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Before Wrigley Became Wrigley

The Inside Story of the First Years of the Cubs' Home Field

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Description

Chicago’s Wrigley Field opened in 1914 as Weeghman Park, the new North Side stadium erected for use by the Federal League’s Chicago team, which would eventually be called the Whales. It was built in just 50 days, with an rectangular shape in the style of New York’s Polo Grounds, designed to fit the odd dimensions of the lot—which formerly housed a seminary school—that Whales owner “Lucky” Charley Weeghman had purchased with a 99-year lease at a little over $300,000. In all, it took $250,000 and a plenty of scrambling to build the park.

That seminal event is at the heart of Before Wrigley: The Inside Story of the First Years of the Cubs’ Home Field . The book will explore the early years of Wrigley Field, when it bore a different name and housed a different team. Sean Deveney has mined documents and resources from baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, as well as the Chicago History Museum, to supplement the reports in newspapers and magazines of the day, giving readers a behind-the-scenes look at origins and birth pangs of the park.

At the center of the Before Wrigley drama is a cast of typically colorful Chicago characters, particularly Weeghman, the young and flamboyant restaurant man who started out in the city as an $8-a-week waiter, eventually became a millionaire baseball magnate, and then lost everything. There’s tightwad owner Charles Murphy, who oversaw the Cubs’ early 20th century dynasty (yes, there was a Cubs dynasty), only to run off his famed infield of Tinkers, Evers and Chance, and be run out of the game himself. There are crooked baseball officials like Ban Johnson and Garry Herrmann, crooked politicians like mayor “Big Bill” Thompson, rogue ballplayers out to make a quick buck or two and, of course, the generally fair and hard-working citizens of Chicago.

Using careful and detailed research, incorporated into the bizarre and gripping narrative of the city, the game and the team in the mid-1910s, Before Wrigley gives Cubs’ fans a rollicking account of their beloved ballpark’s little-explored early days.

Publishers Weekly Review

Mar 17, 2014 – This solid account of the early years of the Chicago Cubs’ beloved Wrigley Field will delight fans who have been looking for a World Series championship since 1908. But what most current fans probably don’t know is that championship was won in the Cubs’ original stadium on Chicago’s West side, not in its the current North Side home in Wrigley Field, which wasn’t built until 1914. Sports writer Deveney (The Original Curse) recounts the Byzantine business, sports, and political stories behind the ballpark’s beginning, which was first named Weeghman Park and was used by the Chicago team of the old Federal League—a “short-lived outlaw circuit” that boldly claimed major-league status and “challenged the dominance of the American and National Leagues.” “Fortune, treachery, and foresight” were all factors in building the park, which is on the former site of the Chicago Theological Lutheran Seminary. Deveney gives an excellent and thoroughly detailed account of the “winding path” that led the Cubs to that piece of land, including the likes of Charlie Weeghman, a flamboyant millionaire who first saw the possibility of baseball success on the city’s budding North side, , and legendary Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Before Wrigley Became Wrigley
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  • $16.99
  • Available on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac.
  • Category: Baseball
  • Published: Apr 01, 2014
  • Publisher: Sports Publishing
  • Seller: The Perseus Books Group, LLC
  • Print Length: 224 Pages
  • Language: English
  • Requirements: To view this book, you must have an iOS device with iBooks 1.3.1 or later and iOS 4.3.3 or later, or a Mac with iBooks 1.0 or later and OS X 10.9 or later.

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