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The forgotten confines
Home of the Cubs' glory
days (last World Series win, for instance) is long gone and barely
remembered. But a team of undaunted fans is about to remedy that.
By
Louis R. Carlozo
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TRIBUNE REPORTER
May
15, 2008
Mike
Reischl, Chicago 10th District cop and chief of the Way Out in Left Field
Society, understands if you're a die-hard Cubs fan but can't recall the
Spuds, Orphans, Rainmakers, Trojans or Panamas—all former nicknames for
Chicago's
National League team.
But that you've never heard of West Side Grounds—where the Cubs and their
variants played before
Wrigley Field—gets him
in a lather of near
Lou Piniella
proportions.
"If you go to the University
of Pittsburgh, they have the original [Forbes Field] home plate on
display," Reischl says. (It's in Posvar Hall, under Lucite.) Then his
laugh morphs into a pro-West Side Grounds rant: "Well, we had four World
Series occur here.
Cap Anson had his
3,000th hit here to become the first player to get that many hits.
Kid Nichols got his
300th win here. And we had the very first interurban World Series game
here in 1906;
New York didn't
do it first, we did it
first!
"And we've got this great location that no one knows about." Bordered by
Wolcott Avenue (then Lincoln Street) and Polk, Wood and Taylor Streets,
West Side Grounds stood as the Friendliest Confines of All—an old
steel-and-wood park snugly seating 16,000 where the Cubs played their best
baseball. Tinker to Evers to Chance ... 116 wins in a season ...
back-to-back major-league titles. That kind of baseball.
Related links
·
Chicago
Cubs West Side Grounds, 1893-1915
Graphic
·
Wrigley
through the decades
Photos
·
 Cubs
in 1945
Photos
·
The Cubs celebrate Ernie Banks
Photos
The Cubs also hit and
pitched there when they last won a World Series, in 1908, which is why
Reischl can't believe nothing marks the spot: no statue, no bronze bat.
Not even a visit from
Ronnie "Woo Woo" Wickers.
"You'll see markers where certain Civil War generals had tea," says fellow
Way-Outer Brian Bernardoni, 40, a governmental affairs director for the
Chicago Association of Realtors and a Wrigley Field tour guide. "But
history is also important to baseball fans."
"The Mall of America has the old home plate" of the
Minnesota Twins, adds
Reischl, 40. "They have a marker in Seattle where the
Seattle Pilots played, for God's sake. How could we not have a marker on
the West Side?"
Soon that will change. Perhaps as early as June 1, Reischl and Bernardoni—likely
flanked by many of their 125 Society chums—will see a plaque mounted at
the site of the old park, occupied by the
University of Illinois at Chicago's
medical campus. An exact monument site is in the works; Reischl and
Bernardoni would like to see it placed at 912 S. Wood St., in or near a
flower garden close to where the West Side Grounds center-field flag pole
stood.
The pair raised $3,000 for the marker (they collected $5,300, with plans
to donate the rest to a local Little League program), then got the
landmark approval from the Illinois State Historical Society, an
independent non-profit group. The Illinois Medical District also
cooperated; as owners of the land where West Side Grounds once sat, they
blessed Reischl and Bernardoni's efforts from the outset. The IMD also
will make the ultimate decision where the marker will go, in part based on
suggestions from the Way Out crew.
For Reischl and Bernardoni, the plaque will cap a nearly three-year joint
odyssey to redeem lost Cubs history.
"Wrigley Field is considered such a cathedral of baseball and is so
beautiful that people forgot," Reischl says. "But at West Side Grounds,
you could see
John McGraw and the New
York Giants,
Connie Mack and the Philadelphia
A's in the 1910 World Series.
Mordecai Brown going
against
Christy Mathewson:
That's the pitching matchup of the era."
'Best in the world'
The
story of West Side Grounds begins, like many a Cubs season, with a loss
and a sense of the inevitable.
West Side Grounds opened May 14, 1893, replacing West Side Park at
Congress, Loomis, Harrison and Throop. Built for $30,000, it was hailed by
one Tribune scribe as "a fine new ballpark, perhaps the best in the
world." The steel-and-wood structure had upper-deck box seats and open-air
seating along the foul lines.
The park also presaged some of Chicago's baseball traditions. It was steps
from a rail stop, now the Pink Line's Polk Street station.
Houses across the alley on Taylor Street erected rooftop stands to watch
games. And like Wrigley today, West Side Grounds sat in a hopping
area—where Mayor Carter Harrison Sr. and "Wizard of Oz" author
L. Frank Baum called
home.
Alas Cap Anson's Colts, as the Cubs were known, baptized the new digs in
too-familiar fashion. They lost the home opener to the
Cincinnati Reds—who
rallied with four runs in the 9th to win 13-12.
"Chicago
[blew] a grand chance yesterday to turn over a new leaf and let the black
bottle of defeats hide itself behind cobwebs," lamented a Tribune
reporter. (The player who scored the winning run? Charles Comiskey. As in
Comiskey Park.)
The losing ways would not continue. Between 1906 and 1910, the Cubs made
four World Series trips—winning back-to-back crowns, if you can imagine
that, in 1907 and 1908. For the record: The Cubs' 6-1 win against the
Detroit Tigers, on Oct.
11, 1908, marked the team's last home victory in a triumphant World
Series.
'No betting allowed'
Compared with Wrigley, West Side Grounds was a more rowdy, earthy place.
While today's Cubs fans get chided for tossing too many balls on the
field, Grounds fans gambled so much the brass erected "No betting allowed"
signs on the field. Overflow spectators sat on the turf.
"It was a tough place to see a game," Bernardoni says. "The capacity was
16,000, but if they let you sit in the field, they could [cram] in another
10,000."
And with the
Neuropsychiatric Institute beyond the left-field wall, the
rough-and-tumble reportedly coined the phrase "way out in left field" to
mean you were as sane as a mental patient. It became American slang and
inspired Reischl to adopt the moniker for his crew. Many researchers
support this, from Jason Marcus Waak at the Office of the UIC
Historian to author Christine Ammer in "Southpaws & Sunday Punches and
other Sporting Expressions." ("Southpaw" is also said to be a West Side
Grounds term, because pitchers on the mound with arms at their sides would
find their left hand facing toward Taylor Street
to the south.)
Given how well the Cubs played there, they could've stayed on the West
Side for decades. But many factors colluded to force a move.
Haven for newcomers
The
West Side became a haven for newcomers, says Bernardoni. "You had a big
influx of Italians, Jews and Latinos at the turn of the 20th Century. They
weren't baseball fans, they were working-class immigrants."
What's more, the Cubs, for all their winning, were by 1915 the city's
third most popular club—after the
American League
White Sox and upstart
Chicago Whales of the Federal League. Both teams played in beautiful new
steel-and-concrete parks that made the Grounds look obsolete.
Related links
Two years prior,
skinflint Cubs owner Charles Webb Murphy (once accused of selling choice
World Series seats to scalpers) promised to build a sparkling new West
Side Grounds within 60 days but was denied a city permit. But for that,
and his unpopularity with National League owners who forced him to unload
the Cubs, we might call the team West Siders today.
When the Federal League failed in 1915, a new Cubs brain trust led by
ex-Whales owner Charles Weeghman moved the team to Weeghman Park (now
Wrigley). West Side Grounds was reduced to hosting amateur baseball and
the occasional Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, until Murphy sold it to the
state in late 1919 for $400,000 to make way for a teaching hospital.
Until the sale day, many Cubs fans predicted the team would return due to
falling attendance up north.
No known trace of the park remains, including its ornate two-story ticket
office topped with two heroic ballplayer statues. The stadium lumber? Sold
for scrap.
But a UIC courtyard, which occupies a chunk of the old turf, remains as a
field of daydreams.
On a recent spring day, Reischl and Bernardoni strolled the grass, necks
craned as if they could hear grandstand cheers, see Mordecai "Three
Finger" Brown bear down on the mound.
The pair followed a diagonal footpath, and using a 1917 Sanborn Insurance
map found the infield's edge near second base. Not home plate, but as
close as you can get and remain outdoors.
Their smiles, kidlike and triumphant, said it all: a major-league moment.
"This is it," Reischl says, with only a spring breeze to punctuate his
sigh. Next they ventured in UIC's
medical sciences building, still searching for home plate. They wound up
not-so-way out in right field.
Cub fans of a century ago felt much the same longing for home. For all
West Side Grounds' faults, and the griping about Murphy, they mourned when
their boys marched to that upstart stadium at Clark and Addison. Tribune
sports columnist (and later famous author)
Ring Lardner was so
moved he penned a poem that ran on April 20, 1916—the day
the Cubs first took the field at the Not-Yet-Friendly Confines.
His "Elegy in a West Side
Ball Park" concluded thus:
All is still at Taylor, Lincoln, Wood
and Polk.
Beneath this aged roof, this
grandstand's shade,
Where peanut shucks lie in a
mold'ring heap,
Where show the stains of pop and
lemonade,
The Cub bugs used to cheer and groan
and weep.
lcarlozo@tribune.com
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