In the bleachers at Wrigley Field, on days when Cub phenomenon Kerry Wood pitches, about 20 season-ticket holders participate in a pool. Everyone contributes a fiver and randomly picks a number from a hat. Whoever chooses the number of strikeouts Wood rings up that day wins.
Ah, just another day within “The Friendly Confines.”
For most fans, sitting in the bleachers is about much more than attending a baseball game. It’s about spending an afternoon or evening with several hundred of your closest friends.
“Everybody here knows everybody else,” says Stephanie Leathers, 56. “Everybody loves the Cubs and respects the game. Everything I know about the game I learned out here. These people are the real fans, not those folks in the boxes.”
On Sunday a gentle wind blew steadily off the lake, cooling sun-drenched fans who came to see the Cubbies take on the New York Mets in the last of a four-game series. Leathers kept a tally of Wood’s strikeouts on the back of her scorecard. The 20-year Wrigleyville resident has been a die-hard Bleacher Bum since her initiation to the team on May 17, 1979.
“It was my first game, a 23-22 loss to the Phillies,” she recalls of a day when home run balls peppered the bleachers. “After that, I was hooked.”
In fact, Leathers became so enamored of the bleachers and its occupants that eight years ago she began publishing a monthly newsletter to document the milestones in their lives.
“Bleacher Banter,” which is filled with gossip and “family” news, is her labor of love for about 300 subscribers. Although Leathers charges a nominal fee, she says that she loses money every issue.
“Someone,” she says, “like maybe a senior who can no longer attend games, will say to me, `I don’t know what I’d do if you stopped publishing the newsletter,’ and I can’t let that person down.”
Gary Stromquist, 40, of LaGrange, says Leathers is his kind of people.
And what kind of people is that?
“Good people, working stiffs, folks who will sit out here even in crappy weather,” says Stromquist, whose portable six-beer carrying case makes him a fan favorite. (Vendors do not walk around with beer in the bleachers; fans must go to food stands to purchase alcohol.)
Stromquist, who has a U.S. Navy tattoo on one arm and a catcher’s mitt attached to the hand of the other, becomes indignant at the suggestion that fans in the bleachers may imbibe a little too much.
“That’s what those yuppies think,” he says scornfully, nodding toward the box seats behind home plate. “I’ll have one beer too many on occasion. But then one of my buddies will drive me home.”
In fact, what Bleacher Bums dislike the most, other than yuppie fans, is the “fair-weather” fan. They’re the ones, they say, who invade the bleachers and throw beer and trash onto the field.
In the sixth inning, when Cub’s slugger Sammy Sosa pounded his 38th homer of the season into the shrubbery beyond the center-field wall, several fans threw beer onto the field. The two men were roundly booed, fingered by the bleacher faithful and thrown out by security.
“Those guys aren’t regulars,” insists Leathers. “They give the Bleacher Bums a bad name.”
One particularly poignant ode to Wrigley and the bleacher loyalists came from an unexpected source: a New York Mets fan from Connecticut.
“I had to come to the bleachers of Wrigley Field,” says Peter Mottolese, 34, who considers himself somewhat of a connoisseur of baseball parks. “There’s tradition here. And you get the best perspective from the outfielder’s position here, (better) than in any ballpark. With a park like Shea, it’s one of those cookie-cutter stadiums built in the ’60s. It has none of the charm of Wrigley. Add the people and this is a party. After coming here, I’m now a Cub fan.”
“It’s a baseball game and a day at the beach,” says Gloria Henke, 36, of Kokomo, Ind.
Henke’s Aunt Ruth used to bring her and her sisters to the ballpark when they were kids. “Aunt Ruth,” says Henke, “was a Lucky Strikes and Old Style kind of gal. She was a bleacher babe.”
Perhaps the best testimony to the bleacher’s allure comes from 96-year-old Carmella Hartigan, a beloved fixture of the left-field bleachers in her hot pink Cub’s hat. Hartigan, who takes two buses to the ballpark and rarely misses a game, has been a Cub fan for as far back as she can remember.
“I recall when tickets were 50 cents,” she muses. “I come here these days because I like the company. Everyone knows me and says, `Hello.’ I don’t really know the players, and if the team wins, that’s OK. If they lose, that’s OK too.”
This appears to be a familiar refrain among many of the bleacher regulars.
“When the Cubs play well, I say, `I went to a party and a baseball game broke out,’ ” jokes Stromquist.
Leathers says that when everyone rises during the seventh-inning stretch to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” at the part where they sing, “So it’s root, root, root for the Cubbies/ If they don’t win it’s a shame/ For it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out/ At the ‘ole ballgame,” Leathers and pals substitute “If they don’t win it’s the same.”
“Sure, we’re fans, but most of us have been here through good times and bad,” Leathers says. “After each home game, win or lose, the party continues across the street at the Wrigleyville Tap. But if we win, we party harder.”
The Cubs’ 3-1 victory Sunday guaranteed that the roof would be rocking at the Wrigleyville Tap well into the evening.
