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Oh, the Stories Wrigley Field Could Tell

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Despite the team’s disappointing record, the century-old home of the Chicago Cubs continues to draw fans.CreditCredit...Larry Stoddard/Associated Press

When the ballpark that became Wrigley Field opened in Chicago in 1914, it soon hinted at the checkered baseball history made there in the next 100 years.

The owner was Charles Weeghman, who quickly ran into trouble in his primary business, running lunch counters. His team, the Chicago Whales of the Federal League, folded along with the league after the 1915 season. So Weeghman purchased the Cubs from the Taft family of Cincinnati and moved them to the two-year-old park. He then began selling his shares of the Cubs to William Wrigley, and an inauspicious century of baseball continued.

The stadium, which took its new owner’s name in 1926, has withstood time and bad baseball to reach the 100th anniversary of its opening on Wednesday. It houses a team that has the longest championship drought in North American professional team sports. After winning the World Series in 1907 and 1908, the Cubs went 0 for the next 105 years. They lost seven World Series, collapsed in 1969 and endured the Bartman incident in 2003 along the way.

Slide 1 of 24

On May 14, 1914, fans lined up outside Chicago’s Weeghman Park to watch Charlie Weeghman’s Federal League team, the Chicago Whales. After the Federal League folded in 1915, Weeghman purchased the Cubs to play there. The park was renamed Wrigley Field in 1926.

Credit...Chicago History Museum, via Associated Press
  • Slide 1 of 24

    On May 14, 1914, fans lined up outside Chicago’s Weeghman Park to watch Charlie Weeghman’s Federal League team, the Chicago Whales. After the Federal League folded in 1915, Weeghman purchased the Cubs to play there. The park was renamed Wrigley Field in 1926.

    Credit...Chicago History Museum, via Associated Press

(Wrigley Field fared much better from 1921 to 1970, when it was home to the team that became the Chicago Bears, who won eight pro football championships there.)

But the ballpark itself became an icon. Its ivy-covered outfield walls, a scoreboard that has been operated manually since it was built in 1937, the rooftop seats across the street and the hangdog pessimism of the perpetually disappointed but loyal fans have all become a part of the charm that fills the ballpark no matter how badly the Cubs perform.

Wrigley’s profile has been raised by events real and imagined, or some mix of the two. It has hosted a circus, a rodeo, a pro hockey game and even a ski jumping competition in 1944. It has been a co-star in movies, most notably “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

The mobster Al Capone had front-row seats in the 1930s. Babe Ruth’s famous, if unsubstantiated, called shot happened there in the 1932 World Series. Lou Gehrig, as a 17-year-old high school player, was said to have hit a ball out of Wrigley and onto Sheffield Avenue. The second-oldest stadium in the majors after Fenway Park in Boston, Wrigley Field has a capacity of only 41,160, but its legend remains larger than life.

A correction was made on 
April 22, 2014

A picture in an earlier version of a slide show with this article was published in error. The photograph, of two players with a bear cub mascot, showed Chicago’s West Side Grounds in 1914, not Weeghman Park in 1916.

A correction was made on 
April 27, 2014

An article in some editions last Sunday about the 100th anniversary of Wrigley Field described incorrectly part of the history of the stadium’s main tenant, the Chicago Cubs. In 1916, Charles Weeghman bought the Chicago Cubs from Cincinnati ownership; he did not buy the “Cincinnati Cubs.”

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