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The Old Look in New Ballparks
| Article
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10216 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1993 |
2,562 Words |
| Author
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James C. Roberts
James C. Roberts is the president of Radio America. |
Summer is my favorite season. In its languorous days, life moves slower, and I succumb willingly to its pleasures-baseball foremost among them.
Baseball has exciting moments-a well-turned double play, a sharply hit ball, a home run-but frequently these are followed by long pauses during which not much happens. These stretches, whether in the haze and heat of the day or in the humid warmth of the night, are conducive to reverie. The calm punctuated by intense action gives baseball its own peculiar tempo, which becomes strangely addictive.
The national pastime we call it, so ingrained is baseball. Analysts pore endlessly over its statistics, authors probe every imaginable aspect for larger meaning, civic organizations look to baseball to instill virtuous habits, and Hollywood endows it (as in Field of Dreams) with mystical qualities.
It seems to many observers that baseball is loaded nowadays with burdens it should not have to bear. A New Republic cover story entitled "Field of Kitsch" claims that baseball is being drowned in a swamp of sentimentality. "It's only a game," pleads a cover story in the New York Times Magazine. Only a game?
HOME TO WRIGLEY
As an expatriate Chicagoan, I find baseball in Wrigley Field an ultimate summer experience, and each year I make it out to Chicago on business trips carefully coordinated with the Cubs' home schedule. Boarding the Ravenswood Elevated on Wabash Street in the Loop, I make the half-hour trip north. The train wends its way through the city's skyscrapers and then its residential areas, picking up fans along the way.
Finally, we reach Wrigleyville, a block from the ballpark, and I join the crowd pouring off the train. There are no vast parking lots here. This is an urban ballpark in the middle of a residential and commercial neighborhood. Flanking the left and right field sides of the park are rows of town houses, many with small stands of bleachers on the roof set up by their entrepreneurial owners as an added source of income.
Entering the stands on a summer day, one is greeted by a beautiful sight: the emerald green of the field, the ivy on the outfield walls, the famous manual scoreboard over the center field bleachers, the amazing intimacy of the stands that hug the foul lines, bringing every fan close
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