Bulldozers Would Put Wrigley Fight in a Different Light

Relax, baseball fans.

I know Monday night was traumatic. Two baseball teams played a night game at Wrigley Field. Under lights. You’re still in shock.

You are saddened and disillusioned at baseball’s brazen sellout, angry that the game would abandon one of its hallowed traditions for the sake of money. You feel your shrine has been desecrated.

Buck up, fans.

They just lit up the place. They didn’t carpet it or remodel it. Best of all, they didn’t bulldoze it.

Let me tell you a little story about Wrigley Field, a different Wrigley Field. Once upon a time there was a Wrigley Field in Los Angeles. It was a charming ballpark with ivy-covered walls. It was the home of a minor league team known as the Los Angeles Angels.

The Angels were a Chicago Cubs farm team, so the ballpark here was designed to resemble--and was named after--Chicago’s Wrigley Field. The L.A. Wrigley, built in 1925 at the corner of 41st and Avalon (then South Park Avenue), featured an elegant clock tower as tall as a 12-story building, double-decked seating along both foul lines, and, in later years, ivy-covered walls.

There were homes behind the walls in left and center fields. When a player hit a home run, he hit a real home run. The ball would sail over the ivy and into somebody’s back yard. If you sat in the upper deck, you would often see whoever lived in the house come out his or her back door to collect the souvenir.

For all I know, these people lived in constant terror of being skulled by a baseball while gardening or watching Milton Berle on TV. For all I know, they all hated baseball, and had cellars full of baseballs that they didn’t know what the heck to do with.

But as a kid watching games at Wrigley, I couldn’t even comprehend the colossal good fortune of living in a house where home runs landed in your back yard.

By the way, that Wrigley Field had lights.

Now, with all this Cubs’ stuff in the news these days, people are getting downright weepy about the death of day baseball.

It will be OK, I assure you. Even with lights, Wrigley Field ain’t the Astrodome. It’s Wrigley Field with lights.

I went to my first real ballgame at L.A.’s Wrigley Field, at age 8 or 9. It was a night game. Under the lights, the field and ballpark were beautiful. I couldn’t have been more awe-struck by the spectacle if they had wheeled out Ben Hur chariots and raced to the death.

I went to more night games at Wrigley, and to many day games. In my memory, you didn’t lose much at night, aesthetically. In fact, the place had even more charm under the lights. The grass was greener at night, the chalk lines and the uniforms were whiter, the players faster. The neighbors who came out to harvest home run balls might turn on the back-porch light and pad into the dew wearing robes and slippers.

The Dodgers started playing in this town in ’58 and the Angels--and cross-town rival Hollywood Stars--had to leave. Wrigley Field was used by the major league Angels in their first season of existence, 1961, but the park was too small--26,000 capacity--for a big league team.

So Wrigley was torn down, blasted and bulldozed into dust, hauled away in dump trucks. I assume the home run houses went, too. I guess it just wasn’t practical to save Wrigley Field for youth baseball, concerts, prizefights, football games, things like that.

The empty lot was turned into low-income housing.

So there are worse fates that can befall a ballpark, fans.

I didn’t like the idea of installing lights at Chicago’s Wrigley Field. But I also thought it was a lousy idea to stop putting running boards and rumble seats on cars.

I sympathize with your sorrow.

But I can’t hop on your bandwagon of outrage, fans. I can’t join the mourning. Not yet.

Call me when the bullies of baseball and local politics gang up and try to install AstroTurf or AstroIvy. Call me when someone decides it’s unsafe for home runs to sail out onto Waveland Avenue and they try to put up a plexiglass shield. Call me when they start discussing a dome to keep out the Lake Michigan wind.

Call me when they try to neonize the old scoreboard, or add three more decks to the stadium and increase seating capacity to 140,000.

Call me when you hear the distant rumble of bulldozers.

Call me when they try to pave paradise, put up a parking lot.

Until then, fans, sit back and enjoy your ballpark.