Can’t we all just get along?
Instead of trashing Comiskey Park or mocking those who are drawn more to Wrigley Field, can’t we just agree on one thing: Chicago is one terrific city for a baseball fan, and not just on the weekends when our teams play each other. It’s the best in the country, in fact.
Sure the World Series is only a rumor for anyone who hasn’t started cashing Social Security checks; New York has been host to the Fall Classic 15 times since we last got a chance. The Series has passed through Los Angeles nine times beginning in 1959.
But patience is supposed to be the greatest virtue. No one says we have merely to endure, either, while our teams are annual also-rans. We can thrive.
From Opening Day in early April until the last out in late September, there’s a game almost every day that it doesn’t rain or snow–and on many days when it does rain or snow. The baseball schedule is as dependable as the U.S. Mail except it doesn’t skip Sundays and holidays.
As a transplanted Texan, I am doubly blessed. It doesn’t matter to me whether it’s the Cubs or the White Sox who are playing a game in town or on television. They are both my teams.
This is the fourth year I have written about major league baseball while based in Chicago. I enjoy going to Comiskey and Wrigley–not to mention Elfstrom Stadium in Geneva, home of the Kane County Cougars–more with every passing year.
It becomes clearer all the time how lucky I am not to have my loyalties shaped by a grandfather from Bridgeport or an opinionated uncle from Evanston. I come to Chicago baseball with an open mind, not a generational bias built around Luis Aparicio and Ernie Banks, if not the exploits of Ray Schalk and Hack Wilson.
It’s all good to me. So when I pick up the newspaper or look at schedules, I’m not looking to see how my [one] team is doing. I’m trying to see what interests me and it could be anything on any given day–Cubs, Sox, maybe even another last trip up to County Stadium in Milwaukee. There’s incredible freedom in being a nondenominational baseball fan in the best baseball city in the country.
Ultimately passion isn’t about wins and losses, it’s about the experience. New York, the L.A. sprawl and the Bay Area of California all have teams in both the American and National Leagues. But none of those places has them in ballparks an 8-mile drive apart, separated essentially by a trip along Lake Michigan, interspersed with such attractions as the Field Museum and the Lincoln Park Zoo.
That’s what we have, along with a hub of minor-league satellites ringing the city. It’s a treasure that my 8-year-old daughter and 6-year-old son will take for granted. I will not–not after growing up in an area, and an era, in which the Texas League was the biggest game in my hometown.
I have covered baseball since 1984. You probably remember that as the season when the blasted grounder went through Leon Durham. We moved to Chicago in time for my wife to get an unexpected shampoo of nacho cheese and diet pop while successfully scrambling for an Albert Belle foul ball. It was in that brief period when Comiskey Park fans actually cheered Belle.
Being here has allowed me to rediscover the fun of being a baseball fan again, both through my children’s eyes and my own. We go to a lot of games together, as I did with my parents. The difference is that instead of battling mosquitoes and 95-degree nights at Dallas’ Burnett Field, we go to the ivy-draped cathedral at Clark and Addison or the comfortable, kid-friendly park at 35th and Shields.
The truth is we like both Wrigley and Comiskey. It’s a shame you probably don’t. With minimal planning, we have had two great Sunday afternoons this season. The first was at Wrigley, the second at Comiskey, and I don’t know which day was better.
During Arizona’s first Chicago visit, I plotted ahead to see when Randy Johnson would pitch. I bought the best four seats I could get, which were behind the visitors’ dugout. It was a great angle from which to watch Johnson work his super-sized magic. You could practically hear Mark Grace exhale when he stood on the base after a single to center in the first inning.
I’ve watched more than 2,000 games from press boxes in the last 17 seasons, but this is the year I reconnected with the fun of being a fan. Like my kids I brought my glove to the game, hoping for a foul ball. I carried along my score book and kept score. With Johnson pitching, you never know if you’re going to witness history.
Oh yeah, it was Beanie Buddy day at Wrigley, so we had to arrive early to avoid the lifelong scars our children might have if they didn’t get one of those tie-dyed bears. Naturally we underdressed, so that meant trips to the souvenir stand for sweatshirts. Six-year-old Dylan, a Diamondbacks fan for mysterious reasons, wanted an Arizona cap, which we bought across the street from Wrigley after the game.
By the end of the afternoon, we had managed to misplace close to $200, but it was well spent. That night Dylan walked around the house wearing his Arizona cap, with a No. 51 taped to the back of his shirt.
“Who am I?” he asked, going through a pantomimed pitching motion. “The Big Unit, of course.”
We went to Comiskey Park for glove day, taking a neighborhood friend for her first trip to a big-league park. We should have taken every kid on the block.
For my reserved seat and three kids’ tickets, I handed over one $20 bill–about what I would have paid if we had been going to see a movie. But they don’t hand you nice fielder’s gloves when you walk into the megaplex. The kids collected their Ray Durham-model Wilson gloves on the way into Comiskey and then we stopped by the batting cages to let them take some cuts.
Eight-year-old Shelby was wearing her Sammy Sosa cap. No one bothered her, but we didn’t want to take chances so we bought her a Sox cap to be on the safe side. We settled in to watch James Baldwin beat the Minnesota Twins.
It was a snappy, well-played game under sunny skies. While Shelby and her friend Layne chatted, Dylan sat between an aunt and uncle who have season tickets. They bring a small television to games, and as he sat watching every pitch at Comiskey he had the Cubs’ game in Montreal on TV. I’ve never seen him look more content.
The kids were disappointed that this was a rare homerless game for the Sox, but they enjoyed the fireworks after the victory. They were standing in a long line to run the bases when the celebratory explosives went off over their heads. Thirty minutes later they were circling the bases like Chris Singleton. Well, maybe Paul Konerko. The point is they were on a big-league field, touching ’em all.
To them Comiskey Park was the best place in the world. It was exactly the same way they felt about Wrigley two Sunday afternoons earlier.
But both of Chicago’s big-league parks soon will take a back seat to Elfstrom Stadium in the ‘burbs. We’re holding tickets to the Midwest League All-Star Game. We’re bringing the gloves we got at Comiskey, but please, not the sweatshirts from Wrigley.
There’s no better place to be a baseball fan, especially one with an open mind. Do yourself a favor and look beyond old loyalties. Do you order the same flavor every time you go into an ice cream shop?
