Facts

Note: In 1893 West Side Grounds was used solely for Sunday home games. The Cubs used South Side Park at 35^th and Wentworth Monday through Saturday.

© The Taft family of Cincinnati under the direction of Charles Taft, the half-brother of William Howard Taft, owned the Cubs when they played at West Side Grounds. Taft installed Charles Murphy as President . Eventually, the team was sold to a 10-man syndicate on January 20, 1916. The leader of the group, Charles Weeghman, moved the team to a new park located at 1060 W. Addison called Weegham Field. Weeghman would eventually sell the team to another member of the group named William Wrigley Jr.[9]

© West Side Grounds was built next to a Psychiatric building which was located behind the left field wall. The patients would yell and scream crazy things from the building creating the phrase, “That came out of left field.”[11]

© Frank Chance, the manager of the Cubs, would bring his players to a bar down the street from West Side Grounds on the southwest corner of Polk and Wolcott called Biggio Brothers. Chance would always buy the first drink, and the bartenders knew to stop serving any players who had had too much. According to former Cubs catcher Jimmy Archer, Chance would buy the booze if the game was rained out. Drinks would start at about three, and Chance had a rule that all players had to leave the bar by quarter to midnight.[13]

© In the 1908 World Series at West Side Grounds, Cubs owner Charles Murphy raised the ticket prices five times higher than regular season prices infuriating the local fans. Traditionally, tickets were doubled for the World Series. When larger blocks of tickets turned up in the hands of scalpers, fans speculated that Murphy had sold the tickets to scalpers to make an even higher profit. Fans rebelled by not going to the second game of the series, and only 17,760 turn out instead of an estimated crowd of 25,000. After an investigation, the National League criticized Murphy for his polices, but did not find any connections between Murphy and scalpers.[15]

© In the 1908 World Series at West Side Grounds, Charles Murphy also enraged the out-of-town writers covering the series by assigning them seats located in the back row of the grandstand. In response to Murphy placing them in the rear of the stands, the writers banded together and organized the Baseball Writers Association of America. The Association evolved over the years, and is responsible for electing players into Baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.[16]

© On August 5, 1894 during a game at West Side Grounds a fan allegedly threw a lit cigar into some garbage, and the stands caught on fire. Two Cub players, Jimmy Ryan and Walt Wilmot, used baseball bats to break through the barbed wire fence that separated the fans from the field to help fans escape the flames. Over forty fans were injured and West Side Grounds sustained $20,000 in damages.[17]

© On September 1, 1906 at West Side Grounds, the regular umpires were stricken with food poisoning. Cubs pitcher Carl Lundgren and Cardinals catcher Pete Noonan were selected to ump the game. The Cubs won 8-1 behind a five-hitter from Modecai “Three Fingers” Brown.[18]

© On April 29, 1913, the Reds trainer forgot to load the team uniforms onto the train in St. Louis, and the team arrived at West Side Grounds without their uniforms. The Reds borrowed uniforms from the White Sox, and lost to the Cubs 7-2.[19]

© The legendary field announcer Pat Pieper began his career at West Side Grounds. Pieper started as a vendor in 1904 before becoming the Cubs field announcer in early 1915 and remained as the public address announcer for the Cubs until his death in 1974.[24]

© Ring Lardner of the Chicago Tribune on April 20^th, 1916 wrote a poem published in the paper called “Elegy in a West Side Ball Park” paying tribute to West Side Grounds. The poem was published the same day that the Cubs played their first game in their new home on the north side.[25]

© On October 23, 1919 Charles Murphy who kept the ballpark after selling the team to Charles Weegham in 1916 sold West Side Grounds to the State of Illinois for $400,000. West Side Grounds covered 8.02 acres, and the State of Illinois used the property to build a research and educational hospital.[27]

© A young fan developed a unique way of getting into West Side Grounds. As he stood at the entrance to the park at Polk and Wood, the young fan along with some friends would wait for Cubs great Frank Chance to arrive, and say, “Hope you win today! Wish I could see it!” or he would tell Chance, “I heard you had a good day yesterday! Wish I saw it!” Sometimes Chance would stop, and say, “Come along kids.” Chance then would walk the kids through the pass gate. If not, the young fan and his pals would watch the game through knotholes in the fence or climb in over the fence. The young fan who described himself as a “roaring Cubs baseball fan” was George Halas[28].

© The Cubs had arguably the finest double play combination in baseball history during their days at West Side Grounds. With Joe Tinkers at shortstop, Johnny Evers at second and Frank Chance at first, the Cubs trio became immortalized by a poem that appeared in the New York Mail in 1910 by Franklin P. Adams called Baseball’s Sad Lexicon. All three were enshrined in the Hall of Fame in 1946 apparently as a trio, and the below poem may have influenced the baseball writers in their selection.[29]

[1] Smith, Curt. Storied Stadiums: Baseball’s History Through Its Ballparks. 2001. Carroll & Graph Publishers, New York.

[2] 2005 Chicago Cubs Information Media Guide. 2005. Lake County Press, Inc. Waukegan, Il

[3] Smith, Curt. Storied Stadiums: Baseball’s History Through Its Ballparks. 2001. Carroll & Graph Publishers, New York.

[4] 2005 Chicago Cubs Information Media Guide. 2005. Lake County Press, Inc. Waukegan, Il

[5] Ibata, David. Cubs Bat Around Town Since Opening Day In 1876. April 13, 1986. Chicago Tribune

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] Couch, Greg. 2^nd city did it first. October 25, 2000. Chicago Sun-Times.

[9] Ibata, David. Cubs Bat Around Town Since Opening Day In 1876. April 13, 1986. Chicago Tribune

[10] Solomon, Alan. Ghosts of Ballparks; Fields vanish, dreams don’t. May 18, 2003. Chicago Tribune

[11] Ibid.

[12] Jacob, Mark. Wrigley Field: A Celebration of the Friendly Confines. 2003. McGraw-Hill Publishing, New York.

[13] Golenbock, Peter. Wrigleyville. A Magical History Tour of the Chicago Cubs. 1999. St. Martin’s Press, New York.

[14] Ibid

[15] Ibid

[16] Ibid

[17] West Side Grounds. From BR Bullpen. (www.baseball-reference.com) 21 Jan 2006.

[18] West Side Grounds. (www.baseballlibrary.com) 21 Jan 2006.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] West Side Grounds. (www.projectballpark.org) 21 Jan 2006

[22] Ibid

[23] Ibid

[24] Shea, Stuart. Wrigley Field. The Unauthorized Biography. 2004 Brassy’d Inc. Dulles, VA

[25] Ibid.

[26] Benson, Michael. Ballparks of North America. 1989. McFarland and Co Publishers. NY

[27] “It’s a sad tale to Cub Fans, but not to Murphy.” Chicago Daily Tribune. October 24, 1919. p26.

[28] Halas, George with Gwen Morgan and Arthur Veysey. Halas by Halas. 1979. McGraw-Hill, New York.

[29] www.reference.com 10 Oct 2006