Twilight's Last Gleaming

By Tom Callahan

As the lights flicker out on another year of sweat, they are threatening to come up at Wrigley Field in Chicago, where the Cubs illuminated last summer with a natural glow. By winning the National League's East Division and taking two quick playoff games from the San Diego Padres, they did momentary damage to a 39-year tradition but promptly squared themselves by blowing three straight to the Padres. God is in heaven, the Cubs are on a losing streak, and all is right with the baseball world--for now.

It is a matter of public record that in this year of the wave, a pestilence of antsy people who stand for everything the stranger next to them stands for --meaning nothing in particular--the Wrigley customers had the rare grace to stay down in front. Regarding the wave, they agree with the ample broadcaster John Madden: "It is just another form of artificial turf." Concerning artificial turf, they concur with the retired philosopher Richie Allen: "If horses won't eat it, I don't want to play on it." Against these and most other modern innovations, nearly all of them television related, the game's purest followers stand foursquare. But what really gets a rise out of Cub fans is an invasion of lights, which they alone have fought off for 50 years. Like their heroes, they are playing a losing game.

The ball club, no longer the tightly held property of Mr. P.K. Wrigley, who for 45 years seemed to regard the team as a nonprofit organization, has just filed legal challenges to the state and local laws that have been confounding night baseball on the North Side of Chicago. A reasonable guess is that lights will be installed by next postseason and in regular use by 1986. Attendance is not the concern. In a park whose capacity counts just 37,275, the Cubs drew 2.1 million people last year despite a horrendous spring- training record that discouraged business early. Whether that many patrons would be attracted at nighttime is highly doubtful in the first place, but commercial revenues from television are at the heart of the issue in any case. For, undeniably now, the heart of the Cubs is their nationwide superstation.

Since the end of the season, the team has arranged to hold on to three of its own pitchers, none of them Sandy Koufax (though one of them Rick Sutcliffe), for nearly $4 million a year. "It isn't the fans' fault that the sport has become so expensive, but they'll be the ones deprived of sunshine," says Bill Veeck, baseball's longstanding conscience. "In all history, these fans in Chicago have been the least affected by bad ball clubs, but television teams have to win." If anyone questions whether the Chicago players are fundamentally baseball or television stars, consider the remarkable fact that the Cubs of the free-agent era jumped ten places, to fourth in payroll spending last year. Soon 100% attendance at Wrigley Field may not be enough.

There is talk of a new stadium in Chicago, somewhere suburban, maybe even Arlington Heights, domed of course, carpeted with plastic grass. There the wave would flourish.