Why Wrigley Field Is Different
TL;DR
Wrigley Field opened in 1914 as Weeghman Park, a Federal League ballpark built in two months by Charles Weeghman for a team that lasted two seasons. The Cubs moved in in 1916, William Wrigley Jr. took control by 1921, and the park got its current name in 1927. The defining renovation came in 1937 under P.K. Wrigley: the bleachers, the hand-turned scoreboard, the W flag tradition, and the ivy were all installed that year. Lights arrived in 1988, last in the majors. The Curse of the Billy Goat from 1945 lasted 71 years until the 2016 World Series ended a 108-year championship drought. The 1060 Project (2014 to 2019) rebuilt the bowl, relocated the bullpens, and made Wrigley a National Historic Landmark in 2020.
1914: A Federal League park built in two months
The ballpark at Clark and Addison opened on April 23, 1914, as Weeghman Park, built for the Chicago Federals of the Federal League (Society for American Baseball Research; Wikipedia). Construction took roughly two months at a reported cost of about $250,000 on the site of a former Lutheran seminary on Chicago’s North Side.
The architect was Zachary Taylor Davis, who had also designed Comiskey Park for Charles Comiskey in 1910. Davis trained in the office of Louis Sullivan, the founder of the Prairie School, which is part of why Wrigley shares the brick-and-steel sensibility of other early-20th-century Chicago landmarks.
The Federal League collapsed after the 1915 season as part of a settlement with organized baseball. Charles Weeghman, as part of that settlement, was permitted to purchase the National League’s Chicago Cubs. He moved the team from the West Side Grounds into his new park, and the Cubs played their first home game at the corner of Clark and Addison on April 20, 1916, defeating the Cincinnati Reds 7 to 6 in 11 innings (Baseball-Reference box score).
The park was renamed Cubs Park in 1920. William Wrigley Jr., the chewing-gum magnate who had been a minority investor under Weeghman, took controlling interest in the Cubs by 1921 and consolidated full ownership through the early 1920s. The ballpark was renamed Wrigley Field in time for the 1927 season.
1937: The renovation that made the modern Wrigley
William Wrigley Jr. died in 1932. His son Philip K. Wrigley, known as P.K., inherited the team. P.K. oversaw the renovation that produced the visual identity Cubs fans know today.
In 1937 the bleachers were redesigned and rebuilt, the hand-turned center field scoreboard went in, and the outfield brick wall was extended and planted with ivy. The W flag and L flag tradition started that same year. All four of these are still part of the park nearly 90 years later.
The ivy
The ivy along the outfield brick wall was planted in the fall of 1937 on a wall that had been freshly extended and bricked over earlier that same year.
Popular memory credits Bill Veeck Jr., then a young Cubs front-office employee under his father, with the idea. The frequently retold story that Veeck planted the ivy overnight by himself is a myth. Cubs historian Ed Hartig and SABR researchers have debunked the overnight-planting version repeatedly. The actual planting was done by Elmer Clavey of the Clavey nursery family of Deerfield, Illinois, working with his son Gordon, who supplied and installed the plants under contract with the Cubs.
The original planting paired two species: Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata), the slow-establishing perennial vine that dominates the wall today, and Japanese bittersweet, used as a fast-growing temporary fill-in while the Boston ivy took hold. The modern wall is functionally a Boston-ivy wall.
The ivy has a seasonal cycle that becomes part of how Cubs fans read the calendar. In early April the vines are dormant and the wall reads as bare brown brick. The ivy leafs out in mid to late May, fills in to dense deep green through midsummer, and turns red and yellow in late September before dropping its leaves in October.
The ivy has its own ground rule. If a batted ball is hit into the ivy and lost, the defensive outfielder is supposed to raise both hands to signal the umpire, and the play is dead with the batter awarded a ground-rule double. If the outfielder instead reaches into the vines to dig the ball out, the ball remains live and runners can keep advancing. Outfielders are coached to play the carom when the ball comes off the brick because raising the hands gives up the chance at a play.
The hand-turned scoreboard
The center field scoreboard was built in 1937 and designed by the Chicago architecture firm Holabird and Root. The structure stands roughly 27 feet tall, 75 feet wide, and sits about 60 feet above the playing field on its perch above the center field bleachers.
Three Cubs employees operate the scoreboard during home games, climbing inside and physically hanging numbered steel plates onto the face of the board. There are 344 individual numbered plates in the active set. The board tracks the Cubs game in the center column and up to 11 other major-league games in the side columns.
The only electronic elements on the board are the balls, strikes, and outs lights for the Cubs game and the small lights that indicate which team is at bat in the out-of-town games. Everything else, including line scores, pitcher numbers, and the clock numerals, is changed by hand using physical plates.
Wrigley’s manual scoreboard is one of only two surviving hand-turned scoreboards in the majors. The other is the manual scoreboard built into the Green Monster at Fenway Park in Boston, which dates to 1934.
Despite occupying a large piece of the prime power-hitting target above straightaway center field, no batted ball has ever struck the Wrigley scoreboard in a major-league game. The two near-misses cited most often are a 1948 home run by Cubs slugger Bill Nicholson and a 1959 drive by Pittsburgh’s Roberto Clemente, both of which passed just outside the scoreboard frame.
The marquee
The red marquee above the main entrance at Clark and Addison was installed in 1934 by the Federated Sign Company of Chicago. The original color was fern green, which matched the early-1930s painted ironwork around the rest of the park.
The marquee was repainted dark blue in the late 1930s as part of the same general refresh that produced the new scoreboard and bleachers. By 1939 the sign had been altered so that the original wording “Home of the Chicago Cubs” became “Home of Chicago Cubs,” dropping “the” so the message read with the city name foregrounded.
The marquee was repainted red in the mid-1960s and has stayed red, with occasional refreshings, ever since.
In 2010 the marquee was temporarily painted purple for a Northwestern football game held at Wrigley on November 20, 2010, when Northwestern hosted Illinois in a Big Ten game played at the park. The purple paint came off after the game.
An electronic message board was added to the lower portion of the marquee in the early 1980s, which is what now displays game-specific text below the fixed red “Home of Chicago Cubs” panel.
The marquee sits above what the Cubs now call the Marquee Gate, the home-plate-side entrance at the corner of Clark and Addison, where most foot traffic arrives from the Addison Red Line stop.
The W flag and L flag
The flag that the Cubs raise above the scoreboard after wins is a white capital W on a blue field. After losses they fly a blue L on a white field.
The flag tradition at Wrigley dates to 1937, when the new scoreboard was built and the team began flying a result flag on a small mast atop the structure. The purpose was practical: commuters on the elevated tracks could glance up at the scoreboard from the L train and read the day’s outcome without waiting for the paper or the radio.
The W-on-blue motif itself traces to William Wrigley Jr.’s Wilmington Transportation Company, the steamship line he ran out of Santa Catalina Island off the California coast. Wrigley purchased Catalina Island in 1919, used it as a personal retreat, and built it into a tourism property whose company flags featured a prominent W.
Santa Catalina Island also served as the Cubs’ spring training base from 1921 through 1951, with a brief wartime interruption. The visual link between the Wrigley family’s Catalina branding and the Cubs themselves was tight for three decades.
The phrase “Fly the W” had been a Chicago talk-radio and Cubs-blog usage for years before it went national during the 2016 World Series run, when it appeared on broadcast graphics, on merchandise, and on Chicago skyline lighting after Cubs postseason wins.
1988: The last lights in the majors
Wrigley Field was the last major-league ballpark to install permanent lights for night baseball, a delay rooted partly in P.K. Wrigley’s preference for day baseball and partly in the resistance of the surrounding Lakeview neighborhood.
The first scheduled night game at Wrigley was August 8, 1988, against the Philadelphia Phillies. The game was rained out after the bottom of the fourth, with the Cubs leading 3 to 1, and was wiped from the books. The first officially completed night game came the next evening, August 9, 1988, when the Cubs beat the New York Mets 6 to 4.
The ceremonial first flip of the light switch on August 8 was handled by 91-year-old Cubs fan Harry Grossman, who had been attending Cubs games since the 1900s and was selected through a fan promotion. Grossman’s call as he hit the switch, widely reported in contemporaneous coverage, was “Let there be light.”
The original 1988 agreement with the City of Chicago capped the Cubs at 18 night games per season, a deliberately tight number meant to mollify neighbors. The current framework comes from Chicago ordinance SO2013-7858, passed in 2013 as part of the 1060 Project approvals. Under that ordinance the Cubs are permitted 35 regular-season night games per year, plus up to 8 additional night games for national television, plus up to 4 concert dates, for a combined annual total of up to 47 night events.
Regular-season Friday night home games are still prohibited under the ordinance. Postseason Friday games are exempt. This is why most Cubs Friday home games on the regular-season schedule are 1:20 p.m. day games.
The Curse of the Billy Goat
The Curse of the Billy Goat is the most famous Cubs superstition, and it traces to Game 4 of the 1945 World Series at Wrigley Field on October 6, 1945, with the Cubs hosting the Detroit Tigers.
William “Billy Goat” Sianis, the Greek-born Chicago tavern owner who ran the Billy Goat Tavern, brought his pet goat Murphy to the game on tickets he had purchased. According to the tavern’s own account and contemporaneous Tribune reporting, Sianis was asked to leave the park during the game after other fans complained about the goat’s smell, and Cubs ownership backed the ushers’ decision. The line attached to Sianis in family lore, as he is said to have telegraphed P.K. Wrigley, is most often paraphrased as a declaration that the Cubs would not win again.
The Cubs lost the 1945 World Series to Detroit in seven games and then did not return to a World Series for 71 seasons. The Cubs had not won a World Series since 1908, so by the time the 2016 title arrived the franchise had gone 108 years without a championship.
The Billy Goat Tavern still operates today, with its flagship on Lower Michigan Avenue in Chicago. The tavern has long traded on the curse and on its connection to the Cubs, and it became further entrenched in popular culture after Saturday Night Live’s “Cheezborger, cheezborger” sketches in the late 1970s.
The Bartman incident
On October 14, 2003, in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series at Wrigley Field, the Cubs led the Florida Marlins 3 to 0 in the top of the eighth inning, one out, and were five outs from their first World Series since 1945.
With Mark Prior pitching and Luis Castillo at the plate, Castillo lifted a foul ball down the left field line. Cubs left fielder Moisés Alou drifted to the wall, reached up, and a Cubs fan named Steve Bartman, seated in the front row of section 4 in the left field corner, reflexively reached for the same ball and deflected it into the stands.
Umpire Mike Everitt ruled no fan interference. In the umpire’s judgment the ball had crossed the plane of the stands and was no longer in the field of play, which is the standard for fan-interference rulings on foul balls.
After the deflected foul, the Cubs gave up eight runs in the inning. Castillo walked. Iván Rodríguez singled. Cubs shortstop Alex González booted a potential double-play grounder from Miguel Cabrera for an error. Derrek Lee doubled to tie the game. The Marlins kept hitting through reliever Kyle Farnsworth, and the inning ended with Florida leading 8 to 3, which became the final score. The Cubs lost Game 7 the next night at Wrigley to end the series.
Bartman was identified on broadcast during the game and quickly escorted out of Wrigley by security for his own safety. He spent the following days under police protection at his family home in Northbrook, Illinois, as fans, media, and out-of-state visitors converged on his neighborhood. Bartman issued a written apology through a statement on October 15, 2003, expressing regret for any role he had played, and has otherwise declined media interviews ever since.
In 2017 the Cubs gave Bartman a 2016 World Series championship ring as an act of public reconciliation. The team and chairman Tom Ricketts framed the gesture as recognition that Bartman is a fellow Cubs fan who suffered for years for an instinctive reaction shared by everyone around him in the stands.
The current Cubs media and front-office posture is to treat Bartman as a fellow fan caught in a bad moment, not as a villain.
2016: The Cubs win the World Series
The 2016 World Series ended both the 71-year pennant drought and the 108-year championship drought.
The Cubs clinched the National League pennant at Wrigley Field in Game 6 of the NLCS on October 22, 2016, beating the Los Angeles Dodgers 5 to 0 behind a Kyle Hendricks start and a Willson Contreras home run. October 22, 2016 was the 46th anniversary of the death of William Sianis, who died October 22, 1970, a coincidence that received heavy attention in Chicago media during the celebration.
Game 7 of the World Series was played November 2, 2016, at Progressive Field in Cleveland. The Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians 8 to 7 in 10 innings after a 17-minute rain delay between the ninth and tenth innings. Ben Zobrist drove in the go-ahead run. Mike Montgomery recorded the final out on a Michael Martínez ground ball to Kris Bryant. The Cubs had trailed the series three games to one before winning Games 5, 6, and 7 in order.
Two days later, on November 4, 2016, the Cubs held a championship parade and rally that ran from Wrigley Field down to Grant Park. The City of Chicago and the Cubs estimated total turnout at approximately 5 million people, which, if accurate, ranks among the largest peacetime gatherings in U.S. history.
The 1060 Project (2014 to 2019)
The 1060 Project was the Ricketts family ownership group’s multi-phase renovation of Wrigley Field, named for the park’s 1060 West Addison address. Total project cost was approximately $575 million, privately financed.
The project was originally announced as a four-phase plan to be executed across four off-seasons, then extended to five phases as the scope grew.
Phase 1 (2015): bleacher expansion, addition of a roughly 2,400-square-foot right field video scoreboard, and new outfield signage that brought back small branded boards along the outfield wall.
Phase 2 (2016): renovated upper-level concourse on the home-plate side, a roughly 30,000-square-foot underground clubhouse for the Cubs, and structural strengthening of the existing 100-year-old grandstand. Much of the structural work involved replacing original 1914 steel and reinforcing concrete that had degraded.
Phase 3 (2017): the bullpen relocation. Both Cubs and visitor bullpens had previously been on the outfield grass in foul territory, in front of the brick walls along the left and right field foul lines. As part of Phase 3 the bullpens were moved to new spaces under the outfield bleachers. The brick walls were extended toward the field. The vacated foul-territory bullpen real estate was converted into premium suites and ledge-style seating. The change ended a long-running Wrigley quirk in which relievers warming up shared sight lines and occasional banter with nearby fans.
Phases 4 and 5 (2017 to 2019): additional suite expansion along the lower bowl, new club spaces, the American Airlines 1914 Club behind home plate, expanded party decks in the outfield, and a comprehensive replacement of the main grandstand roof.
Wrigley Field was designated a National Historic Landmark in January 2020, recognized by the U.S. Department of the Interior for its place in American sports and architectural history. The 1060 Project received the 2019 Reconstruction Platinum Award from Building Design + Construction magazine for the engineering and preservation work required to modernize a Historic Landmark while keeping it in active major-league use throughout the construction.
Statue Row and the Caray statue
Wrigley’s statues sit in two clusters.
Statue Row runs along Clark Street on the west side of the ballpark, integrated into the Gallagher Way plaza that opened in 2017. The statues there:
- Ernie Banks, the franchise’s signature player and Hall of Fame shortstop and first baseman. His statue is inscribed with his “Let’s Play Two” line. Originally unveiled March 31, 2008.
- Billy Williams, Hall of Fame left fielder. Statue unveiled September 7, 2010.
- Ron Santo, Hall of Fame third baseman and longtime Cubs radio analyst. Statue unveiled August 10, 2011, after Santo’s death in December 2010.
- Fergie Jenkins, Hall of Fame right-handed starter and the franchise’s only pitcher with a statue. Unveiled May 20, 2022.
- Ryne Sandberg, Hall of Fame second baseman and 1984 NL MVP.
The Harry Caray statue is the one Wrigley statue that does not stand in Statue Row. It sits at the corner of Sheffield and Waveland Avenues, just outside the bleacher entrance, where Caray was a daily presence during his Cubs broadcast career. The Harry Caray statue was originally unveiled in 1999, a year after Caray’s death.
“Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and the seventh-inning stretch
Harry Caray’s seventh-inning stretch rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” did not start at Wrigley Field. It started on the South Side at old Comiskey Park in 1976, when White Sox owner Bill Veeck Jr., who had returned to ownership of the White Sox in 1975, secretly piped Caray’s broadcast booth microphone through the Comiskey public-address system during the seventh-inning stretch so that fans could hear Caray sing along with the song.
When Caray moved across town to the Cubs in 1982, he brought the singalong with him to Wrigley Field, and within a few seasons it had become the defining ritual of a Cubs home game. Caray’s booth would open at the stretch, he would lean out over the crowd with a microphone, and lead the singalong above the home dugout.
Caray died on February 18, 1998, after suffering a heart attack on Valentine’s Day. Since then the Cubs have used a rotating cast of guest conductors to lead “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the stretch, ranging from former Cubs players to musicians to politicians to actors. The guest-conductor tradition has remained a defining piece of the Wrigley game day.
”Go Cubs Go”
“Go Cubs Go” was written by Chicago folk singer Steve Goodman in 1984 at the request of WGN Radio, which wanted a new theme song for its Cubs broadcasts in what turned out to be the team’s first postseason season in 39 years. Goodman, a lifelong Cubs fan from Chicago, had already written “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request” a few years earlier and was in declining health from leukemia, which took his life on September 20, 1984, just days before the Cubs clinched the NL East.
The Cubs began playing “Go Cubs Go” after every home win in the late 2000s, pairing the song with the raising of the W flag above the scoreboard. The practice has continued through ownership changes and roster turnover. The song reached its commercial peak after the 2016 World Series, when it charted at number 3 on Billboard’s Bubbling Under Hot 100 in November 2016.
The throw-it-back tradition
The Wrigley bleacher tradition of throwing back opposing home run balls dates to the late 1960s, most commonly cited as beginning on May 17, 1969, when Atlanta Braves slugger Hank Aaron hit a home run into the Wrigley bleachers and a fan threw the ball back onto the field.
The tradition is enforced socially by the Wrigley bleacher community rather than by team rule. A fan who catches an opposing player’s home run ball is expected to throw it back, and a fan who keeps the ball is loudly booed by surrounding sections until the ball goes back.
A common workaround that bleacher veterans use is to bring a decoy ball, often a beat-up batting practice ball, that they keep in a pocket for the purpose. If an opposing player hits a home run their way, they hold up the real ball briefly so neighboring fans can see they caught it, then throw the decoy ball onto the field and quietly pocket the real one. This is well-documented practice and satisfies social expectations.
A few smaller quirks worth knowing
The Eamus Catuli sign hangs on the side of a residential building at 3617 North Sheffield Avenue, on the rooftop side overlooking the right field bleachers. The phrase is Latin for, roughly, “Let’s Go Cubs” or “Let’s Go Cub Pups.” Underneath the phrase the sign carries a rolling AC counter, formatted as a six-digit string of pairs, showing the years since the Cubs’ last division title, last National League pennant, and last World Series title. The sign is owned and maintained by Tom Murphy and his family, who run Murphy’s Bleachers across the street and own the rooftop building. The World Series counter reset to zero after 2016 for the first time in living memory.
The Hey Hey foul poles. The yellow foul poles at Wrigley are marked with the words “Hey Hey,” in tribute to longtime Cubs television play-by-play voice Jack Brickhouse, whose “Hey hey” call was his signature for Cubs home runs from the late 1940s through 1981. The labels were added to the foul poles after Brickhouse’s death in 1998.
The outfield basket. The wire basket that angles outward from the top of the outfield brick wall was installed in 1970 as a fan-safety measure after a string of late-1960s incidents in which fans climbed down from the bleachers and ran onto the warning track. The basket projects out roughly 42 inches from the top of the wall and counts as out of play, which means a batted ball that lands in the basket on the fly is a home run.
The 2009 NHL Winter Classic. Wrigley Field hosted the NHL Winter Classic on January 1, 2009, with the Detroit Red Wings beating the home Chicago Blackhawks 6 to 4 in an outdoor regular-season game played on a rink built over the infield and outfield.
Concerts at Wrigley. Wrigley Field began hosting major touring concerts under the Ricketts ownership, particularly after the 2013 ordinance allowed concert dates as part of the cap. Acts that have played multi-night Wrigley stands include Pearl Jam (a long-running personal connection through Eddie Vedder’s Chicago roots and his Cubs anthem “All the Way”), Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Jimmy Buffett, Foo Fighters, Billy Joel, Lady Gaga, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z on their On the Run II tour.
Notable Cubs eras at Wrigley
The franchise has moved through several distinct eras at Wrigley and at its predecessor parks.
The original 1906 to 1910 Cubs dynasty, anchored by Frank Chance, Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, and Frank Schulte, won four NL pennants in five years and back-to-back World Series titles in 1907 and 1908. Those were the only World Series titles the franchise would hold until 2016.
The Lovable Losers era ran from 1946 through 2002, a 57-year stretch during which the Cubs made the postseason just twice, in 1984 and 1989 as NL East champions. Both runs ended in the NLCS.
The 2003 Cubs, managed by Dusty Baker and led by a Mark Prior and Kerry Wood rotation, came within five outs of the World Series before the Game 6 collapse against the Marlins and the Game 7 loss that followed.
The 2007 and 2008 Cubs, managed by Lou Piniella, won back-to-back NL Central titles. The 2008 team was the National League’s best regular-season club with 97 wins but was swept in the NLDS in both seasons, by Arizona in 2007 and by the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2008.
The Theo Epstein and Joe Maddon era began with Epstein’s hire as president of baseball operations in October 2011 and Maddon’s hire as manager in November 2014. It produced the 2015 to 2018 run of consecutive postseason appearances anchored by Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant, Javier Báez, Addison Russell, Kyle Schwarber, Willson Contreras, and a rotation that mixed Jon Lester, Jake Arrieta, Kyle Hendricks, and John Lackey. The era’s peak was the 2016 World Series title. Both Epstein and Maddon left the organization by the end of 2020, and the roster was largely traded away at the 2021 deadline as the Cubs entered a rebuild.
Photo gallery: the history visuals
