A New Day Just May Dawn at Wrigley Field

It’s hard getting used to Wrigley Field with lights. The old place also has a new press box, providing unaccustomed luxury. There’s talk of a $35 million shopping mall being built across the street, with a pedestrian bridge connecting to the park. Still, the venerable ballyard continues to withstand its “improvements.”

It’s the same Wrigley, where imagination and reality merge. Murphy’s Bleachers, across from the actual bleachers, posts the magic number separating Chicago’s beloved Cubs from the National League Eastern Division title above its fine wood bar. A three-story-high painting of Harry Caray adorns a brick house on Addison Street; microphone in hand, he is obviously talking while fingering his big black-rimmed glasses. It’s a beer ad captioned: “Hall of Fame Harry. Holy Cow!”

Inside, Caray in the tanned flesh from all that day ball chortles about the glories of Wrigley. Who can argue at high noon on a crystalline day, when one can smell the cooking, take the sun on the third-base side with old men sitting behind the Cubs’ dugout (one has a row of cigars jutting from the breast pocket of his worn sport coat) or climb to a view of Lake Michigan with sailboats bobbing in the blue-green water?

But can the Cubs win the pennant, or even beat out the St. Louis Cardinals in their division? Their faithful -- the obscure and the famed (Mike Royko, Bill Murray, others) -- believe they can, always a perilous position with the root-at-your-own-risk Cubbies. “This is a different Cubs’ team from 1984,” a TV reporter is saying into his camera, out on the Wrigley grass before a game. That year, the Cubs blew a two-game lead in the playoffs. “Eighty-four was a veteran club. Eighty-nine is a younger club.” Apparently, he doesn’t go back to 1969, when the Mets roared past, and doesn’t look to have been born in ‘45, when the Cubs lost in seven to Detroit in the Series.

Yet here they are, 3 1/2 games in front with what could be a winning blend of farm-developed youth (probable rookie-of-the-year Jerome Walton, Shawon Dunston, last season’s runner-up rookie-of-the-year Mark Grace), a Hall of Fame candidate (Ryne Sandberg) and some trade pickups having streaks of their lives. Take, for instance, reliever Mitch “The Wild Thing” Williams, with 34 saves, and Luis Salazar, only recently acquired but with three game-winning hits. Tuesday afternoon, after Williams homered Monday night against the Mets, two women paraded a banner in the stands back of first: “Let The Wild Thing Swing.”

“I’ve never been on a club before where so many players have contributed to winning,” says Don Zimmer, an aging Popeye of a manager who was banned in Boston almost a decade ago but who’s hailed here for such unorthodox inspirations as starting the runners on a 3-2 pitch with the bases loaded and only one out.

Four times this season he has tried this maneuver and four times he’s gotten a run. Three times the opposing catcher has jumped up ready to tag the runner from third already standing next to him, but it was ball four. The time a Cubs batter hit the ball in that situation he stayed out of a double play. For this, Zimmer could be mayor, except he’s busy. And his strategy is nothing new under the noonday sun. “I did the same thing twice in Boston,” he says, spitting. “You have to do it with the right batter and the right pitcher.”

“You’re very duplicitous as a manager,” a man remarks to Zimmer.

“Hey, Zim, don’t let them say that about you.” That’s Caray, listening in.

The Cubs themselves are beginning to believe. Zimmer himself says, “It’s been a unique season for us and the fans,” sounding awfully close to “We’ve got it.” (Nobody here wants to think that the last three games of the season -- in St. Louis -- could make ’89 another Cubs disaster). “We have so many qualified people,” Zimmer says, “you can’t wait to get them in the game.”

Of course, the player he loves most is Sandberg, with 30 home runs and a vacuum cleaner of a glove around second base. “I could name a lot of good ones,” Zimmer says, holding forth on the Cubs’ third-base bench, “but I don’t know how anybody could be any better. I can’t name a better one. Pretty tough to name a better one. Closest guy I would name, the guy who stands out in my mind, is when Jackie Robinson played second base.”

“Hey Zim,” comes a call from Caray, leaning over the railing, wanting his own interview with Zimmer.

“Be right there,” Zimmer says.

Caray laughs, happy to wait. In fact, he’s more an interviewee than interviewer, sought out by press and TV for his gospel of sunshine and grass.

“I’m from Prime Time,” a man with a microphone says to him by way of introduction.

“Don’t try to impress me,” Caray rasps.

“If you want to talk, I’ll talk.”

Caray says he’ll talk to anyone who wants to talk Cubs.

Like Zimmer and his Sandberg-Robinson pairing, Caray says Walton reminds him of great Cardinals outfielders he has known, Curt Flood and, before him, Terry Moore. When the Cubs win, the superlatives fly like home runs with the wind blowing out.

And when Zimmer comes up the steps for his one on one with Caray, Caray still does much of the talking. Zimmer listens. Caray has the mike. What a question! Does it have an ending? Holy Cow!

“It’s been a season of 100 percent effort by the Cubs,” says Grace, “and it’s not going to stop now.”

“You think I practice hitting to the opposite field?” asks Williams, pitcher turned slugger after his first major-league hit landed in the bleachers Monday night for three runs that finished off the Mets.

Williams came here from Texas as part of a once-unpopular deal because it included Rafael Palmeiro going to the Rangers. Last season in Texas the often-wild left-handed Williams was 2-7 with a 4.63 ERA, and 18 saves. Few here are asking whether he’s a long-term stopper or one-season wonder. The crowd rose as one to roar approval of his unlikely hit.

“So now I’m a .200 hitter. One for five.”

It’s been a season of surprises for the Cubs (Walton hitting .297, unheralded pitcher Mike Bielecki getting off to a 14-3 record, Sandberg hitting five home runs in five games to tie a club record set by Hack Wilson in 1928) and solid play (strong defense down the middle and starting pitchers Greg Maddux, Rick Sutcliffe, Bielecki and Scott Sanderson all winning in double figures). The Cubs have stayed aloft without much help from Andre Dawson, creaky in the knees at age 35 but not to be discounted. He has demonstrated how, as this week when he tagged up after a medium fly ball to Mets’ center fielder Juan Samuel and went from second to third. Take that, Mets.

The Cubs are a much-loved team. While they have broken hearts over the decades and had a losing record 10 of the last 11 years, they nevertheless have added fans by the millions, because of cable television. Signs adorn Wrigley’s neighborhood bars (“Good luck in the stretch drive”); the team lifts a city’s psyche. But more, Caray’s voice carries across America a story of love in the afternoon. How many saw the play and heard his cracking voice describe it last week when the Cubs picked off a Montreal runner at first base to end a game on a note of insanity?

Sandberg credits “good team unity.” Smith the rookie praises Dawson for being a “role model.” Caray calls Zimmer’s work (a mutual admiration society, here) “one of the greatest managing jobs ever done in baseball.”

Yet the world-championship flag has never flown in Wrigley’s breezes. Ernie Banks’s uniform number (14) is imprinted on the flag that flies from the left-field foul pole; Billy Williams’ 26 flies from the right-field pole. A blue flag with a white “W” is run up above the center-field scoreboard after a victory, a white flag with a blue “L” after a loss. These have long revealed the game’s outcome to homebound commuters on the El. But when the Cubs won it all, in 1907 and 1908, Wrigley Field wasn’t here -- that’s how long it’s been.

Having waited for an inevitable collapse this season, Cubs fans now believe the team will win something -- division, pennant, Series. Oh, the danger of believing. “You never know about these things,” cautions Zimmer, wiser from having watched his Red Sox after winning 99 games crushed by Bucky Dent’s ’78 playoff-game home run.

But if the Cubs don’t win it’ll be a shame: for those who pace the sidewalks each afternoon waiting for the gates to open, for the woman who can’t forget the three lost Series of the ‘30s and the man who missed the ’45 Series, for the rooftop sitters and the family visiting from Dubuque, for Zimmer, close once more, for the whole blessed bunch.