A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (21 page)

Why do so many of us care so much about professional sports teams and, hence, about the buildings in which they practice their craft for pay? One answer is: We are more tribal than we, in our modern vanity, like to acknowledge. Which means Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was right about what he called “the liberal expectancy.”

The most accomplished intellectual in politics since John Quincy Adams, and a New York and New Deal liberal in good standing, Moynihan was fascinated by the durable role of ethnicity in our nation of immigrants, and in the larger world. Beginning in the nineteenth century, he said, the “liberal expectancy” gripped much of the intelligentsia. The expectancy was that as science advanced in tandem with the rationality of societies in which markets allocate wealth and opportunity, the forces that propelled history in preindustrial ages—principally, religion and ethnicity—would lose their saliency. This has not happened, which suggests that human nature is not as changeable as many people hoped and others expected or feared. Perhaps we are creatures built—hardwired, in the current argot—for primal allegiances. And perhaps there is much about the modern world that does not satisfy this
ancient but still potent yearning for group memberships and collective affinities.

Moynihan was one of my closest friends, and I can attest that he was almost immune to the translation of his vestigial tribalism—if he had any—into sports allegiances. He and his wife, Liz, owned a modest rural home in Delaware County, in upstate New York, not far from Cooperstown. I once toured the Hall of Fame with him and can report that although the shrine and its worshippers piqued his sociological imagination, he was otherwise unstirred.

The only time I saw his passions engaged by anything about sports was when a New Jersey senator had the audacity to propose having June 19 declared National Baseball Day. This senator alleged that on this day in 1846, “baseball’s first game was played,” supposedly at Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, between two organized teams from across the Hudson River in Manhattan. The senator did not explain how, or why, two teams had been organized—one of them began playing in Madison Square in 1842—prior to baseball’s “first game.”

Moynihan, committed to senatorial courtesy and oblivious to his own state’s stake in this, at first supported the New Jersey senator’s measure. Fortunately, some people more attuned than Moynihan to things sporting alerted him to the peril to which he was exposing himself. He promptly rose in defense of Cooperstown’s spurious claim to be baseball’s birthplace. His argument, which he considered crushing, was: “Baseball was born in Cooperstown
in 1839. The New York State highway sign near Doubleday Field outside the Hall of Fame says so.” QED.

The prosaic truth, however, is that young Abner, then twenty, spent the summer of 1839 155 miles southeast of Cooperstown, at West Point, where he was a plebe. The only thing he started, with some hostile help, was the Civil War, as everyone knows who has read the historical marker at Fort Sumter. It says that on April 12, 1861, he was an artillery captain. The national pastime, like the nation itself, was fertilized by the bloodshed of the Civil War. “
Baseball,” wrote A. Bartlett Giamatti, “grew during the surge to fraternalism—to fraternal societies, sodalities, associations, and aggregations—that followed the fratricide.” The sport “showed who had won the war and where the country was building, which was in the industrial cities of the North.” Then baseball flourished through rivalries between teams organized around factories or ethnic social organizations. When General Doubleday—as he had become in long service that took him to, among other places, Gettysburg—died, in 1893, full of years and honors, a long obituary in the
New York Times
made no mention of baseball, there being no known connection, then or now, between it and him.

Nevertheless, Moynihan was politically prudent in defending the creation myth that is commercially lucrative for some upstate constituents. And perhaps Moynihan was also moved by New York chauvinism. In which case he was, after all, somewhat tribal, and therefore was evidence
for his theory about the fallacy of the liberal expectancy. Be that as it may, Wrigley Field is powerful, if redundant, evidence against this expectancy. As are all the other ballparks where people cluster for the pleasure of suspending their rationality and indulging their tribalism for a few hours.

Bart Giamatti was a Falstaffian figure with a robust appetite for baseball, martinis, and other admirable pleasures. He became baseball’s seventh commissioner in September 1988. He died of a heart attack on September 1, 1989, after the arduous negotiation that led to the lifetime ban of Pete Rose as punishment for betting on baseball. For nine years Giamatti was president of Yale University, where he was a scholar of the Renaissance. His last book, published shortly before his death, was
Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games
.
Its themes explain why we care, and why it is reasonable to care, about a place like Wrigley Field.

Giamatti believed that we make too little of sport when we make too much of it. That is, when we try to infuse sport with too much meaning. When we encrust it with theory and weigh it down with transcendent functions, we obscure its real purpose “as a shared moment of leisure.” Which, properly understood, is rather a lot and quite enough.

The wisdom here is this: The beauty of sport is its
absence
of meaning. With sport, an individual, a team, or a
community experiences the kind of happiness that arises, Giamatti said, from a rare and fleeting “absence of care.” This can be sensed so intensely that it invites comparison to religious experiences. This tempts some people, he noted, to postulate that “the sports experience must be the tattered remnants” of what earlier, less disenchanted ages considered religious experiences. Giamatti believed that sport is “ultimately subversive of religion.” This is so because, whereas religion concerns the most consequential things, “sport cares not for religion’s
consequences
. Sport cares only for itself.”

Rather than encumber sport with religious echoes, it is better, Giamatti said, to understand sport as one of those “shared activities that have no purpose except fully to be themselves.” Sports achievements, however luminous, are never perfect. They are, however, “uncommon enough to remain a bright spot in the memory, thus creating a reservoir of transformation to which we can return when we are free to do so.” This transformation is one purpose of recreation, which means recreation.

In Shakespeare’s
Henry IV
, Prince Hal tells us—warns us, really—that “if all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work.” For all but a fortunate few, who live to work rather than work to live, work is tedious. It is so—the French word for work is travail—because it is a necessity rather than a choice. The reason leisure is, Giamatti thought, an index of a culture’s condition is that leisure is about making free choices. Work is necessary; leisure is an escape from necessitousness. There are those
who say that since the coming of the Industrial Revolution, sport has become industrial. And they say sport has become, in Giamatti’s phrase, “junk food for the spirit,” a narcotic, another opiate of the masses. Giamatti, however, summoned Aristotle for the defense: “We do without leisure … only to give ourselves leisure.” That is, we work so that we may play. There is, said Giamatti, a progression “from what is necessary to what is desirable.” The people who make the effort to come together as a crowd at a sporting event do so because they desire to become a community, “a small town of people sharing neither work nor pain nor deprivation nor anger but the common experience of being released to enjoy the moment.” There is enjoyment even in disappointment and defeat because the sports fan is part of a group of the similarly affected. At a sporting event, when we, a voluntary gathering of strangers, are pulled to our feet by admiration, we
feel
together what we
see
together. And what we feel “begins as a gnawing hunger and becomes a rage to perfection.” If, Giamatti said, “perfection” is too strong, then: “a rage to get it right.” So, in a sense, we go to the ballpark to become better.

Today sports are “city-bound” in that they are connected to cities. It may seem odd that Giamatti linked the sport he adored with cities, because he called baseball “the most strenuously nostalgic of all our sports, the most traditionally conscious of tradition, the most intent on enshrining its rural origins.” But one “rural” setting of baseball’s origins, where the Knickerbockers played, is now near the
Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. About cities, Giamatti was unsentimental:

A city is not an extended family. That is a tribe or a clan. A city is a collection of disparate families who agree to a fiction: they agree to live
as if
they were as close in blood or ties of kinship as in fact they are in physical proximity.… It is a considerable pact, a city. If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will and imagination.… Sports and cities share a common characteristic: They are deeply conventional.

Sports are rules-bound activities, “precision in counterpoint with passion,” and “stability vying with volatility.” Baseball’s conventions, Giamatti believed, mirror “the condition of freedom” for Americans. We are “free enough to consent to an order that will enhance and compound—as it constrains—our freedom.” So in every game, as “energy and order merge,” baseball “fulfills the promise America made to itself to cherish the individual while recognizing the overarching claims of the group” as “we re-create our daily portion of freedom, in public.”

It is, of course, a transitory creation. Even the competitors are almost evanescent, because for athletes sport compresses life’s normal trajectory of aspiration, attainment, and decline. But when the contest has ended, the
memory lingers on. And the memory of something difficult done well is enough. The contest should be spared the burden of carrying too much meaning, or the wrong kinds of meanings. For a century, Wrigley Field has been a memory-making place for afternoon and evening communities. Hence the complex sentiments and associations that this simple North Side structure stirs.

Which is why we care so much about what happens in places like Wrigley Field. What happens, really? It
is
just a game. Yes, like any craft, it is worth doing well. And excellence, wherever it occurs, is worth savoring and honoring. But, in spite of the unending attempts of metaphysicians in the bleachers and press boxes to make sport more than it is, the real appeal of it for spectators is that sport enables us, for a few hours, to step out of the river of time and into a pastime.

Which is not to say that sports—particularly professional sports, and especially baseball, with its enchanting everydayness—serve no valuable function. Utility, however, is not the same thing as meaning. Professional sports teams are municipal assets. They are public utilities that can help infuse a dust of individuals with a unifying sense of tame tribalism. Or, as in the case of Chicago, sports allegiances
can transform a fragile mosaic of mutually wary neighborhoods into something like a community, one united, albeit tenuously and intermittently, by a shared vocabulary of affections, loyalties, hopes, and anxieties.

This is why there are many people—many millions, in fact—who rarely or never visit Wrigley Field but for whom this venue is nevertheless somehow important. Similarly, the United States Capitol and the Statue of Liberty are, for scores of millions of Americans who never visit them, reminders of what it means to be an American. For the subset of Americans who are baseball fans, Wrigley Field is an orienting patrimony. For this cohort, it is pleasant just knowing that the ballpark has been there for a very long time, that it will be there for a long time, and that they could one day choose to drop by and enjoy it.

When my son Geoff and his wife, Maia, who then lived in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, had their first child, I argued strenuously for them to give the boy a boost into life by giving him the resonant name Clark Addison Will. They rejected this terrific idea, not because they considered it weird but because they knew it was banal. Apparently, lots of parents have given children those melodious names. In September 2007, Paul and Teri Fields of Michigan City, Indiana, named their bouncing baby boy Wrigley. And in December 2008, when Brian and Lauren Clark of Plainfield, Illinois, had their first child, a daughter, they named her Addison Nicole. When she uses her middle initial, she will be Addison N. Clark. The five children of
Ralph and Julie Dynek of Northfield, Illinois, are named Addison, Clark, Sheffield, Grace Waveland, and Ivy. It is a rare place that inspires such tributes of affection.