A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (9 page)

Born on December 5, 1894, he was sent to a tony prep school, Andover. He was, his father hoped and assumed, destined for Yale. Instead, Philip left Andover before graduating and entered the family business, running the Wrigley chewing-gum factory in Australia. An able businessman, he had also inherited his father’s faith in advertising. And he had, as many people successful in business do, inordinate faith in his expertise beyond his core business. His business was chewing gum. Baseball was a hobby. And it was not his favorite hobby, which was tinkering with motors.

Charlie Grimm, who played for the Cubs for twelve seasons and who managed them for P. K. Wrigley four times, said that concerning baseball, Wrigley was “absolutely wrong about everything.” For example, Wrigley’s 1938 brainstorm was to hire a University of Illinois professor to measure the reflexes and physical characteristics of the Cubs’ players, who were not amused.
“It was,” Wrigley said, “a coincidence that he was the head of the psychology department.”

Loyalty to a Chicago friend caused Wrigley to resist the newfangled idea of farm teams, where talent could be cultivated. Wrigley’s father was among those who recruited Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to be baseball commissioner, and Landis, said the younger Wrigley, was opposed to farm systems: “Because of our high regard for the Judge, we had no farm system.”

P. K. Wrigley, reluctant owner. (
photo credit 1.9
)

When World War II military conscription depleted the major league rosters, Wrigley was the prime mover behind the creation of the All-American Girls Professional
Baseball League.
This venture inspired the 1992 movie
A League of Their Own
, in which Tom Hanks famously says something Cub fans dispute: “There’s no crying in baseball.” There is, however, apologizing.
An ad Wrigley placed in Chicago newspapers in 1948 read in full:

The Cub management wants you to know we appreciate the wonderful support you are giving the ball club. We want to have a winning team that can be up at the top—the kind you deserve. This year’s rebuilding job has been a flop. But we are not content to just go along with an eye to attendance. We want a winner just as you do and will do everything in our power to get one.

Not exactly.
Winning was not central to P.K.’s business plan, which he explained this way: “Our idea in advertising the game, and the fun, and the healthfulness of it, the sunshine and the relaxation, is to get the public to see ballgames, win or lose.” Although in 1941 he was prepared to sacrifice some sunshine for artificial light, the attack on Pearl Harbor prompted him to donate to the war effort the steel he had purchased for Wrigley Field lights. And then after the war, he seemed to revert to his 1935 belief that night baseball was “just a passing fad.”

Jim Brosnan, a pitcher who wrote two books about his major league experiences,
The Long Season
and
Pennant Race
, spent four seasons with the Cubs in the mid-1950s. He said of Wrigley,
“His slogan was ‘Come Out and Have
a Picnic’—and the other teams usually did.” But Wrigley gave his full attention to cosmetic details. He told
Sports Illustrated
, “I’ve always preferred
CHICAGO
rather than
CHICAGO CUBS
on the uniform.
CUBS
ends up on the stomach, and that emphasizes it. Just
CHICAGO
across the chest makes them look huskier.” You can’t make such stuff up. Or this: He believed “we’re in show business” and thought fans were being deprived of excitement because Cubs first and third basemen did not field grounders hit in foul territory. After he complained to his manager, the first and third basemen began exerting themselves to make stops that were as strenuous as they were pointless.

Dennis Eckersley is in the Hall of Fame, and his bronze plaque depicts him wearing an Oakland A’s hat. What sort of people traded him from the Cubs to Oakland in 1987? One of the members of the Cubs’ senior leadership at that time was Salty Saltwell, who P. K. Wrigley, in one of his last acts as team owner, made general manager in 1976. A year earlier, Saltwell had been in charge of Wrigley Field concessions. Buying hot dogs, selling players—what’s the difference?

In 1958, Wrigley explained why he was prepared to sacrifice the family name:

The idea is to get out in the open air, have a picnic. We mention that the things people like to do, to enjoy, are all in the ballpark. We stress the green vines on the wall. We stopped calling it Wrigley Field. Instead we call it Cubs Park. You
see, people want to go to a park. We are aiming at people not interested in baseball. These are fans we want to get. Dyed-in-the-wool fans want us to tell about batting averages. Why should we tell the dyed-in-the-wool fans? They know where everything is, what’s going on.

There you have it. Much of the Cubs’ history is explained by the celebration of Wrigley Field—or, if you prefer, Cubs Park—as a haven for “people not interested in baseball.”

A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines
.
—
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT

It is not a good sign for fans when their team’s venue is better known for the attractiveness of its flora than for the excellence of the athletes who have played there. Which brings us to the subject of Wrigley Field’s ivy.

Its origin story is told by Bill Veeck Jr. with characteristic verve, and perhaps equally characteristic license, in his autobiography
Veeck as in Wreck
, one of the indispensable books for any baseball fan’s library. In 1917, when Wrigley Field and Bill were both three years old, his father, William Veeck Sr., became president of the Chicago Cubs. He had written several articles for the
Chicago American
in a literary genre that has, by now, a long tradition—the What Is Wrong with the Cubs? school of analysis. Veeck Sr. had explained, frequently and perhaps a bit obnoxiously, what he would do were he running the franchise. The team’s owner, William Wrigley, said, in effect: Well, then, smarty-pants, come aboard and do it.

The ivy arrives in September 1937. (
photo credit 1.10
)

Which Veeck did for sixteen years, during which, his son was to write, the Cubs won their first pennant in twenty-one years. (Bill Jr. was mistaken: The Cubs won in 1929, just eleven years after their previous pennant.) Bill Jr. also wrote that under his father the Cubs became the first major league team to draw a million fans in a season. He was wrong again. In 1927, the Cubs became the first
National League team to draw more than a million, but the Yankees had done that in 1920, with 1,289,422. The Cubs’ 1927 attendance of 1,159,168 was, however, the record for a Chicago team until the Cubs drew 1,485,166 two years later. The Cubs held the Chicago record until 1960, when the White Sox drew 1,644,460 under the ownership of … Bill Veeck Jr.

But we are getting ahead of the story.

At age ten, Bill, who attended school with the sons of Ring Lardner, a star sportswriter for the
Chicago American
, began accompanying his father to the ballpark. By the time he was fifteen, his duties included mailing out tickets for Ladies’ Day games, and P.K. hired him as an office boy, paying him eighteen dollars a week. The younger Wrigley was not a great builder of Cub teams, but as Veeck says, “He made the park itself his best promotion.” In doing so, “he taught me perhaps the greatest single lesson of running a ball club.” This lesson, which might be one reason why the Cubs have been so badly run, was explained by Veeck this way:

Wrigley compared the Cubs’ won-and-lost records with corresponding daily-attendance charts and showed me that the two followed a practically identical pattern. His conclusion was inescapable. A team that isn’t winning a pennant has to sell something in addition to its won-lost record to fill in those low points on the attendance chart. His solution was to sell “Beautiful Wrigley Field”; that
is, to make the park itself so great an attraction that it would be thought of as a place to take the whole family for a delightful day.

This became the Cubs’ conscious business model: If the team is bad, strive mightily to improve … the ballpark. In that spirit, Veeck got Wrigley’s permission to install atop the flagpole on the center-field scoreboard a crossbar with a green light on one side and a red light on the other, visible to passengers heading home on the elevated trains in the late afternoon. The green light announced a victory, the red a defeat. But neither victory nor defeat mattered as much as the venue for both.

Pursuant to Wrigley’s plan to have a beautiful setting for ugly baseball, Veeck suggested that they borrow an idea from Perry Stadium, in Indianapolis, where ivy adorned the outfield walls. Wrigley responded enthusiastically, “And we can put trees or something in the back.” Except he did not want the trees outside the park; he wanted them in the bleachers. And although Wrigley seems to have had too much patience when trying, sort of, to grow a good team, he did not want to wait for saplings to grow big enough to shade the steps leading up to the scoreboard. So tree boxes large enough for full-grown trees were built on each step. These required concrete footings, which, in turn, required new steel supports for the bleachers, to withstand the weight. The trees were planted and, Veeck recalled, “a week after we were finished the bleachers looked like the Russian steppes during a hard, cold winter. Nothing
but cement and bark.” The wind off Lake Michigan had stripped the leaves from the trees. So new trees were planted. And the wind again denuded them. The forestation of the Wrigley Field bleachers was eventually abandoned. The footings for the trees had cost $200,000. That year, 1937, the Cubs’ team payroll was about $250,000.

Veeck had planned to plant the ivy after the season. However, the day before the team returned from a long road trip to end the season with a short home stand, Wrigley told Veeck he had invited some friends to the next day’s game to see the ivy. But Veeck had not yet bought it. A specialist at a nursery was consulted. He said ivy could not be deployed in one night. Veeck asked what could be. The specialist answered with one word: “Bittersweet.” He was not a philosophic merchant commenting on the human condition; neither was he summing up the experience of being a Cub fan. Rather, he was recommending a plant with that name. So that night Veeck and Wrigley Field’s groundskeeper strung light bulbs along the outfield wall to illuminate their work, and by morning the wall was entirely covered with bittersweet. In its midst they planted ivy, which eventually took over the wall.

Veeck was also involved in installing something that today is still very much what it was then: the green hand-operated scoreboard. The designer of this had a dreadful idea. Veeck wrote, “Instead of having lights switching on and off, like all other scoreboards, his model featured brightly painted eyelids which were pulled up and down
magnetically.” Cub fans, who have been spared so few embarrassments, were spared this one.