Nathan Gelgud illustration inspired by George Will's "A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred."
A fairly sizable group of Americans with a cultish appreciation of trivia, legend, and strange combinations of numbers is looking forward to a big day next week. These people will fill their DVRs with hours and hours of programming and listen to detailed accounts of competitions on the radio. Some of them will enroll in imaginary leagues made up of ersatz teams. They’ll wear colorful shirts and matching hats featuring cryptic insignia or cartoons of animals and pay exorbitant prices to visit big roofless buildings they consider to be church-like in their holiness. Next week is baseball’s Opening Day.
George Will is a proud member of this large (but shrinking) cult, and his new book, A Nice Little Place on the North Side, focuses on one of those sanctified buildings, perhaps the most holy of all: Chicago’s Wrigley Field. The Pulitzer-winning newspaper columnist and author has been a Cubs fan since his youth in Champaign, Illinois, choosing to pull for the doomed team because they were a few dozen miles closer to home than the St. Louis Cardinals. Consider it the folly of youth. For the record, the Cards are the second-best team in baseball history (behind only the Yankees), and the Cubs are the worst. The last time they won the World Series was 1908, and they haven’t been to it in more than sixty years. Of course, they’ve had a losing record since they began playing at Wrigley almost a century ago. As Cubs fans say, any team can have a bad century, right?
You get the feeling from Will’s book that even if could go back in time, he wouldn’t change his choice. His account of the Cubs’ history and his relationship with it is elegant and clear, unclouded by overstatements that a more rabid partisan is prone to making. His examination of Wrigley’s relationship with the Cubs’ record is particularly sober. He admits to writing a book more about the frame than the picture, and he alludes to the romantic allure of the field without deluding himself or his readers into thinking that it’s a magical place. Somehow, this book about one of the most poignant places in sports, the beauty of which has never really compensated for the disappointment that it houses, is also a convincing case against sentimentalism.
The cultish weirdos excited about Opening Day (I count myself among them) are prone to elevating nostalgia and legend over facts and truth. This makes A Nice Little Place on the North Side, which serves both as catnip for our pleasure and medicine to relieve us of our delusions, the perfect book to kick off the season.
Nathan Gelgud illustration inspired by George Will's "A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred."