A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (19 page)

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-field 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.

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.