Chapter One
Beer Springs Eternal

Friday, April 8—vs. Milwaukee

The season's first glimpse of Wrigley comes as I walk north on Sheffield Avenue. For some reason, the following actions seem appropriate: a pumping of the fist, kissing the brick on the right field wall, or maybe releasing a fax like Jordan did for his return to the NBA in 1995.

"I'm back," it would say.

I am back. After three years in baseball purgatory, defined as wherever the Royals happen to be playing, I have returned to the corner of Clark and Addison, a.k.a. the Friendly Confines, home of the Chicago Cubs.

In 2003, I attended five games here. In 2004, none. Those totals will be crushed this season. Each Cubs home game is available to me, live and in the flesh. On May 1, I'll move to a place that is a five-minute walk (four blocks) from the corner of Waveland and Clark. Until then, I'm crashing on a couch in Lincoln Park, a five-minute ride from Wrigley on the CTA's Red Line.

I am looking at a Cubs pocket schedule, the kind they give out at the counter at Osco Drug. There are eighty-one dates laid out on a calendar grid, each containing the team names that seem brash yet attractive in their abbreviated form—STL, PIT, CIN. To baseball fans, these schedules appear poetic. Spread across five months, the campaign seems limitless.

Standing outside the right field wall and looking at the Wrigley Field scoreboard (it is 5:45 a.m. and the day's matchups have already been posted), I think about the requirements of surviving a baseball season. Whether you're a player, a manager, a GM, or even a fan, an entire campaign mandates a certain amount of patience and endurance. In return, you receive sustained hope, or, if you live somewhere like Tampa Bay or Detroit, extended misery.

Baseball is the male soap opera, though such a label overlooks the number of women who follow the sport. It is a pin-striped Days of our Lives, with the heroes and villains changing on a more frequent basis. A dissection of the characters and events arrives on our front doorsteps each morning. Hours later, there's a new episode for our consumption.

If the Cubs weren't coming off back-to-back winning seasons, I might not be here. Back-to-back winning seasons? There's a situation I can't resolve in my head.

This new alliterative premise—Cubs as consistent contenders—has a strange fit. Back in the day (and by that I mean 1997) we always thought this might be the year for the Cubs. But like a father at a screeching fourth-grade orchestra concert, we really didn't have a reason to believe in our support. We were just trying to be nice.

Now the Cubs are giving us a little reason to believe. This year's payroll is $87 million, among the highest in the league. The team's top four starters—Mark Prior, Kerry Wood, Carlos Zambrano, and Greg Maddux—seem to be impenetrable, if only they can stay healthy. Sammy Sosa has been traded to Baltimore, taking his declining power numbers and salsa-blaring boom box with him.

But this being Wrigleyville, there are also reasons for pessimism. The team dropped two of three games in Arizona to start the season. General manager Jim Hendry did nothing to address the anemic bullpen, instead calling on unreliable La Troy Hawkins for another season. The team didn't re-sign Moises Alou in left field, leaving us to pin our hopes on . . . Jason Dubois and Todd Hollandsworth? (Sigh.)

When I arrive at Wrigley this morning, I am wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt, a heavy pullover and a blue North Face fleece. A few hours later, I start to sweat. I remove the fleece and tie it around my waist. There is power in layers.

The temperature is approaching the sixties. It's not warm by Florida standards, but that's all we can ask for. On Sheffield Avenue, more than a hundred people have already lined up along the right field fence. I am one of them, though I've yet to find a ticket.

Sweating on Opening Day. In Chicago, the first day of the baseball season is not supposed to involve heat. Instead, we huddle in the green stands at Wrigley Field, chasing cold beers with hot chocolates. We bring heavy blankets and woolly scarves and hats and gloves left over from Bears season. If we could sneak them in under our jackets, we'd bring in cookstoves and space heaters, too.

Everyone sees Wrigley as this summer party place, where guys are perpetually shirtless and girls show up wearing only bikini tops. That's only part of the truth. Wrigley is also about freezing your ass off in April. The cold, we like to say in Chicago, builds character. My stunt is about more than just watching baseball. I'm also here for everything else that goes with living in Wrigleyville. While it's true that Chicago sportswriters have been calling Wrigley "the world's largest outdoor beer garden" since the '60s, the place has taken more of a party-bent approach in recent years (and this is saying something). In 2003, when the Cubs charged toward the National League Central title, overflow crowds swarmed the neighborhood for each home game, looking for an extra ticket or, at the very least, a spot near the front of the bar.

The party carried over to the 2004 opener and charged its way through the disappointing final weekend. People from all walks of life—frat boys, sorority sisters, punks, Goths, nerds, businessmen, families, the elderly—all came together to support what was supposed to be another extended run at the elusive World Series. When that didn't happen, everyone just ordered another round.

Now the game day experience has become more than just a few beers with your friends before heading home. This is Mardi Gras for the Midwest, complete with live music and flashes of what the French call le boob.

Don't have a ticket to the game? Don't worry! Just sit in a bar and spend your money on beers priced the same as in the ballpark. Last year, so many people came to Wrigleyville with this plan that a hyperbolic columnist predicted Armageddon.

A lot of the bandwagon jumpers don't even seem to notice that a Major League Baseball team plays here. For example, take my first bar visit of the season:

Copyright © Kevin Kaduk, 2006.