A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (5 page)

Golenbock says that under Weeghman in 1916, the Cubs became the first team to adopt the policy of allowing fans to keep balls batted into the stands. This concern for improving the fans’ ballpark experience would become the defining aspect of the Cubs’ ownership under another Chicago businessman who in 1916 also bought a portion of the team’s shares. He was a chewing-gum magnate named William Wrigley.

Wrigley arrived in Chicago with his net worth—thirty-two dollars—in his wallet and lived to build the Wrigley Building, the first major office building north of the Chicago River, at the southern end of what now is known as Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile. In every fiber of his being, Wrigley was a promoter.
Wrigley’s father made soap, which William was on the road selling, from a wagon drawn by a four-horse team with jangling bells on its harness, as he said, “before I was thirteen.” He gave purchasers of his soap samples of free baking soda—until there was more demand for the baking soda than for the soap. Then he began selling
the baking soda and giving customers free chewing gum—until demand for the chewing gum became so strong that Wrigley decided to manufacture and sell it. And to promote it with expensive advertising campaigns.

Wrigley was excessively fond of saying, “Baseball is too much of a sport to be a business and too much of a business to be a sport.”
To be sure, the Supreme Court, in a dotty opinion written in 1922 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, had secured Major League Baseball’s exemption from antitrust regulation by declaring that baseball is not a business engaged in interstate commerce.
But as the late Jim Murray, a sports columnist for the
Los Angeles Times
, said, “If baseball is not a business, then General Motors is a sport.” Baseball has always been a business, and one that punishes owners who treat it instead as a hobby.

In the 1920s, when Chicago’s population grew 25 percent, two-thirds of the city’s residents had been born abroad or were the children of parents who had been. For this polyglot city with so many newcomers, baseball—rooting for the home team in your new hometown—was part of the Americanization process. Learning to talk baseball was part of the catechism of the civic religion. In Chicago, the language of baseball could be learned by listening to the radio.

Today, when the word “connectivity” describes life in a world in which everything is instantly available to everyone everywhere on portable devices, it is impossible to recapture the magic of radio in the 1920s, when a hotel could claim to be truly posh if it provided a radio in every room. For rural Americans, radio ameliorated the loneliness of
empty spaces. For urban Americans, many of whom were not long separated from rural roots, radio assuaged another kind of loneliness: the anonymity of crowds. Listeners to particular programs became members of consumption communities, which were electronic neighborhoods of shared experiences, information, and diversions. This was particularly so for urban women tending to households before the postwar influx of women into the workforce during and after the Second World War.

The first radio broadcast of a major league game was produced by Pittsburgh’s KDKA in 1921 during the Pirates pennant race with the Giants. In Cincinnati, a radio station broadcast the first game of the 1924 season.
Radio stations were multiplying rapidly, from 382 in 1922 to 681 in 1927. The number of radios in use in America rose from 60,000 in 1922 to 1.5 million in 1923 to 3 million in 1924 to 16.6 million in 1932. Stations were ravenous for content, and Chicago stations had, in William Wrigley, a businessman with hundreds of hours of content he was eager to supply without charge.

When Wrigley decided to give away Cubs baseball to Chicago radio stations, the stations decided the price was right.
“By mid-1929,” Ehrgott writes, “most major Chicago stations had made Cub home games their staple, effectively eliminating afternoon alternatives from Chicago airwaves seventy-seven afternoons a year.” The fact that the stations were not interested in paying the costs of broadcasting away games indicates that they were more attracted by free content than they were convinced that a large audience was eager
for baseball. But the audience was growing, and not just in the city.
One farmer within range of a Chicago station wrote a thank-you note to the Cubs: “Don’t stop it. I have a radio in the field with me. I plow one turn, sit down for a cool drink out of the jug and listen to the score. It’s grand.”

The 1920s also saw the birth of ballyhoo and the manufacturing of celebrity. This was a result of the interrelated burgeoning of radio, tabloid journalism, advertising, public relations, and sports superstars like Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange, Bill Tilden, and Man o’ War. The age of celebrity was both cause and effect of the most socially transformative technologies of the 1920s: radio and cinema. About radio, William Wrigley was ahead of his time. Most baseball owners saw radio as a threat, fearing that it would cause people to follow the team from the comfort of their couches rather than the grandstands of the home field. Wrigley the chewing-gum marketer saw radio as a way to whet fans’ appetites for a day at the ballpark. His policy about broadcasts was: The more the merrier. At one point, five different stations were carrying home games. One of the play-by-play announcers was a very young Russ Hodges. The career he started in Wrigley Field would have its most memorable moment in New York’s Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951, when he was working for the Giants. Bobby Thomson’s pennant-winning home run—“the shot heard ’round the world”—elicited from him the most famous home-run call in baseball history: “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

In 1927, the year Ruth electrified the nation by hitting sixty home runs in American League ballparks, the Cubs became the first National League team to pull more than a million fans into their park. In the 1920s, Americans generally, and Chicagoans especially, had an insatiable appetite for sports.
This was dramatized on the city’s lakefront in 1927 when more—many more, according to some reports—than one hundred thousand spectators poured into Soldier Field, then just three years old, for the heavyweight fight between champion Gene Tunney and former champion Jack Dempsey. Not all those at ringside with Al Capone were locals. Among the luminaries who were there to see, or be seen, were Bernard Baruch, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Gloria Swanson, Princess Xenia of Russia, and American royalty in the form of captains of industry.

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.”