Understand that my argument against night games was always an aesthetic argument. Although I admire Citizens United for Baseball in Sunshine and the other Wrigleyville groups that have fought the good fight against lights, I consider their arguments concerning parking and rowdiness a bit tenuous. Having moved away from and then back to that neighborhood in the last year and a half, I can testify that anyone who thinks that parking near a ballpark is bad should try parking near ClubLand and Union. The only difference between yahoos who go to baseball games and yell at umpires and yahoos who go dancing and yell at Madonna videos is that yahoos who go dancing find it easier to buy mixed drinks. The same comparison can be made in any of a dozen city neighborhoods.
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To the sun gods and goddesses in the bleachers, day baseball is tanning. To children, it offers easy and relatively safe access to the sport. It is waiting for you when you come home from work or school; it is comfort to the sick who had to stay home; it is a persistent voice calling out to play hooky on summery afternoons; it is, after all, a source of sly joy to anyone who can remember smuggling a radio to school or to a job to listen to the World Series back when it was played during the day. I grew up coming home from school to watch Jack Brickhouse and the Cubs on television. I saw Ernie Banks’s 500th homer while staying home from classes, and I remember coming home from playing baseball myself to watch Ken Holtzman’s Wrigley Field no-hitter.
Day baseball is no more antiquated than the family farm, and an argument can be made that it is a good deal less trouble to maintain. The Cubs require no government subsidies; Dallas Green said the Cubs had to draw two million to survive, and they have done so in three of the last four years–without lights. In one ballpark in the nation, there was baseball played the old-fashioned way, and it was here, in Chicago. We were lucky.
Wrigley Field’s single-date attendance record is close to 47,000, but that was back in 1948, in the days of folding chairs in the box seats. For the first night game, the attendance was estimated at 40,000, but I’ve never seen it more crowded or felt more bunched-in. The lines at the program stands were long and unruly; naturally everyone had to have an official program. I was cajoled into buying one, then found when I arrived at our seats that the “official program” had no scorecard in it. So it was back down to stand in line again. I finally slapped down 50 cents, grabbed a scorecard, and ran.
In the Cubs’ first bats, Mitch Webster got on base on a single. The game’s elevated stature was then reemphasized by the entrance of Morganna, the Kissing Bandit, who came trotting onto the field from beyond first base. (Evidently the tough ticket market had forced her to buy seats beyond her natural range.) She came bouncing across the field. Ryne Sandberg has long been on her hit list, and Morganna obviously wanted him, and we in turn were cheering for her, but she never had a chance. Security guards had her surrounded by the time she got to the pitcher’s mound. Yet Sandberg, pumped up as any man might be by the sight of Morganna running toward him in seeming slow motion, hit a homer to left, to put the Cubs in front.
This was no more the end of day baseball than it was when they first put the lights atop the upperdeck roof, but at the same time I don’t think anyone would be cantankerous enough to say that things haven’t changed at Wrigley Field and in baseball and in our culture in general. The last ballpark without lights is gone. Be angry at the sun for setting.
