out. Those new stadiums, you’re so far away you can’t even see the catcher.”

When Bogren retired he turned the job over to his younger brother, Einar, who, along with his five full-time assistants, gets to work every morning at 8:00 A.M. to water down the field, smooth the infield, work on the mound and batting area, and lay the foul lines. Vine-covered walls, sunny bleachers, an old-fashioned scoreboard: a park for kids. During the game, three of them head inside the scoreboard. They scurry around three narrow, fire-escaped levels to move the heavy numbers—metal plates, 15.5 inches by 20 inches—into their slots as the game progresses. They post not only the score in the Cubs game but, using the yellow tape of the sports ticker, scores in the other National League games and those in all but one game in the American League. (Aggressive AL expansion has progressed beyond the forty-seven-year-old scoreboard’s capabilities.)

“People think all we do is take care of the field when it rains,” said Einar Bogren, whose game-time crew of seventeen gets the infield tarp down in fifty-five seconds then—before play is resumed and while the hump-backed field is still draining—doctors the dirt areas into shape. “Our regular duties keep us here two hours after the last out.”

It is also the job of the ground crew to tailor the playing surface to the individual strengths and weaknesses of its team, an art all but lost when that surface is a plastic carpet. The man in Chicago who coordinates the manager’s needs with the crew’s assignments is a Lubie Veal, the Cubs’ supervisor of stadium operations.

“The left side of our infield is not as young as it once was,” said Veal, referring to the Cubs’ thirty-eight-year-old shortstop, Larry Bowa, and thirty-six-year-old third baseman, Ron Cey. “We keep the infield grass long and soften everything in front of the batter’s box. That slows those ground balls down a bit.”

During the third inning of a Cub game against Montreal that I attended, Expo first baseman Pete Rose hit a bouncing ball toward the hole between second and short. A sure single on the artificial turf of his home Olympic Stadium, it died in the tall grass of Wrigley. Larry Bowa scooped it up and fired to first for the out. Chicago fans, a knowledgeable lot, cheered Bowa and the grass.

“People make too much of the help we get from our infield,” said Bowa after the game. He, like most athletes, does not like discussing the effect of age on his skills. Furthermore, he would rather talk offense than defense. Since he is primarily a singles hitter, Bowa sees the slow infield taking hits from him as well as the opposition.

“A home park should be a distinct advantage for the home team,” continued Bowa. “This one isn’t. Every day it plays different. One day the grass is real high, the wind is blowing straight in, the dirt is hard. The next the grass is cut, the wind blowing out, the dirt is soft. You’ve got to be alert like in no other place.”

Most players enjoy coming in for a few days of baseball in the sun, but many Cubs complain about the eighty-one-game season at home. It seems conditions that were once normal—playing on grass, only during the day, under the hot summer sun—are a handicap and are exacerbated by Wrigley’s treacherous winds, which can stand one of the rooftop pennants straight out while another two poles away hangs limp. These idiosyncrasies, complicated by the adjustment to and from the night schedule of the road, have been blamed for the team’s lack of success, the hallmark of the franchise in modem times.

The Cubs appeared in ten World Series from 1906 through 1945 and never since, making them the least successful non-expansion team in major league baseball. While they often begin well, they fade by late summer and have won more games than they have lost in only eight of the last thirty-eight seasons.

Yet their fans remain faithful. The Cubs have outdrawn the White Sox in thirteen of the last eighteen seasons, even though Comiskey Park holds 44,432 to Wrigley Field’s 37,275 and the Sox play 85 percent of their home games at night, the commercially preferred time.

The two Chicago clubs have over the years become closely identified with their respective neighborhoods: Comiskey on the south side, urban and working class, amidst expressways and bars; Wrigley on the north side, a relatively stable, middle-class residential area, just over a half-mile from Lake Michigan and the expensive high-rise apartments there. Comiskey has a reputation for being more rowdy; Wrigley, more conservative, with many of its fans under twenty and over sixty. As one veteran reporter told me, “Wrigley’s a park for kids, where parents can drop off sons and daughters for a game and know they’ll be okay.”

• • •

The week I spent at Wrigley was ideal: June and bright sunshine, school out, and Chicago in first place. Cub games start at 1:20 and 3:05, the latter an attempt to lure people out of their offices early. That first Montreal game was a 1:20 start. By 9:00 A.M. lines had begun to form at the windows selling box and reserve seats. Kids stood with their fathers beside men in business suits planning on long lunches and tourists carrying maps and guidebooks.

The heart of Wrigley Field beats not in the $8 seats but in the bleachers. At noon, while those heading for the boxes behind the dugouts and home plate were still passing through the gate, the Spartan benches out beyond the ivy were practically full.

An afternoon in the bleachers of Wrigley is the quintessential Chicago experience. Rapid-fire banter between vendors and customers, debates among fans, and well-orchestrated jeering between the partisans of the right-field and left-field sections are the side show; the attraction is baseball, and it begins with the players’ taking their warm-ups within hailing distance. The crowd is a mixture of old-timers in straw hats and youngsters on vacation, suntans and braces identifying their social status. The girls wear halter tops and alligator-crested golf shirts; most of the boys are topless.

The elder statesman of the budget seats is Bill Veeck, who, along with the park, is celebrating his seventieth season. Much of that time they have spent together. Veeck, more identified with the White Sox, actually helped design the bleachers while working for the club in 1937; and a year later—with the assistance of then clubhouse boy Cotton Bogren—he planted the famous ivy.

“Going to a baseball game is a form of escape--that means you get away from the city you’re escaping from,” Veeck said from his station in the right-field bleachers during one of the Montreal games. “It should smell like freshly cut grass, and there should be a natural green background, which is the vines.” Although the vines were his idea, the general philosophy came from Philip K. Wrigley, then the Cubs’ owner.

Veeck worked at Wrigley as a vendor at the age of ten while his father was the club’s general manager. He joined the front office nine years later when his father died, working for Wrigley until 1941. After World War II, which he spent as a Marine, Veeck ran Cleveland and then St. Louis in the American League, and he owned the White Sox twice, from 1959-61 and 1975-81.

“During the Depression there was a stigma to sitting in the cheap seats,” he said, explaining that originally bleachers and grandstands were connected and all tickets were purchased from one box office, permitting a fan to conceal where he was going to sit.

“Now the bleachers have their own entrance and ticket office,” he said. “I like to think I’ve helped to popularize them as the best seats.”

He undoubtedly has, sitting there “every day the sun shines,” as he says, in nearly the same spot, his shirt off. An injury during the war cost Veeck his right leg, but that does not stop him from wearing shorts and enjoying the sun. And he is a magnet of attention, signing autographs, chatting with fans, shaking the hands of well-wishers who weren’t even born when his 1959 White Sox gave the city its last trip to the World Series.

“This is my favorite place to watch a ball game,” he said. “The view is the best; and, of course, the company is the best.” He stopped to point out a group of regulars who seemed to be betting on the placement of every pitch—inside or outside, high or low.

“Box seats are full of stuffy people who don’t want to take off their shirts,” said Veeck. “The real fans are here. There’s more knowledge about baseball in the bleachers than in the whole rest of the park.”

Probably true. But not all of the Cub faithful come into Wrigley. Just across the two streets bordering the outfield, on the roofs of apartment houses, the ad hoc contingent congregates. During my week in Chicago the most regularly populated roof was 3706 North Kenmore, on the corner of Waveland Avenue, beyond the line between the left-field foul pole and the scoreboard. While other roofs of this becoming-chic neighborhood showed occasional gatherings, 3706 had between six and twelve fans every day. Weekends reportedly drew upward of twenty.

“Some of those others are really big on parties—Fourth of July, opening-day stuff,” said Richard Scholz of 3706. “We consider ourselves less frivolous, more dedicated.”

He offered in evidence the mix of old and current tenants who spontaneously materialized during the first three innings, as well as several Cub caps and three green wooden seats recently retired from active duty in Wrigley’s grandstand.

“There is a purity to Wrigley that is taken seriously here,” said Scholz. “Sure, we don’t want night baseball--the lights and traffic would destroy our neighborhood—but it goes further. Every change matters. The adding of those beer signs made a lot of people angry.”

The advertisements, placed at the bottom of the scoreboard in 1983, were the first inside Wrigley. The decision to add them was made by the Chicago Tribune Company, which bought the Cubs in 1981, ending, according to the club’s media guide, “the longest continuous operation of a franchise by the same family in the same city in major league baseball history.”

The sale immediately kindled rumors. The most serious—predicting lights, or a new stadium altogether—were fueled by the hiring of general manager Dallas Green, who repeatedly said that to be competitive the Cubs needed night baseball and a park with more seats.

“I think we’re doing all we can to improve revenue without changing the physical look of the park,” said Jim Finks, the Cubs’ chief executive officer, who followed Green in 1983 and who proceeds more delicately on this most delicate of subjects. Changes made by the Tribune Company include a new clubhouse for the team and a fancy stadium club where food and alcohol are served. The company also plans to install executive boxes at press level.

“It’s the last of its kind, and we’re all aware of that,” said Finks. “I can guarantee that everything will remain as it is—no lights, no new park—for the next five years. I wouldn’t guarantee anything beyond that. I wouldn’t guarantee baseball.”

Any threat to Wrigley’s integrity—let alone its survival—seems inconceivable, especially when you’re sitting behind the visitor’s dugout, listening to the first-base coach urge on his runner, or sharing a beer with Bill Veeck in the bleachers. Knowing how long it has all been there, you have to think it will go on forever.

On the last day of my Chicago visit, after a 3:05 game that the Cubs dropped to Philadelphia, I lingered in the seats along the right-field foul line, enjoying the last piece of sun in the stands and watching the cleanup crew sweep mountains of beer cups, nacho holders, and popcorn boxes through the aisles. Suddenly I heard a voice from behind me: “I like this part of the day. They try to get everybody out, but I hide. I like to watch the shadows move across the field.”

It was an old man who had somehow escaped the ushers. I was not surprised. Old men are part of Wrigley, like the steel beams that support the upper deck. Phil Grossman, who sells programs and scorecards at Gate K, is seventy-four; Harry Altman, a program vendor at the front gate, and Glen Reynolds, an usher in the bleachers, are even older. But this was just an old fan, with white hair and thin hands.

“I been coming to this park since the summer of ‘seventeen,” he said. “I was sitting not far from here during the third game of the ‘thirty-two series. I saw the Babe take those two strikes from Charlie Root, all the time the Cubs’ bench raggin’ ‘im. Saw him step out, point to the bleachers, then pop one to the very spot where he pointed.”

He looked around the park. The only sound was made by the pennants on the roof, flapping in the wind. The old man took a breath.

“My grandchildren ask me why I keep comin’ out here,” he said. “I tell ‘em everything else I grew up with is gone or turned to crap. Except Wrigley. Wrigley’s the last.”