A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (13 page)

The rise of the White Sox to temporary baseball supremacy in Chicago in the 1950s began in 1951, with the arrival on the South Side of Saturnino Orestes Armas Arrieta Minoso. Minnie Minoso, as he was known, was a Cuban who integrated Chicago baseball two years before Banks got to Wrigley Field. Banks came from the Monarchs in September 1953. Second baseman Gene Baker, also an African American, came to the Cubs three days
later. They signed Baker partly because he was a gifted player, but also because in those days players slept two to a room on the road and it was assumed that a black player had to have a black roommate.

At that time there was, it is important to remember, uneasiness all around. When Banks had left the army, Abe Saperstein, the owner of the Harlem Globetrotters, had asked him to play with the team in a game.
Banks said that when Saperstein invited him to sit down and talk about the opportunity, “I’d never sat down next to a white man, and I wasn’t sure what to do.” Different African Americans had different coping strategies for navigating the changing social terrain. Frank Robinson, arriving in the big leagues with the Cincinnati Reds shortly after Banks came to the Cubs, brought a prickly ferocity that served him well. Banks’s unshakable, even preternatural, amiability served him even better.

Banks’s signature words as a professional athlete were: “It’s a beautiful day, let’s play two!” But when he was a child in Dallas, his father had to bribe him with pocket change to get him to play catch. At Booker T. Washington High School in that city’s segregated school system, Banks was a football, basketball, soccer, and track star. In that time and place, however, athletic proficiency was not, for an African American, a reliable ticket to a professional career. So at age seventeen, Banks began playing baseball with an African American barnstorming team that paid him fifteen dollars a game. One of the greatest black players, Cool Papa Bell, spotted Banks and signed him for the
Monarchs. Banks returned to them after being drafted into two years of service in the army, and in the summer of 1953, when Banks was twenty-two, the Cubs signed him and soon brought him to the North Side.

He had 35 at bats in 10 games, with 11 hits, 2 of them home runs. In 1954, he played in all 154 games and hit 19 home runs. Then came one of the most remarkable six years of slugging in major league history. His home run totals were:

1955 44

1956 28

1957 43

1958 47

1959 45

1960 41

His major league contemporaries in the second half of the 1950s included future Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson, and Duke Snider. Snider hit more home runs in the 1950s than anyone else in either league. In the second half of the decade, however, Banks hit more home runs than any of them. In 1955, the year he hit a record five grand slams, he switched to a lighter, thin-handled bat and changed the idea of what a shortstop could do at the plate.

Since the 1917 retirement of the Pirates’ Honus Wagner, the greatest shortstop in baseball history, potent hitters had rarely played that position. Before Banks, no National
League shortstop had hit even 25 home runs in a season. The NL shortstop home run record was 23, by the Giants’ Alvin Dark in 1953. Only one American League shortstop, Vern Stephens of the Red Sox, a right-handed hitter taking aim at Fenway Park’s Green Monster wall down the short (310 feet) left-field foul line, had hit more: 29 in 1948, 39 in 1949, and 30 in 1950.

Then along came Banks, who, like Henry Aaron ninety miles north, used extraordinarily strong wrists to whip a light, thin-handled bat through the strike zone. “His wrists,”
said a teammate, “go right up to his armpits.” Although in 1961 Banks would be moved to first base and would play more games at that position than at shortstop, he blazed the path for slugging shortstops like Cal Ripken and Alex Rodriguez. What is especially remarkable is that Banks did this when it did not make much sense for pitchers to throw him strikes.

In 1955, the most common Yankees lineup had Yogi Berra, a hard-hitting catcher, batting behind Mantle. The most common Braves lineup had future Hall of Famer Eddie Mathews (512 career home runs) batting in front of Aaron. The most common Dodgers batting order had Duke Snider batting in front of future Hall of Famer Roy Campanella, who in 1955 hit 32 of his 242 career home runs and won his third Most Valuable Player award. Who was behind Banks in the most common 1955 Cubs batting order? Ransom Jackson, a.k.a. Handsome Ransom. He hit 103 home runs in a ten-year career. Banks has been faulted for not “working the count” to get a lot of walks. But what
would have been the point—to hope Jackson would drive him in? In 1959, Banks became the first National League player to win a second consecutive MVP award. In the most frequent Cubs batting order that season, he batted in front of Walt Moryn (101 home runs in eight seasons).

Bill James, in the first version of his
Historical Baseball Abstract
, published in 1985, ranked Banks the fortieth best player of all time. By the time James’s 2001 version appeared, he ranked Banks seventy-seventh. James cited the fact that over his career Banks hit sixty-eight more home runs at Wrigley Field than on the road. This, James says, “makes him among the most fortunate home run hitters in history.” James presumably means that Wrigley is a hitter-friendly ballpark. It certainly is when the wind is blowing out, which many people assume is the norm in the Windy City. But during the five seasons from 2008 through 2012, the wind blew in 57.4 percent of the time, it blew out 24 percent, and there were either crosswinds or no wind the rest of the time.

Were this myth a fact, it is unlikely that in 1999 the
Sporting News
would have ranked Banks thirty-eighth on its “Baseball’s Greatest Players” list or that he would have been elected to the thirty-member “Major League Baseball All-Century Team.”

After the Braves’ third baseman Eddie Mathews, Banks was the second infielder, other than first basemen, to hit more than five hundred home runs. It is rare in baseball history that one player has been, as Banks was for a decade, the only reason—the only baseball reason—for fans to go
out to see the home team. And through it all, Banks was unfailingly cheerful. (To someone with Durocher’s sensibilities, Banks was maddeningly cheerful.)

Banks’s record of five grand slam home runs in a season was broken when the Yankees’ Don Mattingly hit six in 1987. So the only major league record Banks still holds is 2,528 games played without ever appearing in postseason competition. But through it all he played hard. Look again at the 1953 scouting report on Banks. Note the right side of the ninth line down, the space for assessing “attitude.” Scout Hugh Wise said: “Very good.” Quite right.
In 1958, an opposing manager, Jimmy Dykes, noted, “Without Ernie Banks, the Cubs would finish in Albuquerque.” True enough.

On March 31, 2008, the statue of Banks in his upright stance, his bat almost perfectly perpendicular to the ground, was unveiled at Wrigley Field. The inscription on the base read, “Lets play two.” Two days later, the sculptor came to Wrigley early in the morning and added an apostrophe.

Getting things not quite right is something of a tradition around Wrigley Field. Another statue outside the ballpark is of broadcaster Harry Caray, who sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during thousands of Wrigley Field seventh-inning stretches and almost always sang it wrong.
He sang “take me out to the crowd” rather than “with the crowd” and “I don’t care if I ever get back” rather than “if I never get back.” It was almost as though even off-the-field errors somehow authenticated the Wrigley Field experience. Caray was one of three famous baseball people to come from the Italian section of St. Louis. The other two were catchers: Joe Garagiola, who had a better career in broadcasting than as a player, and Yogi Berra. In 1945, Caray became the radio play-by-play broadcaster for the Cardinals and, briefly, for the St. Louis Browns, too. In 1953, the Cardinals were bought by August Busch II of the Budweiser brewery dynasty.
According to Golenbock, Caray was fired by the Cardinals in 1969 for a reason that never became public knowledge:

Detectives hired by the Busch family discovered a string of telephone calls from Harry to the wife of August Busch III, Gussie’s son. They intuited that Harry, whose reputation for drinking and partying was legendary, was having an affair with this woman. Harry never denied it. All he said was, “I never raped anyone in my life.”

Having broadcast Cardinals games for twenty-five years, Caray did Oakland A’s games for the 1970 season, then moved to the Chicago White Sox for eleven seasons. He moved to the North Side for the 1982 season, and the WGN superstation made him a national celebrity, perhaps second only to Ernie Banks as emblematic of Wrigley Field.

Nearly forty years after he first experienced it, Mike Krukow, now in his third decade of broadcasting San Francisco Giants games, still fondly recalls the unique pleasure of playing at Wrigley Field. In a successful fourteen-year pitching career (124 wins, 117 losses), he spent his first five full seasons with the Cubs. The night before his first day as a big leaguer—September 6, 1976—he slept fitfully. In the morning, he rose early, grabbed his equipment bag bearing the logo of his last minor league team, the Wichita Aeros, and stepped out of his hotel and into a cab. “I said to the driver the two words I had been waiting all my life to say: ‘Wrigley Field.’ She said: ‘How do I get there?’ ”

He got there, was given a uniform with the number 40, and stepped out into the Friendly Confines to stretch and run sprints. While he was jogging with a Cub veteran, a fan in the bleachers began shouting, “Hey, Forty, what’s your name, man?” After a few such shouts, the Cub veteran told Krukow, “Just tell him to buy a program.” So the next time Krukow ran past the fan and the fan repeated his shout, Krukow yelled back, “Go buy a program, meat.” To which the fan replied, “I did—and you ain’t in it.” After that, Krukow told the Cubs’ clubhouse man, “Give me any number but fucking 40.” He became number 39.

That first day at Wrigley Field, Krukow was told there
was already a president of the Krukow Fan Club. He recalls that every Cub, no matter how new or obscure, had a fan club—the membership of which consisted, he says, of all the presidents of the other players’ fan clubs. He’d been paid $1,050 a month in Wichita, and in Chicago the next year he made the major league minimum—about $22,500, as he recalls it. He could not afford to live in the city, so he had to commute from the suburbs. Since all the games took place during the day, he was in rush hour both ways. Today he says, with mock indignation, “It was like you had a
job
.” But because Cub players were so special in the city, he earned $500 for each of three personal appearances, which was serious money in those days before baseball became rich.

In 1981, his last season with the Cubs, they were so dreadful (38–65), he believes that if a players’ strike had not shortened the season, the Cubs might have broken the 1962 New York Mets’ record of 120 losses. More than three decades later, he seems almost wistful about the missed opportunity.

Because Krukow pitched on May 13, 1979, he missed a chance to play in one of the most memorable games in Wrigley Field’s history. On May 17, the ballpark lived up to—or perhaps down to—its reputation as a purgatory for pitchers. The major league record for runs scored in a game had been set there fifty-seven years earlier, on August 25, 1922, when the Cubs defeated the Phillies 26–23. That record still stands, but the Cubs and the Phillies made a valiant effort at topping it on May 17, 1979.

The game began with Dennis Lamp on the mound—briefly—for the home team. He lasted a third of an inning. Before he could get the second out of the first inning, he surrendered two home runs. Two three-run home runs.
As his wife settled into her seat in the top of the first, she said, “Where is he?” He was already licking his wounds in the clubhouse, where he would soon be joined by a succession of shell-shocked pitchers as the farce unfolded over four hours and three minutes. The Cubs came to bat in the bottom of the first trailing 7–0. They finished the first inning trailing 7–6.