Many civilians have tried to enter the Wrigley Field scoreboard.
Few have succeeded. “They try all the time. All the time,” says Brian Helmus, the Cubs head scorekeeper, who has worked at Wrigley since he was 16 and has gotten used to repelling fans who decide to breach the 70-year-old manually operated structure, most often in the seventh or eighth inning, after too many beers. “Usually we wedge a 2-by-4 in there [the scoreboard’s trap door] so they can’t get in,” he says, on a recent afternoon while readying the board for a night game. “They’ll get their head in there. Then you just yell, and they shoot straight back down.”
For liability reasons (it’s a tricky climb up a skinny metal ladder to reach the trapdoor) very few people go inside. But if trespassers do make it up the ladder and manage a glimpse before being shooed away, they actually can get a decent idea of how things operate from this vantage point.
“It’s basically very easy,” Helmus says.
In general, the innards of the scoreboard have looked pretty much the same since it was built in 1937, including the color of the paint (rust red), and, apparently, some of the junk lying around as if this were a disappointing yard sale (brooms, coolers, plastic cups, folding chairs from when the Bears played here). There’s a three-story steel catwalk structure stretched along the 75-foot front wall, which lends the cavernous rectangle a backstage-at-the-opera quality, except that the opera is about a Cubs baseball game and the audience can be seen only through small windows (which are covered with number boards rather than a curtain).
The scoreboard has been operated the same way since those early days too.
“We got [the system] from the people before us,” Helmus says. “I got trained by a guy who retired after 40 years.”
Before this day’s first pitch at 7:05 p.m., he has two jobs to do, same as he does before every game: set up the scoreboard and raise the team-standings pennants.
He climbs to the third floor, scales the ladder to the trapdoor on the roof, and opens an old wooden box behind the big clock and near an old FM antenna that nobody has bothered to take down (there’s also an obsolete satellite dish up there). All the team flags attached to lanyards come spooling out; the big blue W (Cubs win!) and white L (Cubs lose … ) flags that go up after a game are in there, too.
“This is the West Coast,” he says, referring to flags that indicate standings in the National League West Division. “We change them all the time. Because they have to go in order. Like yesterday Arizona was in first. Los Angeles was in second … Colorado was fourth. So we gotta change them.”
He rearranges the flags on the lanyard and sends them flapping and clanging up the pole. It is a clear day and the sky is beautiful. But when it rains, Helmus and his crew get wet (water splashes in through the windows); when it gets hot, they get hot (“It’s like you’re sitting in a metal can in the hot sun,” he says); and ditto with frigid days (“because the metal gets really cold, and we can’t really wear gloves. You can’t get a grip on the plates”). When there’s an electrical storm, they go to the first floor because the board is essentially, as he puts it, “a lightning rod” (“Everything is steel, except the first floor,” he says.)
Usually, before raising the flags, Helmus uses the sports section in the Tribune to fill out a photocopied chart that resembles the scoreboard configuration you see from the stands. He carries this around like a grocery list as he and a colleague rearrange metal plates (they range from 3 to 10 pounds each) in their slots to reflect league matchups for the day: Houston gets carried upstairs and slipped into a new slot facing the field; the metal sign for Florida (two signs, actually: “Flori” and “da”) is brought downstairs.
“Where’d you put Cincinnati?” Helmus yells up to Dave Wasielewski, who can be seen tramping around upstairs through the catwalk.
“We do a lot of yelling,” says Helmus. And they all speak a language Helmus refers to simply as “Scoreboard,” although, as far as he knows nobody else speaks it even though it’s been in place since the 1930s.
During games, the scorekeeper stationed on the middle floor (in the cutout windows to the left of the Ball and Strike signs) is the only person who has an actual score sheet. “There’s two guys on the first floor, and one up here,” Helmus says, from the middle floor where the extent of the technological advances added since the days Morse code were on display (a TV on a rickety wooden stand, a radio, and a Dell laptop, which they got just last year). “We used to use a sports ticker, from Jersey City. We just got a computer last year — this place wasn’t set up for it. They had to run so many wires in,” he says.
Anyway, the method: “He’ll yell down, ‘Bottom game American League, one run top of the seventh.’ He doesn’t even tell you the team names. Bottom game, top floor; first floor, bottom game. Second floor …”
“When he yells down, you yell back, and he checks it off so he knows you put it in. So that’s the system,” says Helmus, who minds Cubs game from the first level with binoculars, from three open windows. “I do the innings and the pitching and the top game National. The other guy does the hits and the two American League games. If I have to get up and change something, he’ll tell me if a run is scored while I’m changing a plate.”
There are a lot of things that could make the old-fangled job more modern and more convenient — such as air conditioning or heat. Electronic headsets or walkie-talkies would be helpful — especially during an actual game, when the crowd has filled the stands and the loudspeakers on top of the board are blaring, or the board’s electronic element is displaying both a hit and an error, which makes a noise so loud you can barely hear yourself think.
But there are no such plans on the horizon, as far as Helmus knows. “It’s part of Wrigley. It’s tradition,” he says.
But what happens if he can’t hear the guy on the second floor yelling instructions down to his station on the first floor during a game?
“Well, if you can’t hear, you stand and say, ‘What’d you say again?'”
– – –
The fastest electronic finger in major leagues?
The information that appears in the center of the scoreboard (batter number, balls, strikes, errors and outs), is electronically operated from the press box by a man named Rick Fuhs. He is known, however anonymously, as a source of wonder to lots of fans, because of how quickly he updates the count — sometimes before a fan even has time to look up!
“They say he’s the fastest in the league,” says groundskeeper Brian Helmus. “They say he’s faster than even the newer scoreboards.”
“There’s two things that help me,” says Fuhs, who has been doing the job since 1989. “I watch the umpire’s movement: Most umpires, if they move their right foot back they’re calling a strike. I’m 100 percent right most of the time, although I do make mistakes.
“It’s easier to put the strike up,” he says. “If he doesn’t move his right foot, you have to wait a split second. And then you put the ball up.”
Some of the umps aren’t so easy: “Usually it’s the foot, but the guys who call it in front of them with an arm gesture — that makes it really hard for me to read.”
And the truth is he just sort of calls it himself when he can: “A lot of times I’m over the plate, so I can see if the pitch is a ball, if it’s outside or inside or high.”
“It’s at the point that I could eat a sandwich and talk on the phone, and not make a mistake,” Fuhs says.
— Emily Nunn
———–
ernunn@tribune.com
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