Father and Son Baseball Pilgrimage Turns 13

By Norm Wheeler
Sun editor

It starts innocently enough during a game of catch or a ride in the car listening to Ernie Harwell or Bob Ueker broadcasting the game. Your son is around 10 and hasn’t been to a major league park yet. “Let’s go see some ball games,” you say, “maybe we can see two games in one day!”

My son Jacob and I have been attending worship services at the Church of Baseball for 13 years now. We started by seeing the Cubbies in the afternoon and the White Sox at night on the same day in 1989 when the scheduling allowed both teams to be at home at the same time. You could just hop on the Elevated train outside Wrigley Field and be at Comiskey Park in half an hour. (That day game is recounted by our baseball buddy Tom Martinsen later in this story.)

The 1989 night game was in old Comiskey Park, where we sat in left field and just missed getting a home run ball. It was “pudge” Carlton Fisk’s last season, and the old ballpark was about to be replaced by the new one. Over the years we also said goodbye to Tiger Stadium in Detroit and County Stadium in Milwaukee, and we reacted with mixed skepticism and acceptance to the new parks built to replace the old ones. The new Comiskey seemed sterile and characterless at first, with the chi-chi latte shops and sushi stands under the corporate boxes getting more of our attention than the exclusive restaurant behind the black windows in right field or the over-stimulating giant TV screen/ boom box of a scoreboard in center field. But you can walk around the promenade and see the game from any angle, and the crowd retains the feel of the Polish working class lunch bucket neighborhood that has always been home to the Sox.

Comerica Park in Detroit bosts the great monuments to Cobb and Greenberg and Kaline, and the walk-all-the-way-around mezzanine resurrects the idea that you can watch a ball game standing, from the “stands.” Nothing can replace the pure baseball ambiance of old Tiger Stadium, as I am reliving in the pages of Tom Stanton’s celebration of fathers and sons and baseball in his book The Final Season.

This year we made it to the new Miller Park in Milwaukee after watching it emerge (like something from an outer space scene in a Stanley Kubrick movie) next to County Stadium over several seasons. We were there a few days after the huge crane twisted and toppled over the wall of the new park, killing several workers. It was impossible to imagine how the spaghetti-like tangle of steel could be removed and repaired, but now you can walk inside the tall erector set of a stadium to see the monument to those fallen workers in back of right field. Upon first entering the stadium, one has an otherworldly astonishment and distaste for the scale of it. It doesn’t feel like a baseball park. But the crowd is the same friendly batch of “salt ‘o the earth” working people you sit with at Comerica or Comiskey, and once you focus on the thrill of the grass between the white lines, it’s just baseball again after all.

The biggest problem with all of these new parks is the relentless bombardment of noise and images being spewed from the enormous megatron scoreboards. If people wanted to watch television they would stay home. I say turn them off (or at least turn the sound down), get a Wrigley Field style board just for scores, and rehire the organist and the brass bands to entertain between innings.

Wrigley Field remains the Mecca of baseball for us, the altar to which we must journey and at which we must genuflect each season to renew our faith, if you will. The brick and the ivy, the scoreboard and the organ, the bleachers and the rooftop fans all conspire to give Wrigley Field that pure ethos of baseball as myth, history and immediate entertainment. The crowd may be more yuppie, the beer and brats more expensive, and the babes more aloof, but Wrigley Field has the magic that never seems to fade. (As for inept play and bad records, all of these teams in Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee are about on par this year.)

One season we made this annual pilgrimage the occasion to celebrate four generations of baseball lovers in our family. We took my wheelchair-bound grandfather, Peter Brondyke, and my mother, Anna Jean Wheeler, to the new Comiskey and the old Tiger Stadium during the 1992 season. One of the trips was on Grandpa’s 92nd birthday. He had taken me to see spring training in Florida when I was eight, and I still have the autographs of the 1959 Tigers, White Sox, and Milwaukee Braves. He passed away on his 94th birthday while Jacob was at baseball camp at Grand Valley State University. It was great family bonding for the four generations and is now part of the family lore. As Tom Stanton reminds us in his book, baseball is about family, too.

Despite the meteoric rise in player’s salaries and beer, brat and ticket prices, and despite the annoying browbeating mega-noise scoreboards, there is still something about going to a major league ballpark. The players change, the owners convince the public to pay for new state-of-the art ballparks, the fortunes of the teams ebb and flow. But the magic of the green grass, the crack of the bat, the hook slide, the double play, and the home run continue to enchant us and give us a common denominator of delight. We reckon we’ll keep going to the ballpark.

Here’s the reminiscence of baseball buddy Tom Martinsen of Milwaukee, who, with his sons Jon and/or Tony, has joined us on many of our baseball pilgrimages:

The Friendly Un-Confines?

It was probably 1988 or 89 when you suggested that you, your children and Bill Pierce (The Bear) could meet me outside Wrigley Field, and that we could see a Cubs game together. I was skeptical about the prospects of meeting people outside a stadium in a city of several million people, but I didn’t know much about “The Friendly Confines”.

As remarkably easy as it was to identify you and your kids under an El stop near Wrigley, the game itself was more remarkable. The pitching matchup was legendary; Maddux vs Hershiser. (Yes, Greg Maddux was a Cub once. The story goes that they let him go for the same reasons they traded Rafael Palmeiro. Both were young, and both were good.)

Maddux pitched a shutout. The only grumbling I heard from Cub fans throughout the contest involved the official scorer awarding a sacrifice to a batter who advanced a runner on what looked like a drag bunt — a bunt that was fielded by a hard charging second baseman. The only run in the contest was scored on a double over the head of Dodgers’ right fielder, Mike Marshall (last name I cannot recall, but if memory serves me well, he was reputedly romantically attached to Belinda ________ another last name unremembered, a woman who sang with “The Go Go’s”)

The Bear couldn’t get off work. You and your kids had to start your drive home immediately after the game. The Bear promised to meet me at a McDonald’s restaurant near Wrigley field an hour after the game. I had an hour to kill. I answered a pay phone.

The person who called the pay phone asked if I was Bill. I told him that my name was not Bill and that he had called a pay phone. He asked me if the pay phone was just outside Wrigley Field. When I said yes, he asked if I had seen the game. When I said yes to this, he seemed to get enthusiastic about our conversation.

The unknown caller pretty much took me back through the game: the few hits, the numerous strikeouts, some good defensive plays — from time to time he would ask me to hold while he fielded questions from what sounded like a growing number of people in the area of the telephone from which he was calling.

Then came the question that convinced me that the call had been placed from an office. Was the hit that won the game a clean double or did Mike Marshall turn the wrong way on a fly ball that could have been caught?”

I had to think a minute on that question. Eventually I said that it looked to me like he initially turned the wrong way, yet I couldn’t say for sure that the ball could have been caught. “I would have scored it as a double,” I answered somewhat reluctantly.

“Great,” the caller almost shouted, “and thanks a lot, pal.”

“Enjoy the rest of the afternoon,” or words to that effect, I closed, and put the pay phone back on the hook. Within a few steps I realized that some mad Cub fan probably called that pay phone after every afternoon game when he was stuck in an office. I didn’t mind reliving the game with him.