Aweary of The Sun

By Tom Callahan

Trains are still the best conveyance for transporting a mood. Last week's destination was either the past or the future -- Chicago anyway, Wrigley Field. After two or three switchyards, a traveler gets turned around, and the sensation is of highballing one way and the other, backward and forward, in time.

The pity with which the old fedora-wearing baseball writers beheld their fresh replacements always seemed to have to do with missing trains. Seeing the country roll by in thatches of shadows, hearing Babe Ruth call all the redcaps "Stinkweed," were trivial elements of the coverage but critical parts of the experience. Without day baseball and night Pullmans, Red Smith could never have written, "Frisch's homer was the longest in history. Frankie talked about it all the way from St. Louis to Boston."

But railroad tracks don't sing anymore. Sinatra barely sings anymore. The new sleeping compartments are capsules resembling John Glenn's old accommodations on exhibit in the Air and Space Museum (without the air and space). And all the ball clubs have long since flown away. Wrigley Field fell in line with the age last week, when, 53 years after the innovator (Cincinnati) and 40 years since the procrastinator (Detroit), the Cubs finally put in lights. That makes everyone.

The Governor isn't often present for the throwing of the switch, but this was an unusual sunset. Even the buildings across the street wore bunting. A World Series supply of chroniclers from the American as well as the National League showed up to see the last-place Phillies oppose the fourth-place Cubs, whose proprietors said they had to give in to television and go incandescent or risk having to host every one of their postseason games in St. Louis. If any. The Cubs are 80 years between World Championships and pennantless since World War II.

Their longest-suffering fan, a hearty, hatchet-faced former tire dealer named Harry Grossman, 91, pushed the electric button. "Let there be light," he proclaimed in a biblical voice. The Cubs' holiest relics, Ernie Banks and Billy Williams, threw out first balls. Chicago's most sentimental pitcher, Rick Sutcliffe, took the mound. "It's like sunshine and Wrigley are saying goodbye to each other," he thought, though only eight night games are scheduled this season and just 18 a year for the calculable future. Looking hard at the Phillies' leadoff man, Phil Bradley, and straight into a light show of Instamatic flashes, Sutcliffe was struck by history -- and Bradley.

A home run right off the bat: the perfect note played on a party horn. Then the bottom of the inning kept on that way, fast and farfetched. Mitch Webster singled and Ryne Sandberg was up. Out of the rightfield stands popped Morganna, the floppy exhibitionist with the unmissable kisser, racing for the batter's box on mincing old-ballplayer feet that brought back the newsreels. She couldn't make it past the security guards to Sandberg, but she got to him anyway. His giggling homer gave Chicago a 2-1 lead.

Later, an inning short of the official seal, poetry struck a final time, along with lightning. Funnels of dust that some took to be divine displeasure rose up and blew across the infield, and two hours of rain flooded the tarpaulin and washed out the game. The sellout crowd of 39,008 drew back under cover and took the time to really look at the old place in the new light. The outfield wall, with its singular vines and morning glories and spider webs, was humanely spared any hardware. The stanchions peek fairly unobtrusively over the shoulders of the stadium. The park, that is. Or that was.

To lighten the mood, by ones and threes the spryest fans took slides on the tarp, ultimately including a pretty girl in a pink dress. Making a case for lenient court fines, four Cubs took flying dives on their own stomachs, including the pitcher Les Lancaster, who happens to be on the disabled list after an appendectomy. It's actually a promising young team, and if Chicago does play better over the next couple of summers, people will say it was the cooler August nights, and maybe they will be right.

It makes no sense and does no good to lament little deteriorations on every side. Constant comparisons with better old days are illusory and unreliable. It's enough to say we used to have Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and now we have Michael Douglas and Cher. If anything has been lessened at Wrigley Field, it is probably something quite small, certainly nothing to cry over, only a momentary feeling of letdown, like missing the train.