In baseball’s quaint antiquity, teams made money by selling tickets to watch the game, rather than through broadcast rights and branded merchandise. Hence stadiums were situated in population centers, which created the undesirable side effect of allowing people living nearby to watch the games from their windows, free, or even sell tickets themselves. The teams built higher fences; the freeloaders responded by erecting stands on their roofs, finally driving one team, the Chicago Cubs, to buy most of the houses behind Wrigley Field and put their own bleachers atop them, which I might not have believed if I didn’t see it myself on the jacket of the architecture critic Paul Goldberger’s new book.
The much-beloved Wrigley, which dates from 1914, looms large in Goldberger’s account. Its quaint, ivy-covered outfield fence and its near–North Side location make it the perfect illustration of one of the author’s key themes, the baseball “park” (or “field” or “grounds”) as rus in urbe, a small piece of countryside transplanted to downtown. Like nature itself—but unlike, say, football—baseball has no fixed boundaries. Beyond the right angles of the infield, it occupies a theoretically limitless space whose main constraint, in the pre-suburban-stadium era, was the surrounding real estate. This called forth some creative architectural solutions to achieve maximum seating capacity, optimal sight lines, and enough distance to the outfield fence to create a meaningful distinction between a pop fly and a home run.
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