At the All-Star break, I reached the same conclusion the Cubs must have come to: that I had never really recovered from my late start on the baseball season. Of course, unlike the Cubs, who sleepwalked their way through the first half, I had the Bulls as an excuse. Still, at midseason, even though I had monitored the Cubs and White Sox in the standings and the box scores and more than a few times in person, I remained for the most part unacquainted with the main characters and plot lines of the two teams; I hadn’t even been out to see Jack McDowell pitch, and he probably has been the best baseball player in the city this year.
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Inside, the ballparks open outfield–no upper deck on the bleachers–made for a natural stage on which the lightning played. It slashed at the horizon through the early innings and kept the 42,295 fans who braved the rain gasping and on the edge of their seats, even though the game itself was as sloppy as the weather. At one point, the clouds began breaking up and produced a sky directly overhead like that found in a Maxfield Parrish painting–all pink, puffy clouds glowing in the sunset almost as if they were backlit, which of course they were. Right after that, however, the rains came again, and delayed the game about 20 minutes.
Greg Hibbard was on the mound for the Sox, with his pitching motion learned, it seems, from a pitcher in a video game. He begins his stride down the mound, pauses almost with his foot in the air as his arm catches up with his body, and delivers the ball to the plate. He has had an erratic season, and he was erratic in this game, allowing two runs in the second and another pair in the fourth before settling down enough to get the game to the bull pen.
Paul Assenmacher did his best Bobby Thigpen imitation in the ninth; the Cubs survived to win 8-5. As the fans left elated (I heard one call it “one of the best games I’ve ever been to,” while another said, “I almost didn’t come; what a mistake that would’ve been!”), Dibble answered reporters’ questions with his head buried in his locker, mumbling between his knees. I walked back to my car with the moon waxing low over Wrigleyville’s apartment buildings.
I felt fully caught up. The Sox began this week only three games out of first, playing scrappy baseball that has produced 44 straight crowds of 30,000 or more. The Veeck is a hopping, happening place, and as I walked back to my car, parked on a street west of the stadium, then turned onto Halsted and drove home without a hint of a traffic jam, I decided I had finally solved how to get to and from the new stadium.
