Today’s Wrigley Field is the hub of a neighborhood called Wrigleyville. When real estate agents coined the term in the 1970s, they thought it beat the previous name, Lakeview. They were right. Today, real estate near the ballpark is some of the priciest on the North Side. Motorists still park in nearby driveways and side streets, but now it costs forty dollars instead of five.
The first sign of Wrigley Field from any approach is the banks of lights over the grandstand. After forty years as the only major-league park without them, Wrigley got lights in 1988. They turn the sky purplish white on game nights. Music blares from open-air pubs—there are forty-four bars in a four-block radius. Vendors hawk RIZZO and BRYANT jerseys. The lights, music, and crowds give the old neighborhood a Las Vegas vibe. A city block on the west side of Clark Street has been razed to make room for the high-end Hotel Zachary, named for Wrigley Field architect Zachary Taylor Davis. A block from there stands the sprawling Budweiser Brickhouse Tavern (Homerun Nachos $14, Margarita Pitchers $36), named for WGN announcer Jack Brickhouse, who died in 1998. Around the corner, a sign on a stadium wall reads CHICAGO CUBS, WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS 1907 1908 2016.
On Waveland and Sheffield Avenues, tar-paper roofs where fans once held cookouts have been replaced by rooftop bleachers co-owned by the Cubs. The owners of a dozen apartment buildings warred with the team until 2004, when they agreed to share revenue. Fifteen years later the Wrigley Rooftops aren’t apartment buildings anymore. They are four- and five-story sports bars full of HD monitors and memorabilia, with bleacher seats on top—another part of Wrigleyville’s conversion from a lived-in neighborhood to a theme park devoted to the Cubs. The Ricketts family, which made its fortune in finance, bought the team in 2009 for $875 million, spent another $850 million modernizing the park, and now owns eleven of the buildings beyond the outfield walls.
Before one night game in 2018, ballhawk Rich Buhrke sat in a folding chair at the corner of Waveland and Kenmore. He remembered seeing Dave Kingman’s sixth-inning blast come over the bleachers forty years ago. “I got outrun for that one,” said Buhrke, now seventy-one years old and dressed in a Cubs cap and a sweatshirt with WRIGLEYVILLE over his heart. He still chased home-run balls to sell to fans. “I’ve lost a step, but I make up for it in anticipation,” he said.
Inside the old ballpark, the ivy Bill Veeck planted in 1937 still eats an occasional ground-rule double, but the nets that kept crumbling mortar from conking Cub fans are long gone. In today’s Wrigley, even the old-fashioned steel-trough urinals in the men’s rooms gleam. A 4,600-square-foot Jumbotron outshines the old manual scoreboard. A playing field manicured down to the quarter inch makes bad hops a rarity, though you may wonder about the clouds of dust kicked up by base stealers. For years, Cub fans have sneaked loved ones’ ashes into the park and strewn them on the field while groundskeepers looked the other way.
Attendance now averages almost three times the 14,952 who turned out on Thursday, May 17, 1979. Today’s fans, who pay from $49 to $119 for bleacher seats, hardly ever get into fights. The bleacher bums of the ’70s used to get bored during blowouts and chant back and forth: “Left field sucks!” “Right field sucks!” “Rain sucks!” They might have chanted worse at the fat cats in luxury boxes if there had been luxury boxes then. Today’s Cub Suites on the mezzanine level rent for $9,000 to $13,000 per game. On the other hand, the old bleacher bums might say it’s better to win.
In 2011 the Ricketts family hired general manager Theo Epstein away from the Red Sox. Epstein was the very model of the modern general manager, a Yale grad conversant in economics, sabermetrics, two-seam and four-seam grips, and clubhouse politics. His Red Sox had broken their own curse in 2004, when the thirty-year-old Epstein was the game’s youngest general manager. He jumped to Chicago for a record $18.5 million over five years. Five years later the Cubs finally broke the Curse of the Billy Goat: they beat Ray Boone’s old Cleveland Indians to win their first World Series since 1908. All three of their home games in the 2016 Series were night games.
The Cubs are now overdogs—a normal big-market franchise that behaves like one. They pay top dollar for free agents. Manager Joe Maddon deploys pitchers in unusual ways dictated by deep stats, and uses shifts as often as any major-league manager. The Cubs contend year after year. Some of their success is likely due to the fact that thirty-five to forty-three of their eighty-one home games each year are played at night. At least Maddon thinks so. He wants more night baseball at Wrigley Field. “Night games benefit us. I just want my players to be rested,” says Maddon, who sometimes greets reporters before day games by saying, “Good yawning.”
AFTER EXORCISING THEIR demons in 1980, thanks to heroics from Mike Schmidt, Steve Carlton, Pete Rose, and Tug McGraw, the Phillies lost to the Montreal Expos in a divisional playoff the following year. They lost the 1983 World Series to the Baltimore Orioles, and soon returned to last place. From 1987 through 2000 they had a winning record in only one season, 1993, when a Phillies team led by Curt Schilling, John Kruk, Lenny Dykstra, and Mitch Williams captured the National League pennant. (They lost the ’93 World Series when Williams, with ’79 Phillie Tim McCarver calling the game for CBS, gave up a walk-off three-run homer to the Toronto Blue Jays’ Joe Carter.) But after Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, Ryan Howard, and Cole Hamels led the franchise to its second championship in 2008, the Phillies also became a normal modern ball club—not as rich as the Cubs but equally driven by metrics and money management. By then Schmidt, now a celebrated figure in Philadelphia, was an occasional presence in the Phillies’ TV and radio booths. Generally considered the best all-around third baseman of all time, he often groused about modern players’ shortcomings.
Bruce Sutter, the other Hall of Famer to appear in the 23–22 slugfest of ’79, has kept a lower profile. By 2018 the split-finger fastball pioneer had been retired for thirty years. Sutter was sixty-five, sporting a full white beard that made him resemble an Old Testament prophet, but unlike Schmidt and others of their generation, he was still getting paid to play ball. Back in 1984, when he signed a six-year, $9.1 million free-agent contract with the Atlanta Braves, he had all the money deferred, with interest and inflation factored in. The arrangement helped the Braves at the time by lowering their payroll, but left them on the hook for $1.12 million a year over thirty years. The deal will continue to pay Sutter through 2021.
WHEN THE PHILLIES returned to Chicago for a three-game series in June 2018, they were in contention again thanks to their $25-million-a-year ace, the former Cub Jake Arrieta, and young stars like Aaron Nola and Rhys Hoskins. Due to the modern game’s salary structure, Nola—who would outperform Arrieta in 2018—and Hoskins earned a combined $1.1 million, their salaries a fraction of what they would be in a free market because they weren’t yet eligible for salary arbitration. (Players need three years in the majors to qualify for arbitration. That’s why teams keep their best prospects in the minors for a week or two every April, to give the club an additional year of control over them.) In effect, younger players earn less than market value so veteran free agents like Arrieta can earn tens of millions more. The Players Association favors this system.
By any accounting the Phillies were no match for the 2018 Cubs, whose $189 million payroll ranked fourth behind the Red Sox, Giants, and Dodgers. (Philadelphia’s payroll stood at $104 million.) Not even Arrieta could brag much in light of what the Cubs were paying outfielder Jason Heyward, whose $28-million-a-year salary was ten times what the 1979 Cubs paid their entire roster and coaching staff.
There were 40,275 fans at Wrigley the night Nola faced off against Cubs lefty Jose Quintana. The fans would see no split-finger fastballs from either starter. Three decades after its heyday, the Pitch of the Eighties was considered an arm killer. Angels phenom Shohei Ohtani threw a wicked split, and the Yankees’ Masahiro Tanaka had one that was almost as good, but both had elbow troubles. Too many who threw the pitch ended up needing surgery. But if the split was endangered, the screwball was extinct. By 2018 there were no screwballers left in the major leagues. Yu Darvish, the Cubs’ $126 million pitcher, had relied on a screwball before switching to a split to preserve his arm. (He was soon out with a sore elbow.) Brent Honeywell, one of the Tampa Bay Rays’ top prospects, had been ready to bring his screwball to the big leagues when he blew out his elbow. And the scroogie wasn’t just feared as a health risk; some players doubted such an unnatural delivery existed. “I don’t think it’s physically possible,” said Giants catcher Buster Posey. His teammate Madison Bumgarner agreed: “If anyone actually could do it, they’d last about three pitches.” Christy Mathewson, Carl Hubbell, Fernando Valenzuela, and Tug McGraw might disagree.
On this night Nola would need all four of his pitches—fastball, sinker, curve, changeup—against a bigger, stronger Chicago lineup than the one Randy Lerch faced in 1979. Cubs first baseman Anthony Rizzo and third baseman Kris Bryant were almost as tall as Dave Kingman but denser with muscle. Forty years after the Phillies pumped iron on Nautilus machines in the majors’ first weight room, the Cubs’ posh clubhouse featured “so many rooms you could get lost,” Bryant said. With its hot tubs and hyperbaric chambers, the Cubs’ 30,000-square-foot underground clubhouse was “part Las Vegas nightclub, part Star Trek spaceship, part luxury spa,” according to the Washington Post. Rizzo, who wore cleats with blinking red lights in the soles, stood six foot three and weighed 240—thirty pounds more than the six-foot-six Kingman in his playing days. Bryant stood six foot five and outweighed Kong by twenty pounds. Injuries were up—too many tight muscles?—but so were home runs. And strikeouts.
Decades of data crunching dating back to Tony La Russa’s White Sox days had turned baseball into a smarter game. Above all, modern metrics showed the full importance of the home run. For many if not most hitters, the most effective tactic is to damn the strikeouts, uppercut the ball, and swing for the fences.
“It’s Kingman all over again,” said Cubs historian Ed Hartig. “Homers and strikeouts—that’s the modern way.”
According to Deadspin founder and New York magazine columnist Will Leitch, “Dave Kingman is one of those baseball players spoken of in whispers, a certain sort of awe; he is a slugger from another time, another planet.” Leitch noted that Kong’s “embarrassing” strikeout totals “wouldn’t even have gotten him in the top 40 in strikeouts” today. “When he played, he was a bit of a joke. But if you took Kingman’s numbers and gave them to a hitter playing today … well, we might just award him the MVP.”
In 2017 the Yankees’ six-foot-seven, 282-pound outfielder Aaron Judge struck out 208 times and won the Rookie of the Year award. Judge deserved it, too. He slashed .284/.422/.627 and led the American League with fifty-two homers. Kingman’s league-leading 131 strikeouts in 1979 would have placed him fifty-sixth among major-league hitters in 2017. A year later, sixty-one hitters would strike out at least 131 times. In 2018, for the first time ever, there were more strikeouts than hits in the majors. The Nationals’ Mark Reynolds, who held the all-time mark with 223 in a season, joked that he was the “original gangsta” of swinging all-out all the time. According to Leitch, however, Reynolds was only “a down-brand version of Kingman.”
In 1992 the Baseball Writers of America elected Tom Seaver and Rollie Fingers to baseball’s Hall of Fame with 425 and 349 votes, respectively. Kingman got three votes, falling far short of the minimum required to stay on the ballot in future years. His fans always point out that he was the first player with four hundred or more home runs not to make the Hall. (Later sluggers excluded by the voters, including Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa, were rumored or admitted steroids users.) Kingman’s defenders sometimes neglect to mention the owners’ collusion against him: coming off a thirty-five-homer, ninety-four-RBI season for the 1986 A’s, Kong got no offers in 1987. Given another year or two in the majors, how many more homers might he have hit?
BOTH TEAMS SWUNG like Kong at Wrigley Field in June 2018. By the end of the game the Phillies and Cubs had struck out twenty-five times—fourteen more whiffs than in the slugfest of ’79.
Both starting pitchers were long gone by the time the Phils took a 5–3 lead in the ninth inning. In the last of the ninth, the Cubs loaded the bases with two out. Their last chance was Jason Heyward—the biggest bust of GM Epstein’s revamp of the franchise. A Gold Glove outfielder with a Garry Maddox beard and mustache, Heyward was almost as fast as Maddox, but bigger: six foot four and 240 pounds to Maddox’s six foot three and 175. After signing the richest contract in Cubs history—eight years, $184 million—he’d spent two and a half seasons flailing at National League pitching. His herky-jerky swing produced so many grounders and pop-ups that a few of the generally polite fans of 2018 booed as soon as they heard his walk-up music.
Heyward was 0-for-4 on the night. (Groundout, groundout, groundout, strikeout.) After Phillies left-hander Adam Morgan ran the count to 2-2, the Cubs were down to their last strike. At that moment, according to the latest metrics, their chance of winning the game was 18 percent.
The fans stood up. They hooted and applauded. Some put their hands together in prayer.
“Heyward’s hitting just .139 against lefties,” announcer Len Kasper said on NBC Sports Chicago.
Morgan threw a ninety-seven-mile-an-hour fastball. Heyward took a big cut. “And there’s a drive!” Kasper said as the ball flew into the night—the Cubs’ first walk-off grand slam in a decade.
RAY BURRIS WAS rooting for the Phillies that night. After his fifteen-year career ended in 1987, the former Cubs, Yankees, Mets, Expos, A’s, Cardinals, and Brewers pitcher—the only Chicago pitcher to survive the ’79 slugfest without allowing a run—joined Philadelphia as a minor-league pitching coach in 2013. In 2018 the sixty-seven-year-old Burris served as the organization’s rehab pitching coordinator, helping injured pitchers get back to the mound. He had a professional interest in Adam Morgan, who had rehabbed his shoulder on Burris’s watch four years before. But Burris, who came to the majors as a Cub in 1973, couldn’t help being happy for Heyward and the thousands of fans singing “Go Cubs Go” after Heyward’s grand slam.
Burris sometimes thought back to the times he’d spent with Donnie Moore. So did Bill Buckner. “I had an inkling,” Buckner said after Moore shot his wife and himself. Thinking back to their last hunting trip in the 1988–89 off-season, Buckner said, “It was a lot of things. His wife left him. He lost all his money, plus his arm was hurt.” After Moore’s attempted murder-suicide a sportswriter phoned Buckner’s ranch in Idaho and asked his wife, Jody, if Bill ever thought about killing himself.
Tonya Moore never remarried. Now living in Corona, California, she plays doting grandma to six grandchildren. Sometimes she drives an hour from Corona to Newport Beach, where her daughter, Demetria, works as a real estate agent. Mother and daughter, both survivors, talk mostly about family, hardly ever about baseball. “We talk about happy things,” Demetria says. Thirty years after the shooting, she keeps her dad’s baseball card on the nightstand by her bed. It’s the 1985 Donnie Moore card, his All-Star season.
Moore’s old friend Burris was looking forward to 2019, his forty-seventh season in professional baseball. Looking back to 1979, he said, “Chicago was a special place to play.” One of Burris’s favorite memories is of driving home after a win with Moore, his best friend on the club. Traffic was awful but they didn’t care. “We talked about how cool it was to be in the big leagues. Donnie had a white Ford van with plush seats and a tape deck. This is when music was music. We’d turn up the Temptations, James Brown, the Four Tops, Aretha, and just sing and sing. And that was a good day.”