Wrigley Field, Chicago (MLB #21 - Fourth impressions)
With the ivy-covered outfield walls, the rooftop bleachers across the street, the left-field “well” on the playing field, and the Chicago skyline in the distance, this can only be Wrigley Field.
Wrigley Field, along with Fenway Park in Boston, is one of the two most famous (and oldest) stadiums in the major leagues. As a baseball fan, and a fan of baseball history, why haven’t I loved it?
Although this is the first time we’ve been to Wrigley Field on this quest, I’ve actually been here three previous times, and Kerry’s been here once, so I consider this a fourth impression, rather than a first impression. And I’ve got to say, I’m growing to love it.
Wrigley Field, built in 1914 and originally christened “Weeghman Field,” has a long and interesting enough history to be worthy of being a National Historic Landmark (which it is). I’m not going to go into any of the details before the year 2000, when I first attended a game at Wrigley on my 45th birthday.
I was in town for a scientific meeting, and found out that Randy Johnson, arguably the best left-handed pitcher in the history of baseball, was going to be starting for the Diamondbacks against the Cubs in Wrigley for an evening game. I took a taxi there, and was disappointed to find out that because he had a bad back, Johnson would not start, and Mike Morgan, who pitched in the majors for more than a decade but was definitely not Randy Johnson, would start instead. Morgan pitched well enough that the game was 1-1 going into extra innings. My Diamondbacks scored two runs in the top of the 10th inning, but closer Matt Mantei gave up three in the bottom of the inning, so the Cubs won in a walk-off, 4-3. As the Cubs fans celebrated, I hurried out of the stadium and caught a taxi back to my hotel (I wouldn’t realize for 20 years that I’d been incredibly lucky to catch a taxi).
I thought Wrigley was OK, but there were two things that bugged me about it. First, I didn’t like the fact that the concourses smelled strongly of urine. Is it that hard to wash down a concrete concourse, or are there enough people relieving themselves that no amount of hosing it down is enough? Second, I was seated next to a Cubs fan and his young (5 years old?) son, and every time Sammy Sosa, the Cubs’ star at the time, trotted to the outfield or, even better, caught a ball, or, better yet, came to bat, the father gushed to his son about “There’s Sammy!” I’m not sure which of the two was more excited, but they didn’t seem to have much interest in baseball if it didn’t involve Sammy Sosa. Don’t get me wrong, I love Sammy, but there’s more to the game than a single player. In general, the crowd didn’t seem that into baseball.
A few months later, I was at another scientific meeting in Chicago, and this one was a big enough deal that it had activities for spouses and families, so Kerry and the kids came along. One of the social activities was an afternoon game at Wrigley, so we went. I don’t remember the details of the game, but I do know that Kerry came away from the game complaining about the overpowering smell of urine – I’m not sure she’d believed me before.
A few years later, when Kerry was taking care of the non-sports medicine for the Colorado Rockies during Spring Training in Tucson, she saw the wife and young child of a player who had just gone from the Cubs to the Rockies. Kerry asked what she’d thought of Wrigley. She said that they were so glad to be out of Chicago. The Cubs had a room in Wrigley Field that served as a nursery, so the wives could drop off their kids and watch their husbands play, but the room was so grimy that none of the wives would leave the children there. The wives offered to pay to have it painted and cleaned up, but the team turned them down. At the time, I thought, “no wonder it’s been 100 years since they won a World Series.”
In 2009, the Ricketts family bought the Cubs, and things just haven't been the same. For one thing, they hired a general manager, Theo Epstein, who had a history of winning (more on that in a future blog). For another, they invested over half a billion dollars in upgrading Wrigley Field. I thought that just having some pressure-washers would have been a huge upgrade, but they've done much more (and must have invested in some pressure-washers, too).
In 2022, the world was just coming out of COVID-19, and one of the first scientific meetings I went to was in Chicago, in August (actually, it was the same organization that had last had their meeting in the Windy City in 2000). Dan Cavanagh, a friend of mine who is a former radio announcer, was visiting family in the area, so he and I met at Wrigley for an afternoon game. The game itself was a spectacular experience. It was a warm, but not hot, sunny day, and looked like Wrigley is supposed to look. The U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds did a show overhead at many of the between-inning breaks.
There were two potential negatives to it.
One was that the team had recently gotten rid of most of the players who remained from the 2016 team that remains the only Cubs team since the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt to win a World Series. The crowd was really down on the home team, booing whenever they made a mistake (which wasn’t uncommon). Dan and I recognized that the Cubs had gotten rid of a bunch of popular over-the-hill players to make way for a new generation that would again be competitive, but it’s hard to part with heroes.
The other was that I had taken a rideshare to the park, which was easy enough, but I had a devil of a time getting home. As I left the park, I asked various people (team employees at the exit gates, cops in the street) whether there was a place to pick up a taxi or a rideshare, and no one knew anything. Ultimately, by testing the rideshare apps, I found out that they’d pick me up about a mile from the park, if I could get there. Between the time it took me to find this out, and the time it took me to walk, it was 45 minutes before I was in a rideshare.
I didn’t spend much time in any of the concourses, but it was a much better experience than the games in 2000.
Wrigley today
Today, we took public transit. Think of the “El,” although the station closest to our Loop hotel was underground.
The weather was not great (50°F is chilly for someone who’s lived in Arizona for 40 years), but I won’t hold that against Wrigley.
The fans on the “El” were pleasant, somewhat chatty.
The stadium was clean. We had seats in the upper deck, since the game was nearly sold out, and Kerry and I agreed that Wrigley smells infinitely better than it did in 2000.
The fans were into the game. We would occasionally have to stand up, because everyone around us was standing up when the Cubs loaded the bases with two out, or when there was a close play at the plate, or when it got to two out in the bottom of the ninth.
And the appearance of Wrigley really is spectacular. The ivy and the across-the-street rooftop bleachers (now mostly owned by the team) are unique, the view of the downtown Chicago skyline meets my standards for a stadium with a view, and from the upper deck, you can see Lake Michigan.
Getting home on the El involved standing in a line a block long outside the Addison Street Red Line station, but we got into a train within about 15 minutes of when we got to the line. Public transit is clearly the way to go to Wrigley.
I was kind of dreading Wrigley, but I changed my mind. I enjoyed myself, even though my team lost. Today, I thought going to a game at Wrigley Field felt like I'd always been told it was supposed to feel like.
The game: Chicago Cubs 2, Arizona Diamondbacks 0
Between this quest and a handful of games in Phoenix with our season tickets, one or both of us have been to more than a dozen games this year. This may have been the best-played game we’ve seen. In particular, we’re fans of good pitching and defense, and there was good pitching and defense in abundance.
Before the game, the Cubs made a set of presentations, to players on the team who had won a “Gold Glove” as the best defensive player at their position for 2025. They had three, second-baseman Nico Hoerner, centerfielder Pete Crow-Armstrong and leftfielder Ian Happ. Since there are 15 teams, and only nine positions (actually 10, since a Gold Glove is also given to a player who has been outstanding defensively at multiple positions), three on a team means that team is pretty good. Since 2020, there’s also been a Gold Glove awarded to the team that plays the best defense. The Cubs won that, too, so they had four trophies out on the field. The four most important positions defensively are those “up the middle,” the catcher, second baseman, shortstop and centerfielder. The Cubs won two of the four, and their shortstop, Dansby Swanson, won a couple of Gold Gloves earlier in the decade. The Diamondbacks didn’t have any previous winners on the field, although they had one (catcher Gabriel Moreno) who didn’t start, and two recent outfield finalists on playing. I thought it was a good omen, and it was.
Every pitcher was effective. Ryne Nelson of the Diamondbacks, who gave up eight runs while getting only one batter out in the first inning the last time we saw him pitch, was pumping in fastballs on the corner of the strike zone at 95, 97, 99 mph. Happ hit a home run off of him in the second inning, but that was the only run he allowed before leaving with two out in the sixth. Shota Imanaga of the Cubs was even more effective, pitching seven innings without allowing a single run. He was helped by good defense, particularly by Swanson. For the game, 9 of the 27 outs came when Swanson fielded ground balls and threw out the batter. Some were routine, some were very good, and one was spectacular, when he caught a ball while running toward centerfield, spun, and threw in time to beat the runner by a step.
Happ, who has won four Gold Gloves, didn’t do anything great defensively, but he was the Cubs’ entire offense. He hit a home run in the second. The Diamondbacks walked him intentionally to load the bases with two out in the fourth (and got the next hitter out). He doubled in the 6th. Then, in the 8th, he tripled, and scored the Cubs’ second run on a fly ball to left field. Lourdes Gurriel Jr., the Diamondbacks leftfielder who was a Gold Glove finalist in 2024, made a strong throw, and it was on line, but it bounced a couple of feet in front of catcher James McCann, making it a tough play for him, and McCann couldn’t corral the ball and tag Happ. I’m not sure if Happ would have been out even if McCann had caught it, but it was very close, a great play by Gurriel even if it didn’t quite pan out.
Although I was disappointed that my team (and the team for whom a few percent of the other fans had jerseys) lost, it was hard to be disappointed by watching a game played that well.
Ildemaro Vargas
The other story of the game was Ildemaro Vargas, who had had base hits in the first 24 games he played this year, plus the last 3 he played last year, for a total 27-game hitting streak. It’s nowhere close to Yankee legend Joe DiMaggio’s 56 game streak in 1941, but was (note the verb tense) the longest of the 2020s.
Vargas is a fascinating story.
He played his first professional game at age 16, in 2008, but didn’t make it to the majors until 2017.
He’s played in the majors every season since, but never in more than 95 games (out of the 162).
He has changed major league organizations eight times in his career. That’s not the same as saying that he has played for nine different organizations, because three times, the change was moving into the Diamondbacks organization. At least one other time, the Diamondbacks released him from his contract or granted him free agency, and he resigned with them.
In other words, he’s a guy who has played baseball his whole adult life, and has been good enough to stick around as a backup player, but has never been the star.
Until this year.
Last Monday, he was named the National League’s Player of the Week for the previous week. Then, in Friday’s game, he got four hits, raising his batting average to .404, highest in the majors. He’s currently in the top 10 in the majors in all sorts of batting categories. Given his track record, you know it’s not going to last, but you can’t help rooting for him.
Today, he twice hit balls that left his bat at more than 100 mph. I don’t think anyone besides Happ hit more than one ball that hard. But one of those was a fly ball hit to the deepest part of center field, which the centerfielder easily tracked down (it would have been a home run if he’d hit it a little to the left or right of where he did), and the other was a sharply hit ground ball right at Swanson at short, who gobbled it up and had plenty of time (given how fast the ball got to him) to throw to first. So the hitting streak is over, and I’m sure the batting average will settle back down.
I’m betting Vargas will end up spending a few decades as a coach (he's the kind of person who does), most of it in the Diamondbacks organization (since he seems to always end up there).
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