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This Week:
- A Wrigley Field escape
- Dialogue: the economics of sports stadiums
- Places & Culture
- Weekly Digest
"Have a good day," bids the bank teller, and I decide not to tell him how much better a day I expect to have than he will. While he remains in indoor confines on a summer-like afternoon, I will be in the Friendly Confines, soaked by sunshine. It's quarter to noon on a Tuesday, and I am off to Wrigley Field on a flawless 80-degree day in mid-April.
Such recreational indulgence while the rest of society dutifully labors reminds me of what historians say about baseball: that the game caught on at the turn of the twentieth century as agrarian compensation for urbanization—a sanctuary of grass and play relieving spectators from the noise and grime of their factories. This pastoral imperative endures in a very different age, to alleviate the monotony of our increasingly technological working lives. Indeed, of all of our Lord's commands we disobey, surely one of the most grievously ignored in a frenzied society is his mandate to rest. Consider the source: Christ had a mere three years into which to cram his ministry, and yet in the Bible, he's continually stealing away for a nap on the boat. I imagine him today idling off the shore of Lake Michigan. A mile away, Wrigley Field beckons as the next best thing.
I want to offer this reassurance to the man behind me on the Red Line as it wriggles toward Wrigley. "I'm going to a Cubs game," he announces into his cell phone. After a presumed groan on the other end of the line, he chuckles but gets defensive: "It's not my tickets! I found out about it at 7:30 this morning. I'm wearing dress pants and an Oxford shirt. At least I don't have my tie on."
I spill with the crowd out of the train and onto Addison Avenue, into a chorus of barking scalpers, past the statue of Harry Caray on the corner, which venerates the play-by-play legend whose exuberance for the Cubs was as unmistakable as his saucer-sized eyeglasses—the man's very name exults "Hooray!" Around the stadium, on Waveland, I find a dozen frozen men staring at the back wall of the park, ball gloves on their hips, in a trance. Their idleness catches my eye amid the streams of people, and I realize they are waiting for home runs from batting practice to wing their way. I sit on the curb and eat my lunch under their protection as they snare each fugitive fly ball.
Inside, the grounds crew fusses over the field like a cartoonist bent over an easel. They douse the infield to stifle its dust, turning the sand the color of cappuccino. Wrigley's most famous lawn ornament—the ivy that crawls the outfield walls-is still brown and scraggly in early spring, like a hairdo in the morning. My hair will soon match it as the wind whips eastward over me in the upper deck. It unfurls the red, white and blue flags lining the roof, testaments to sustained futility, each marking a year long ago when the Cubs—imagine! —won the pennant.
The crowd's first stirring roar drowns out the last bars of the national anthem and rouses my resting heart-rate. Sammy Sosa is the first to spring out of the dugout; he sprints toward his right field post as though pursued by a bee and hoists his fist to the right field bleachers. Among today's desultory ballplayers, who play with all the passion of a tax accountant and are equally preoccupied with annual income, Sammy is a joyous exception. The bounce in his step expresses his contagious gratitude for being in such a ballpark on such a day.
Soon I float out of my seat when Sosa slaps a shot toward left-center and the wind deposits it over the wall for his 501st career home run and a 1-0 Cubs lead. (Baseball fans, like a congregation at the opening hymn, always rise in unison when the ball is hit deep, as though there were an unspoken ban on sedentary observation of a homer.) It turns out I have picked a particularly prolific game of Sosa's to watch, like eating in the office lounge on the one day somebody brought doughnuts. He finishes with a homer, two doubles, and 3 RBIs.
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