- baseballhotcorner.com
- Wrigley Field: A great place to suffer for the past 100 years.
I visited Wrigley Field for the first time on a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1982. I was five and accompanied by my dad. He was a Detroit Tigers fan and I had no previous interest in baseball, but it was understood we would root for the Cubs because we were north-siders (well, northwest suburbanites), even though I secretly thought their opponents, the Pirates, had a better team name.
This year Wrigley Field turns 100. There will be speeches and more celebrations and battles between the Ricketts family and the city. Already there are at least seven histories of the old ballpark, looking back on the mostly bad old days. I have had the dubious joy of reading two of them: George Will’s A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred and Stuart Shea’s Wrigley Field: The Long Life & Contentious Times of the Friendly Confines. Both cover roughly the same events, in very different styles.
(Shea, for the record, doesn’t delve into the psychology of Cubs fandom, although he does tackle the race question and its impact on the Cubs, who stunk so bad in the 50s and 60s they even drove fans away from Beautiful Wrigley Field.)
