Home Away From Home : A Baseball Bar

He was born near Wrigley Field. And, says Bob (Chicago) Girsch, “I was a left-field bleacher bum for 15 years. I hung out with all the crazies.”

Nowadays, though, Girsch lives in Burbank, 10 minutes from work and eight minutes from the spot that most reminds him of his Chicago home: Tin Horn Flats, a bar frequented by sports nuts homesick for the Windy City. It’s a place equipped with a satellite dish that picks up all sporting events involving Chicago teams, and it faithfully plays them for its patrons.

“Every Sunday morning, they open at 9. We’re out there at 8 a.m. Only Chicagoans would be at a bar at 8 o’clock on a Sunday morning, reading ‘The Bear Report’ (a newspaper covering the Chicago Bears),” reports Girsch, 39, a lumber salesman who lived in Chicago for 30 years before he moved to Burbank about nine years ago.

“At 9, they put on ‘The Mike Ditka Show’ out of Chicago. You can’t believe the way the people are. It’s just great. Everybody’s full of electricity, fired up, ready for the kickoff. You can hear the (bar) crowd yelling a block a way.”

Although Girsch doesn’t think the patrons at Tin Horn Flats are quite as crazed as his beloved bleacher bums, he says he prefers them to the people he’s met at more traditional Southern California bars.

“In the bars here,” he says, “it’s like you’ve got to know the status of people, how much they make, what they’re driving. Back East, we’re all equal. Tin Horn Flats is a beer bar. It’s got sawdust on the floor. A pool table. You don’t have all these prima donnas there. We’re hard-core sports fans. It’s not a pickup bar. It’s not flash and cash. It’s strictly down-to-earth people who come to have a good time.”

And for those who miss the occasionally demented spirit of Wrigley’s bleacher bums, there are always “the cheeseheads.” They’re the local Green Bay Packers fans, says Girsch--guys who show up at Tin Horn Flats on the Sundays when Green Bay plays Chicago because it’s the only place in town they can watch their hometown team on television. Girsch points out that what the Green Bay boosters lack in numbers they more than make up for in flamboyance: The cheeseheads are so-named because they arrive at the bar wearing giant, plastic blocks of cheese on their heads.