Free A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred by George Will

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. Yousee, 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 firstNational 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