Wrigley Field : Lights Dim a Baseball Tradition

This is a story of money and greed. Of tradition and religion. Of politics and passion. Of sex and sin.

It is the story of how they came to turn the lights on at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

On Monday, Chicago’s beloved North Side team, the Cubs, will play their first home game at night under artificial lights.

To hear some sports fans talk about it, the event will be a turning point in history, a monumental event that could change the character of a city, if not an entire nation.

Getting the Point

For others, particularly those who don’t fully appreciate the subtleties and profundities of the game, the importance of the situation in Chicago may be hard to comprehend. After all, every other major league team has played night baseball in their own parks for decades. In fact, the last city to hold out against night games was Detroit--and the Tigers put in lights 40 years ago.

But that, say students of the game, is exactly the point.

In Chicago--and indeed in cities and towns around the country--pundits have been out in record numbers in recent months, waxing philosophic on the sociological and psychological implications of the last major league ballpark in America to give up baseball strictly in the sunshine.

Ted Nelson, a bartender by trade but who is now unemployed, tried to explain why lights had been installed at Wrigley in the first place, given that the Cubs had done just fine without them for nearly three-quarters of a century.

“I don’t even know where to begin,” said Nelson, who lives three blocks from the ballpark. “Let me get a pack of cigarettes.”

A Matter of Business

Repeating a story that Chicagoans and sports fans now know by heart--though the details may vary depending on who is doing the telling--Nelson explained that lights were installed at Wrigley this spring because the Fortune 500 corporation that owns the team, the Tribune Co., the commissioner of baseball and executives of network television stations all were pushing to hold at least some games at night.

If the Cubs were ever in a pennant race or the World Series (the latter hasn’t happened in 43 years), the commissioner and the executives argued, the team couldn’t possibly play in its own park. After all, without lights there could be no night baseball, and without night baseball there could be no prime-time broadcast and no rich sponsors. The unthinkable would then have to happen. Chicago’s home games would have to be played in St. Louis or some other Midwestern city. Or worse, the Tribune could simply pick up and build a new fully lighted stadium in the suburbs.

Which is why Nelson, who sees 30 or 40 games a year, came around to thinking that lights weren’t such a bad idea.

And anyway, he said, there would still be day games. Out of 81 home games, the Tribune has agreed to a city ordinance limiting the Cubs to only eight under the lights this year and 18 in foreseeable future seasons--which leaves 63 games a year in the sunshine. Not a bad average compared to, say, the Dodgers, who will play only 21 day games at home this year.

Not everyone is so sanguine about the change.

Lights at Wrigley are significant to many people because they symbolize the end of important traditions, said Steven A. Reiss, a professor of history at Northeastern Illinois University, author of several books on baseball and editor of the journal Sport History, published by the North American Society for Sport History.

A Shift of Power

The addition of lights, he said, represents a power shift from community interests to corporate concerns. It symbolizes the victory of profit over values. It reflects the growing artificiality of many aspects of American life.

Jim Langford, a former Chicagoan who now lives in Indiana and is director of the University of Notre Dame Press, agrees, although he himself is not entirely opposed to the addition of lights at Wrigley. And Langford should know about such things. He has written three books about the Cubs: “The Game Is Never Over,” “Cub Fan’s Guide to Life: the Ultimate Self-Help Book” and “Runs, Hits and Errors.”

Langford likens Wrigley to a “cathedral,” a “temple.” Going there, he said, is a “religious experience.”

“For fans, not just in Chicago, but in a 200-mile radius encompassing a large part of the Midwest, and for people in cities all over the country, Wrigley is Mecca. And Mecca has been defiled. . . .

“The park is the spiritual center for devoted Cub fans,” Langford continued. “It’s not the Cubs, God knows.”

Team Is Still Bombing

It’s a team that hasn’t won a World Series since 1908 and hasn’t won a National League pennant since the end of World War II.

Cubs supporters are, even as baseball fans go, something of an oddity in their undivided devotion.

Last year, for example, the team finished last in its division and yet, miraculously, still drew about 2 million fans, many of whom were observing Chicago’s time-honored tradition of playing hooky from jobs and schools to spend an afternoon in the sunshine.

In Washington, D.C., there is a Cubs’ fan club that all but celebrates the mediocrity of the team. It is named the Emil Verban Society in honor of a perfectly average second baseman who had a perfectly ordinary three seasons on the team between 1948 and 1950.

There are 500 or so members of the club, said Bruce Ladd, a lobbyist for Motorola, who founded the organization some years back. One of the best known members is President Reagan.

A Trip to the West

“The Cubs used to train on Catalina Island, you know,” Ladd said, speaking on the phone from his Washington office recently. “President Reagan tells a story about working for a Des Moines radio station and being sent out to California to cover spring training in the early ‘30s. He never came back. The way we figure it, the Cubs really put him on the map.”

The President may not be making public pronouncements on what, if any, views he has on lights in Wrigley, but a number of Chicagoans, mostly neighbors around the park and a few opportunistic politicians, have not hesitated to speak out on the subject.

The naysayers have argued that nighttime crowds will create monumental parking problems, foster crime, produce an unbearable amount of noise and litter, and promote urination on trees and fornication in bushes. And all of this in what is otherwise said to be a quiet, residential neighborhood on the real estate upswing.

“It’s no Beverly Hills,” said Bob Greene, a local syndicated columnist. “But it’s a place becoming gentrified by Yuppies.”

Neighborhood organizers, wise to the ways of Chicago politics, have pulled out nearly every political stop and legal maneuver imaginable and have managed, for nearly seven years, to delay what others have come to view as inevitable. The group is named Chicagoans United for Baseball in Sunshine--or CUBS, as they like to call themselves.

Not Giving Up

Although the CUBS now acknowledge that there is no longer anything to be done about the Monday game, the neighborhood activists have by no means given up their fight and claim to have a couple more tricks up their sleeves, including a plan to resurrect an ancient city ordinance that allows districts to vote themselves dry. And baseball without beer, they say, would surely be a blow to the fans, day or night.

“It’s been like David fighting Goliath,” said Charlotte Newfeld, an artist and designer who lives in the neighborhood and has been devoting most of her time recently to running CUBS.

Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and interviewer, isn’t so happy about nighttime baseball, but then he isn’t exactly enthralled with the Cubs, either.

Terkel, who is perhaps best known for his interviews with ordinary Americans in “Hard Times” and “Working,” had just returned from WFMT-FM where he broadcasts the “Studs Terkel Show.” He acknowledged, rather adamantly, that he prefers the White Sox, Chicago’s other team on the grittier South Side of town. “I loathe the Cubs. . . . At heart I’m a Giant fan back in the days of John McGraw,” the manager of the New York team in the 1920s.

Just Like It Was

Wrigley Field goes back that far, too--even further. While most of the old baseball parks have either been torn down (Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, Ebbetts Field in Brooklyn) or aggressively updated (Yankee Stadium in New York), Chicago’s Wrigley Field looks, by all accounts, practically the same as it did in 1914 when it was built and certainly like it was a half century ago, just after its last major renovation.

As many admirers have noted, Wrigley is not a “stadium” but a ballpark whose outfield fences are covered with ivy and where fans sit so close they can hear the players talking and can smell the scents of freshly mown grass on a sunny day.

“It’s one of the two or three most beautiful parks in baseball. Everyone knows that,” said Roger Angell from his office at the New Yorker magazine, where he rhapsodizes about baseball and other lesser matters.

In his latest book, “Season Ticket,” Angell dubbed Wrigley “the Smithsonian of baseball.”

Like other devoted fans of the sport, Angell argues that the idiosyncrasies of ballparks are important to the game and that the traditions that make baseball baseball are important to the fans. Because lights and night games were not traditionally part of baseball, it is surely worth preserving at least one team that has held out against the march of time and the demands of TV, he said.

Part of Civilization

A fictitious character in Philip Roth’s “Great American Novel,” put it another way: “If the distance between the bases were to be shortened by as little as one inch, you might just as well change the name of the game. . . . Boys and girls, take away the Rules and the Regulations (of baseball), and you don’t have civilized life as we know and revere it.”

George Will, a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who works in Washington but grew up a Cubs fan, finds such arguments a bit precious for his taste. He is one fan who is looking forward to night games.

Twenty-five years from now, most of the major league games ever played will have been played at night, Will snarled into the phone from his home in suburban Washington, shortly after returning from the Democratic convention last month.

Will said he did not want “to commit sociology in public” but nonetheless did not hesitate to offer up his own theory of why Cubs fans had become so exercised over the issue of lights in Wrigley.

It has to do with Chicago’s “persecution complex,” Will declared. Ever since the early 1950s when New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling trounced the Cubs’ hometown in a series of wickedly funny articles titled “Chicago: The Second City,” Chicagoans have suffered under the sense that someone is always out to get them, whether it’s Al Capone trying to take over the business of the city, or an upstart writer from New York trying to do it in, or insensitive corporate slugs trying to ruin its favorite pastime.

Psychological Injury

According to humorist Art Buchwald, just being a Cubs fan can have a profound psychological impact on a person. When the Cubs were once on a winning streak, back in 1984, Buchwald took note of the fact that his friend Will was getting morose and nervous.

“When he wasn’t around, we discussed his sudden change in personality,” Buchwald said.

“One of the pundits had a theory. ‘I don’t think George is able to deal with success. He’s so used to the Cubs’ losing. . . .

Buchwald’s thinking pretty much sums up a lot of people’s feelings about lights in Wrigley.

“For a while the Cubs were at least unique because they only played ball at home in the daytime,” said Nelson, the bartender. “Now we can lose at night like everyone else.”

Many people take a more erudite view of what it means to love baseball and to grieve over the death of one of its traditions.

In the history of the nation, even in the history of the city of Chicago, putting lights in Wrigley may, on one level, be a relatively minor matter. It’s nothing, for example, compared to losing a franchise, acknowledged Reiss, the history professor at Northeastern Illinois University who edits Sport History.

Question of Values

But, he said, there have always been a number of myths associated with baseball. The game is thought to reflect what was best about American society; it “touches base” with the central values of democracy: Everyone can go to the park. Everyone who is good enough can make the team. Though you may be only one individual who plays only a small role in society, your cooperation contributes to the team as a whole.

“Those are the lessons baseball teaches us,” Reiss said. To do away with any one of the traditions of baseball, he said, threatens and undermines the basic symbolism of the game for many Americans.

Not for Mike Royko. The feisty columnist, who has at one time or other worked for three major newspapers in Chicago, said he thinks “this whole story has gotten out of hand.” It’s “a silly flap,” one of the most “overblown stories” he can remember.

Though Royko now works for the Tribune, the newspaper that is owned by the same Fortune 500 company that owns the Cubs, he has made a career of lambasting the powerful, and as far as he is concerned, the Tribune Co. has done everything it could to make night games a pleasant experience, not only for Wrigley’s fans but its neighbors as well.

The company even offered to let people come see a practice game under the lights and turn the proceeds over to charity. Several thousand fans paid $100 a seat for the honor of being there.

Tickets Hard to Get

And interest in the first real night game is running even higher. Tickets have long since been sold out and reports from Chicago are that scalpers are getting $500, even $1,000 a seat.

George Will said he’ll be flying in from Washington but declined to comment on how he will manage to get a ticket, except to say that it is “a state secret.”

Mike Vasilevich, manager of Sluggers World Class Sports Bar, a neighborhood establishment with indoor batting cages, said he wouldn’t miss the game for anything. What’s more, he won’t have to. He has a friend who has pair of season tickets.

Charlotte Newfeld will be there too, but not inside the ballpark. The CUBS have organized a neighborhood watch for that night. “We’re not out to be Guardian Angels,” she acknowledged. Rather, members of the organization will be taking down complaints as “evidentiary material” in case the neighborhood decides to pull a grand slam legal maneuver and file a nuisance suit against the Cubs’ owners.

But Studs Terkel won’t be anywhere near the ballpark that night. “Don’t you understand?” he roared, “I loathe the Cubs.”

And neither will Roger Angell.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think it’s an occasion to celebrate. . . . It’s a day of some sadness. Not tragedy, but sadness.”