A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (16 page)

George Washington, Sam Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were among our Founding Brewers, and beer was integral to the Internet of colonial America—the communications network of taverns, such as the Green Dragon in Boston, where, on the evening of December 16, 1773, some patriots decided to go down to the docks and toss cases of tea into the harbor. When the nation was born, it needed a national anthem, and it found one by giving new words to what had been a drinking song that sometimes served as a sobriety test: If you could sing it, you could have another tankard of beer. In the 1860s, beer, not milk, became the first beverage to be pasteurized. The reason beer could spoil was that it was alive. It contained a hitherto unknown life-form, bacteria, which could make beer sick—and people, too. Hence the cornerstone of modern medicine, the previously mentioned germ theory.

What America needed was not just better medicine but more fun. Fun-loving Benjamin Franklin had understood this when he’d said, “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” It was not, however, until the nineteenth century, when German immigrants began
arriving in large numbers, that America had a cohort that took fun seriously. The German immigrants were astonished, and not happily, to find that there was no beer culture and, not coincidentally, no culture of pleasure. The German Americans set about rectifying this defect in the Republic by creating beer gardens where people could play cards to the accompaniment of music.

Most beer was drunk in taverns, some of which had basements where ice cut from northern lakes kept the beer cool in the summer. But ice was not always cheap or plentiful, either because of warm winters or because, during part of the nineteenth century, ice was, by weight, America’s biggest export, sent as far as India and China. And American beer that was taken home from taverns in pails would last only a day before spoiling because of the absence of refrigeration.

It was the American preference for one particular form of beer—lager, which has to be brewed slowly and at cold temperatures—that led brewers to drive the development of refrigeration, which made possible a constant supply of beer year-round. It also solved mankind’s problem of food storage and made Las Vegas possible.

Before the mechanics of refrigeration and the technique of pasteurization arrived from Europe, beer had been brewed in batches of seven to ten barrels a day. Now, suddenly, there were the technological prerequisites for the emergence of beer barons. Emerge they did, and some of their German names—such as Adolphus Busch, Gottlieb
Heileman, Frederick Pabst, Joseph Schlitz, and Bernhard Stroh—would eventually be emblazoned on the labels of billions of beer bottles and cans.

By the turn of the twentieth century, when the beer business was booming enough to finance advertising (“Budweiser gives punch to the lunch”), most beer was sold in “tied houses”—taverns tied to particular breweries. Soon there were many more taverns than could survive by simply selling beer. So they branched out, doing a brisk business in gambling and prostitution. This, in turn, fueled the Prohibition movement, which was so vividly embodied in Carry Nation, who, as Daniel Okrent writes in
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
, was “six feet tall, with the biceps of a stevedore, the face of a prison warden, and the persistence of a toothache.” This hatchet-wielding scourge of taverns used a vigorous persuasion technique called “hatchetization.”

On the defensive, brewers argued in vain that distilled spirits, not beer, were the real alcohol problem. Perhaps that was so, but during Prohibition, which arrived in January 1920, spirits fared better than beer because beer is bulky and therefore difficult to smuggle into the country or on your person. As support grew for repealing Prohibition, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union warned that “no nation ever drank itself out of a depression.” To which the nation responded: Maybe not, but drink might make the Depression more endurable. Prohibition ended in 1933, but serious damage had been done: America had lost much of its taste for beer. Beer consumption did not
reach pre-Prohibition quantities until the 1970s. Which was certainly not Wrigley Field’s fault.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, baseball did much to help the nation shed some of its Puritan earnestness and learn to play, or to relax by watching others play. In the second half of the twentieth century, baseball helped the nation reacquire its thirst for beer. In 1950, Heileman’s Old Style lager became not just the only beer then sold at Wrigley Field but the official beer of the place. Although Heileman is now owned by Pabst—these familiar names do endure—Heileman’s association with the Cubs is older than Anheuser-Busch’s with the St. Louis Cardinals, who today play in their third ballpark to bear the Busch name. Wrigley Field, like all ballparks but more than some, performs a function that taverns used to perform: It brings people out of their homes and together for a social drink. Home refrigerators helped prompt the shift of beer drinking from taverns to homes, and by the time Prohibition ended, one-third of all beer sold was not from a tap but in a bottle. By 1940, half was. By 1960, 80 percent was sold in bottles or cans. Today, millions of bottles and cans are emptied in the North Side tavern that also is a ballpark.

To the delight of fans who work while the sun shines, night games came to Major League Baseball on May 24, 1935, in
Cincinnati’s Crosley Field. This was the handiwork of Larry MacPhail, grandfather of Andy MacPhail, who would be president of the Cubs through twelve seasons, 1994–2006. By the 1938 season, two of the fourteen ballparks (the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns shared Sportsman’s Park, and the Philadelphia Phillies and Athletics shared Shibe Park) had lights. If the Cubs had had lights that year, the most dramatic home run ever hit by the home team would have been drained of much of its drama.

On September 28, 1938, the Cubs were half a game behind the first-place Pirates as the two teams continued a three-game series at Wrigley Field. Late in the afternoon of an overcast day, the game was tied 5–5 as the Cubs came to bat in the bottom of the ninth, and the home plate umpire announced that the game would be called at the end of the inning if the Cubs did not score. At 5:37
P.M
., with two outs, no runners on base, and no one able to see much of anything, Gabby Hartnett hit a two-strike pitch for what would ever after be known as the “Homer in the Gloamin’.” The next day the Cubs pummeled the Pirates 10–1, earning the right to be trounced by the Yankees in a four-game World Series in which they were outscored 22 to 9.

In 1936, when the two leagues had separate governance under their own presidents, the American League gave its members permission to have night games. Until 1942, each American League team was allowed to have only seven a season. This restriction was relaxed in 1942 to accommodate people working long hours in war industries. By 1948, when lights were installed in Briggs Stadium in Detroit,
only Wrigley Field was without them. Soon the absence of lights became a symbol of a superior sensibility to some baseball “purists.” Never mind that P. K. Wrigley had bought those materials for installing lights after the 1941 season but then had donated the steel to the war effort.

When, however, the Cubs got to the National League play-offs against the Padres in 1984, the introduction of lights to Wrigley Field became inevitable. Commissioner Peter Ueberroth knew that Major League Baseball’s national broadcast partners, having paid steep fees in anticipation of prime-time audiences, would not accept daytime games. So Ueberroth said that in future seasons, any Cub postseason games might not be played at Wrigley Field. Four years later, on the evening of 8/8/88, the lights were switched on for the first night game at Wrigley, which was rained out in the third inning.

To the surprise of no one other than dismayed purists, most fans—impurists?—like night games. The dispensers of beers in Wrigleyville bars probably do not. They would prefer games to begin at, say, five
P.M.
, so that fans leaving the ballpark around eight would not need to hurry home. Lights have, however, rendered anachronistic the portion of Lee Elia’s rant about Cub fans being, necessarily, people who “don’t even work.”

Fourteen months later, Game 1 of the 1989 championship series between the Cubs and the San Francisco Giants was played in Wrigley Field and was broadcast by Vin Scully, who has been broadcasting Dodgers games (first Brooklyn, then Los Angeles) since 1950.
Before the game, he waxed poetic about Wrigley Field:

She stands alone at the corner of Clark and Addison, this dowager queen, dressed in basic black and pearls, seventy-five years old, proud head held high and not a hair out of place, awaiting yet another date with destiny, another time for Mr. Right. She dreams as old ladies will of men gone long ago. Joe Tinker. Johnny Evers. Frank Chance. And of those of recent vintage like her man Ernie. And the Lion [Leo Durocher]. And Sweet Billy Williams. And she thinks wistfully of what might have been, and the pain is still fresh and new, and her eyes fill, her lips tremble, and she shakes her head ever so slightly. And then she sighs, pulls her shawl tightly around her frail shoulders, and thinks, This time, this time it will be better.

Maybe. On the other hand, perhaps the old lady of the North Side is like Miss Havisham, the sad, spectral old woman in Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations
. She had found, or so she thought, Mr. Right in a swain named Compeyson. But at eight-forty
A.M
. on her wedding day,
as she was dressing for the ceremony, she received a letter from him, revealing that he had defrauded her of her inheritance from her father, a successful brewer, and would not marry her. She responded by having all her clocks stopped at twenty minutes to nine. The table set for a banquet was left untouched, and she never changed out of her wedding dress. It eventually catches fire and she dies from the burns.
This is Miss Havisham as seen through Pip’s eyes:

She was dressed in rich materials—satins, and lace, and silks—all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white.… I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its luster, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure on which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone.

So, no. Let us avoid thinking of Wrigley Field as a melancholy old lady. It—she—does, however, have one haunting memory of what might have been. It concerns an ugly episode that should be remembered whenever Cub fans get
misty-eyed and natter on about the “Friendly Confines.” Around ten
P.M
. on October 14, 2003, friendliness was suddenly in short supply at the corner of Clark and Addison.

The Cubs were leading the 2003 National League Championship Series against the Florida Marlins, as the Miami Marlins were known then, three games to two. Ahead of the Marlins 3–0 in the top of the eighth inning of Game 6, with a Marlins runner on second base, the Cubs were five outs from their first World Series since 1945. For Major League Baseball, that would be a matchup made in heaven: David against Goliath, the Cubs against the Yankees, perennial losers against the definition of the word “dynasty.” Then a Marlins batter lofted a soft fly ball down the left-field line where the seats are only a few feet from the foul line. Cubs left fielder Moises Alou, his glove hand raised, crossed the foul line and reached for the ball. So did some fans, including Steve Bartman.