Time Out For Sports Talk: Fenway Welcomes Wrigley to the Century Club
Todd: If you are a genuine dyed in the wool fan of baseball to the point that you would travel around the country to visit various ballparks, I suppose you don’t need me to tell you that a visit to Chicago’s Wrigley Field should be at or near the top of your bucket list.
Those of us who have grown up in New England are fortunate enough to have 102-year old Fenway Park right here in our own backyard that we can visit whenever we want, especially now that tickets appear to be more available. But if you ever find yourself traveling through our nation’s midsection, a visit to Chicago is an absolute must to check out the home of the Cubs, a baseball franchise long considered to be the Red Sox’ soul sister (at least until October of 2004).
As an aside, good luck to former Sox GM now Cubs VP of Baseball Ops Theo Epstein in his efforts to try and end another long championship drought, now 105 years and counting (unless you want to already include 2014 as another failed attempt, then it would be 106 long years without a trophy).
Today is Wrigley Field’s 100th birthday. When the ballpark at the corner of Clark and Addison Streets first opened for business on April 23, 1914 it was actually called Weeghman Park, named for Charles Weeghman, owner of the Chicago Federals of the Federal League, the building’s first tenant. When that baseball league folded a year later, Weeghman bought the Cubs and moved them right in. The ballpark officially changed its name to Wrigley Field in 1926 shortly after minority owner William Wrigley Jr. bought the team from Weeghman, who found himself in financially dire straits and had to sell all his stock to raise capital for his other business ventures.
As the late, great Paul Harvey used to say, now you know the rest of the story.
Those of you of a certain age reading this also know that Mr. Wrigley founded the William Wrigley Jr. Company, most known for the creation of such chewing gums as Juicy Fruit and Doublemint. Double your pleasure, double your fun…and I’ve just shown my age yet again.
But back to the ballpark. My own personal visit to Wrigley was back in 1998, the year Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire hit a lot of home runs and then got busted for PEDs a few years later. But sixteen years ago, it was all about their quests to top Babe Ruth’s single season home run record.
I took in two games that summer, the first a night game in the upper deck behind home plate and then the next day in the right field bleachers (the bleachers are a must-sit if you plan on attending a day game at Wrigley), where Sosa’s biggest fans stood up each inning when he trotted out to his position. We might have all been naïve then to what these players were doing to themselves, but there was also a fun innocence to just hanging out in the bleachers on a hot summer’s day and enjoying some baseball. Sosa wound up hitting his 43rd home run that day (of 66 he would hit that season), although his blast wound up landing in the left field bleachers.
Another aspect of Wrigley Field I truly appreciated was the vast amount of leg room in front of every seat. Despite being built only two years after Fenway Park, those Midwest architects apparently had much more forethought than the ones in Boston about the possibility that people might get taller and wider over the course of time.
While I never got the chance to take in a Cubs game from the rooftops of the buildings on Waveland or Sheffield Avenues, I did check out a few of the funky little watering holes on those streets during my visit and recommend anyone else making the trip to do the same. The Red Sox have tried to duplicate that atmosphere in recent years with many more eating and drinking establishments up and down Lansdowne Street, not to mention the opening of Yawkey Way to fans during games.
So happy 100th birthday Wrigley, I hope I eventually get back to the Windy City to watch a Cubs win, Cubs win! Maybe this is the year to strongly consider a return visit, as the Cubs plan to commemorate the ballpark’s anniversary all season with various giveaways and enough throwback baseball uniforms to bankrupt the average fan, were they to buy every one of them.
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