Bob Wiem and Herb Gordon were 13-year-old freshmen at Senn High School when they played hooky, jumped on a Clark Street streetcar, hopped off at Addison and took in Game 2 of the 1938 World Series between their beloved Cubs and the New York Yankees at Wrigley Field.
It was the last time Wiem had seen the Yankees in person until a rainy Friday afternoon 65 years later. Once again he joined his lifelong buddy and suffered through a Cubs defeat in the Yankees’ historic return to Wrigley in the first of a three-game interleague series.
A day that began with the anticipated announcement that Cubs star Sammy Sosa had received–and immediately appealed–an eight-game suspension for using a cork-altered bat in Tuesday’s game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays ended on another downer. The Yankees had a 5-0 lead by the third inning and coasted to a 5-3 victory.
But for the 39,359 fans who came to see the gray-clad pride of the American League step onto the Wrigley Field grass for the first time since the days of Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, the afternoon re-created a magical era of the game. Particularly for Wiem, 78, and Gordon, 77.
Their right-field bleacher seats came courtesy of Fox Sports Net after Wiem, of Highland Park, responded to an inquiry seeking fans who were at the ’38 Series. Back then, Gordon recalled, the three-game ticket package for two upper-deck seats cost $19.80.
“My dad got us the tickets. I have no idea how,” Gordon said.
The boys normally sat in 55-cent bleacher seats and came to the game unfettered by adult supervision.
“My dad had to work to pay for the tickets,” Gordon, a Chicagoan, said with a laugh.
The two remembered the Yankees’ 6-3 victory as “the Dizzy Dean game.” Dean was the losing pitcher for the Cubs after serving up a two-run home run to Yankees shortstop Frankie Crosetti in the eighth inning and another to DiMaggio in the ninth.
“We were so scared of the Yankees,” Gordon said.
Gordon and Wiem recalled it as a time when athletes were heroes for boys like them.
“They didn’t move around, you could develop loyalties,” Gordon said. “And they played to have fun. Now it’s a business.”
Perhaps, but the electricity of the day was evident in both clubhouses.
“I’ve never been on the field before,” said Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ star shortstop and newly named team captain. “I grew up in Michigan watching the Cubs and I’m a history buff, so this is great fun for me.”
Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer, who managed the Cubs to their last division title in 1989, said he was “waiting and waiting” for an opportunity to return to Wrigley.
“I’m 72 years old and I was excited about coming to the ballpark this morning,” he said. “It’s special.”
Yankees first baseman Jason Giambi celebrated his first trip to Wrigley with a first-inning home run, a two-run shot that set the tone for the day.
“You can’t appreciate the game as a player if you can’t appreciate the history,” Giambi said. “This is exciting. The fans are really into it here and the buzz in the air was definitely a playoff-type atmosphere.”
New York fans were in abundance. They included Bronx native actress-director Penny Marshall, a lifelong Yankees fan who was not making her Wrigley Field debut. Marshall directed “A League of Their Own,” about the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, and some of the filming took place at Wrigley.
“It was worth flying in from L.A. for this,” Marshall said. “I thought this was a part of history that I didn’t want to miss.”
It is a history that includes two World Series between the clubs in 1932 and ’38, both of which were four-game Yankees sweeps.
They were the teams of Babe Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio, the greatest players in all of baseball on the greatest team, brash and haughty and not the least bit intimidated by Gabby Harnett’s “Homer in the Gloamin'” that lifted the Cubs past Pittsburgh and into the Series.
Gehrig was earning a career-high $39,000 a year in ’38. By comparison, if Sosa’s eight-game suspension holds up, it would cost him approximately $70,000 of his $13 million salary this year.
“It’s much ado about nothing,” Wiem said of the Sosa controversy.
“Better you should be writing about Iraq,” Gordon said.
Sosa’s appeal allowed him to play the weekend series. A hearing is likely early next week. On Friday his struggles at the plate continued as he went 1-for-4 with a single and two strikeouts.
The focus shifts immediately to Saturday and one of the hottest tickets in Chicago sports history as future Hall of Famer Roger Clemens goes for his 300th career victory and 4,000th strikeout against Kerry Wood, the young Cubs ace who, along with Randy Johnson and Clemens, has struck out 20 batters over nine innings in a game.
“It’s going to be awesome,” Yankees manager Joe Torre said. “We’re talking about the old guard versus the new guard. It’s going to be a heck of a show.”
