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

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”; thatis, 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. Nothingbut 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 downmagnetically.” Cub fans, who have been spared so few embarrassments, were spared this one.
    Veeck went on to own the St. Louis Browns, from 1951 through 1953.That team