5.4.01 CHICAGO CUBS vs LOS ANGELES DODGERS
 |
We all know about Wrigley. The brick. The ivy. Baseball heaven, right? Paradise on earth. The greatest fans in the world cheering on the most beloved team in the world in the most beautiful ballpark in the world. For those of us who have never been there, it’s something we hear about so often that we’re forced to take it on faith. I mean, it sure looks nice on TV. Our Cubs-fan friends seem credible enough. And all that stuff about not having night games until 1988, and throwing the home run balls back, and Harry Caray singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” and the “Cubs win!” flags, well, it all sounds pretty great, you know?
Nevertheless, I took care to scale back my expectations a couple notches before visiting Wrigley for the first time, if only because that’s what years of unwittingly buying into hype teaches one to do. My caution was unnecessary.
I’ll say it up front: Wrigley Field is all that. It is, simply, a perfect place. Its essential architectural rightness is the kind of thing that cannot be contrived, but is attained only through a magical confluence of form, function, and years of organic evolution. I don’t know that when architect Zachary Taylor Davis started drawing plans for the park back in 1914 he set out to create something that would be revered nearly a century later; I’d be more inclined to think that he was concerned first and foremost with getting some grandstands up as cheaply and quickly as possible with the materials at hand. If those materials happened to be brick and mortar, or spectacularly intricate webs of lattice girders holding up the second deck, well then, so be it. Bill Veeck thought to build the bleachers and scoreboard in 1937, and planted some ivy along the outfield wall that same year. Not much has changed since then except the lights, and while I can sympathize with purists’ complaints about the demise of daytime-only ball, the lighting towers themselves are gorgeous.
More than anything else, though, it’s something about the scale of the place that makes it wonderful, enormous in that way that any ballpark seems to a child who’s never before seen so many people in one place, intimate in a way that no new major league ballpark will ever be again. It’s a scale that, coupled with its surroundings—an ordinary North Side neighborhood, lined with trees, two-story apartment buildings, restaurants, bars, and shops—makes Wrigley entirely welcoming and ideally suited for use by human beings. Maybe not for the international corporations and multimedia consortiums to which Major League Baseball seems increasingly bent on catering, to the exclusion of all others, but you know what? Fuck them. Wrigley Field itself makes a more powerful case for the silliness of such strategies than I could given a thousand baseball diaries.
After the game in Cincinnati I drove down to Louisville and picked up my old buddy Rob, and the next morning we headed up to his boyhood home of Chicago. I have observed that there are two distinct types of Cubs fans in the world. The first group is made up of people like my friend John, who accepts his Cubs fandom as a sort of penance, and has simply resolved to make the best of it. If the Cubs are playing well, John refuses to acknowledge it, for he knows all too well the disastrous effect that the declaratory utterance, Hey, the Cubs are doing pretty good right now! will have on his team.
Rob, however, belongs to the second group. Members of this sect regard the remotest hint of success by their club as an infallible harbinger of imminent Cubs World Domination, and they don’t care who knows it. As you might imagine, then, with his boys boasting the best record in the National League, Rob was lording it over me a bit on the drive up. “Shoulda brought my broom” jokes, the whole nine yards. I was less worried about the matchup than excited about the prospect of watching the two best teams in the NL facing off for three consecutive days.
Game one of the series turned into a Chan Ho Park vs Kevin Tapani pitchers’ duel, with nothing but donuts on the board after six and a half quick innings. In the seventh, though, Park gave up singles to Bill Mueller and Sammy Sosa and then bent over in pain after throwing one wide to Rondell White (he was suffering from back spasms, we’d learn later). The Cubs then netted three runs off reliever Matt Herges on a combination of singles by White and Damon Buford and a sacrifice fly by our old friend Todd Hundley.
The Cubs would tack on another run in the eighth off Greg Olsen (didn’t we get rid of that guy?), and their bullpen combo of Kyle Farnsworth and Jeff Fassero preserved the shut-out for Tapani. Oh well.
FINAL SCORE: CUBS 4, DODGERS 0
FOOD CONSUMED: The Chicago dog at Wrigley Field is a thing of pure beauty. A sizable frank served with grilled onions on a poppy-seed bun, topped with mustard (I skipped the ketchup, thanks), sweet relish, freshly diced tomatoes and sliced pepperoncinis, it is perhaps the best hot dog I have ever eaten at a ballpark. As Sammy would say, “Remarvelous!” Also some peanuts, and a couple Old Styles (natch).