Wrigley Field in Chicago turns 100 years old tomorrow. It was built on the site of a former seminary. The taverns along Clark Street got too loud for the aspiring pastors trying to study, so the church sold the land and the baseball team left their original home on the west side of the city and moved in.
There is a library full of books on the place and even more and better stories passed along through the years. My grandfather, the Irish lawyer, taking his eldest daughter, my Mom, out of school to watch the Cubs play a game in the World Series in the 1930’s. Which wasn’t that long from the time Bill Veeck planted the ivy on the outfield walls that flows into me sitting in the bleachers not far from Veeck, no shirt and wooden leg propped up in front of him. All time’s boundaries erased on a summer day looking out on the green fields of hope.
The end game was always gonna be my pal Larry, who first brought me to the place, and I sitting in lawn chairs along the right field line, reaching out to snag foul balls and then toss them to kids in the stands.
One of our finest, Bonnie Hunt, once said, “Wrigley Field is one of the most romantic places on earth. And she was right.
Doesn’t mean that the charlatan’s that have always populated baseball, the pasty white rich kids who think they own what’s timeless—till they don’t—get in the way. There is no shortage of scumbags and lily livered empty suits in baseball. The proxy class war of hating the Cubs having now devolved into something akin to kicking a sick puppy. How do you hate something so brilliantly mediocre?
And when you do hate it—you miss this:
You miss looking, through the upper deck, at the orange and blue streaked western sky in late August. On a Sunday afternoon. The season almost over.
Who knows, maybe you are almost over too, Like the guy who sang this song, the one that went,
Do they still play the blues in Chicago?
When baseball season rolls around.
And you think, looking at that sky,
Play ball.