Published May 30, 2020
We were somewhere around Cairo, on the edge of Illinois, when the realization began to take hold. I remember thinking something like: I feel a bit giddy. Maybe I should wake him up.
But let me start at the beginning.
It was Monday, Memorial Day 1990. Three of us — my wife at the time, my friend Yancey and I — got in my new Suzuki Swift and drove from Lake Charles, Louisiana, to Baton Rouge to see the LSU Tigers and USC Trojans play the championship game of a baseball regional to decide which team would play in the College World Series. Rain delayed the start, so we headed to The Chimes Restaurant & Tap Room for food, cold beverages and a place to wait.
While we were there, Yancey brought up an idea he’d been thinking about for a long time. With me on vacation, he could try to get enough time off so that we could drive to Chicago to see a game in Comiskey Park, which was destined for the wrecking ball after the season. The Chicago White Sox were playing the New York Yankees in a three-game series that was starting that night and would end on Wednesday night. Could we do it?
We worked together in the Sports department of the Lake Charles American Press, whose LSU beat writer was in Baton Rouge for the game we planned to see. We ran the idea past him, because some juggling of work schedules would affect him, and if memory serves, he ran it past our boss by phone. Eventually, we settled on a plan: If Yancey could get permission and get free in time, we’d hit the road around 5 p.m. Tuesday. That would give us time to drive to Chicago, sleep during the day, and then see the game Wednesday night.
We watched LSU and USC play each other for the third time in the tournament. All three games were decided by one run. Bret Boone hit a home run for USC, and Rich Cordani and Lyle Mouton hit homers for LSU. Alex Box Stadium, itself an old ballpark, was rocking. It was a fun night and the beginning of a great baseball week.
My wife decided she didn’t want to go, and with her blessing, I spent Tuesday getting ready and awaiting word from Yancey. Around 6:20 or so, we headed east on Interstate 10, just like we’d done the day before, but with a different ballpark as our destination.
Yancey would end up doing most of the driving to and from Chicago, but at some point after the turn north on I-55, probably in Missouri, I was behind the wheel while he went to sleep. By the time we were on I-57 and crossing into southern Illinois, it was Wednesday. When I saw a sign showing the distance to Chicago, I did the math in my head. We were going to get there around 10 a.m., maybe 10:30. And that’s when it hit me.
I wonder if the Cubs are in town.
We hadn’t even checked. There was a Sporting News in the backseat, but I didn’t want to try to grab it while driving, so I waited for Yancey to wake up. Pretty much started willing him to wake up, to be honest. The prospect of seeing my first game at Wrigley Field and first and only game at Comiskey Park had me excited. Wake up, Yance!
He did, and he told him what I’d realized about our pace. He grabbed the Sporting News, but we were unable to confirm anything about the Cubs’ schedule. We stopped at a diner or hotel in a small town (Marion, we think) to grab their local paper, but it was a weekly, and it was several days old, so no details about upcoming Cubs games. We figured that when we got to Kankakee, we’d stop for gas and buy a Sun-Times or Chicago Tribune to satisfy our curiosity.
“Getting out of the car in Kankakee, we both remarked how the air smelled different than in Louisiana,” Yancey recalled this week. “Or the South in general. It was Northern air. Great Lakes air.”
Sure enough, the Cubs were in town and were playing against the San Francisco Giants. We knew that Wrigley Field had finally put up lights late in the 1988 season, but surely the Cubs and White Sox wouldn’t have night games at the same time, would they? Not on this May 30, they wouldn’t. First pitch at Wrigley was scheduled for 1:20 p.m. We’d have to forgo sleep, but we could do this.
“Let’s see two.”
We drove up the Dan Ryan Expressway, past Comiskey Park, and somehow managed to find our way to Wrigleyville after driving along Lake Michigan on a beautiful morning. There was no chance of rain. This seemed too good to be true. Games at two historic Major League Baseball stadiums in the same day? We couldn’t have planned it any better.
We pulled into the parking lot around 10:30 a.m. Not exactly well rested, we stared at the iconic Wrigley Field sign long enough to be sure we were really there. We bought programs. We bought tickets for the left field bleachers. We would be Bleacher Bums for the afternoon. How cool was that?
Although I knew Steve Goodman’s “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request” by heart, I wasn’t up for a Frosty Malt. But, when in Rome …
“We bought a gigantic bag of peanuts while in line to enter Wrigley,” Yancey said. “So huge, we couldn’t finish it.”
Flipping through the program, we saw a storied essay — “The green fields of the mind” — by the late Bart Giamatti. It had first been published in November 1977 in the Yale Alumni Magazine and Journal, and was recirculating during the first season after Giamatti, then the commissioner of Major League Baseball, died of a heart attack on September 1, 1989. That made the opening paragraph of his ode to baseball chilling in hindsight.
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.
It continues: “The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.”
He was referring to the end of the 1977 baseball season — at least for his beloved Boston Red Sox. But here we were, Yancey and I, in Chicago on a gorgeous spring afternoon in 1990, with sunshine and high skies and the promise of at least 18 innings of baseball.
The Giants had little trouble defeating the Cubs. John Burkett scattered five hits over eight innings, allowing a run in the eighth on a Ryne Sandberg home run. Matt Williams hit a two-run homer for the Giants in the third inning, and Burkett even drove in a run with a single.
We had a blast with the Bleacher Bums, who were sort of quaint in their rabble-rousing.
“The Cubs fans politely razzed a St. Louis fan in the bleachers,” Yancey remembered, “way more politely than a Yankees-Red Sox fan exchange.”
A young woman held up a sign — the Shawon-O-Meter — for Cubs shortstop Shawon Dunston, a sign whose popularity was just beginning to take off. It’s one of my lasting memories of that beautiful afternoon, along with the sunburn and windburn that caught me by surprise. I had been lulled into a comfort zone by the relatively cool temperature and low humidity, and I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. Who knew it could be this comfortable on an afternoon in May? Not this Louisiana native.
The game ended at 3:42 p.m., giving us time even in late-afternoon Chicago traffic to get to Comiskey Park for the 7:05 first pitch of the Yankees-White Sox game.
We made it in time to size up the next Comiskey Park — under construction next door — buy a program, roam the old ballpark a bit, eat a bratwurst and eventually find our seats in time for the start. There was a buzz in the air. The Yankees were in last place in the American League East, but the White Sox were nipping at the heels of the Oakland A’s in the American League West. Many miles away, in Auburn Hills, Michigan, the Chicago Bulls and Detroit Pistons were about to play Game 5 of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals, each with two wins in the series. With a two-game winning streak, the Bulls were hopeful, and Chicago was salivating at the prospect of seeing Michael Jordan and the Bulls advance to the NBA Finals.
Ah, Comiskey. This is why we made the trip in the first place, why we drove for 16 hours.
“The Wrigley bleachers were cool, cool, cool, obviously,” Yancey said. “But the biggest kick for me was when we walked into Comiskey and up a dark ramp and when I could just begin to see the grass, I was thinking: This place is so ancient, it feels like the cast of ‘Eight Men Out’ is about to take the field. The look, the smell, the feel.”
Fatigue was starting to hit me hard, but I was able to enjoy the game. We moved around quite a bit, checking out the view from different seats throughout the ballpark. We knew it would be our only chance, so we got our money’s worth. Was everyone else doing that, too? We saw people walking in the stands throughout the game, something we observed again a few weeks later watching the White Sox play — and pass the A’s for first place — in a televised game. Looking back, the design of the stadium probably explains the behavior. In most modern ballparks, there were concourses where fans could move about and go to buy snacks or souvenirs or go to the restroom and not be as noticeable as they were at Comiskey.
At one point, I visited the Picnic Area, where you could see the game from behind the left fielder and enjoy concessions while standing or seated at a picnic table. People watched the Bulls-Pistons game on televisions in the area or listened on the radio. Several heckled Yankees left fielder Deion Sanders. One of the most enjoyable parts of the evening was listening to Comiskey organist Nancy Faust, whose clever riffs would make you laugh when you figured out her game. For example, when Yankees first baseman Steve Balboni came to bat, she played the melody from the old Oscar Mayer “baloney” commercials. (“Cuz Oscar Mayer has a way with b-o-l-o-g-n-a.”)
Faust is a living legend in Chicago, and her rendition of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” was a delight to hear in person, so rich in detail and immensely popular with the fans. (And check out this story from last month, when she helped a girl sing the national anthem while in quarantine due to the coronavirus pandemic.) She is an American treasure, and hearing her play the organ that night was one of my highlights of the entire trip.
As for the game, the White Sox won as easily as the Giants had won over the Cubs earlier. After Balboni’s two-run home run in the first inning, New York didn’t score again.
Scott Fletcher’s three-run homer was the key part of Chicago’s four-run fourth inning that put the White Sox ahead to stay. A young right fielder named Sammy Sosa gave Chicago its fifth run with a solo home run in the eighth inning.
We also got to see a future Hall of Famer, catcher Carlton Fisk of the White Sox. Like Sosa and Yankees second baseman Steve Sax, he was one of several players in the game who was playing for a team other than the one many fans associate him with the most. And any game that features a pitcher named Plunk is a fun game to see. (Sadly, he did not live up to the name by hitting a batter.)
The local color was entertaining.
“Around the final inning,” Yancey recalled, “we moved behind the third base dugout and near an ancient woman wearing headphones and, I believe, keeping score. She was a crusty old bird, grousing at either the umpire or the Sox pitcher (Bobby Thigpen). I remember us kicking around guesses about how long she’d been coming to Comiskey.”
The White Sox got the win, and “Sweet Home Chicago” blared from the stadium speakers at game’s end. It was time to find a place to sleep. After a few uneasy moments on Chicago’s South Side, we found a hotel near Chicago Midway International Airport, and got as much sleep as we could.
After we woke up and got ready to find a place to eat lunch, we saw news on TV that drug and explosive charges against gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson had been dropped the day before. We both laughed at how, when he spoke, he sounded like Bill Murray had in playing an HST-like character in “Where the Buffalo Roam.” (The beginning of this blog post is a wink and a nod to having longtime Cubs fan Murray and Thompson unexpectedly become a part of our trip.)
We found our way to downtown and narrowed our lunch options to Pizzeria Uno or, a stone’s throw away, Pizzeria Due. We chose the original, and had our fill of Chicago deep-dish pizza.
“I think we ordered Old Style lagers with the pizza,” Yancey said. I think he’s right.
We did a little bit of driving along Michigan Avenue and other main thoroughfares, but we knew that we’d need to get on the road before rush hour to speed us on our way back to Louisiana and the end of Yancey’s workweek. As we headed south, the radio station we were listening to played Boston’s “More Than a Feeling.” The significance of that song? On our way in, the station had promoted a $10,000 giveaway and said to be listening for the song, because one lucky caller would win the prize. We scrapped the idea of trying to find a payphone, and we headed back down the Dan Ryan Expressway.
We listened to as much as we could of the first game of a series between the Minnesota Twins and the White Sox, before we lost the station somewhere in southern Illinois. Hearing Nancy Faust’s organ playing during the broadcast was a bonus. Later, we picked up a signal carrying a Reds-Dodgers game in Los Angeles. After that faded away, the hardest part of the drive home was upon us.
“It became very hard to find anything to help stay alert,” Yancey recalled. “And the Arkansas-Tennessee stretch into Mississippi was the hardest because it was the dead of night.”
When we stopped for gas in Mississippi, the June 1 air was not Northern air. It was not Great Lakes air. It was thick, humid Southern air. The majesty and wonder of our trip were behind us.
“As with almost any trip, the drive home was more of a slog because the centerpiece of the journey is over,” Yancey said, putting it perfectly.
We reached Lake Charles on Friday morning, and I went to sleep as soon as I could. Yancey slept for a couple of hours before a friend woke him up, and they went to grab lunch before the start of Yancey’s evening shift at work.
Best guess? We drove 2,140 miles (in a new car I’d bought during March Madness).
“One other thing,” Yancey said, “that jumps out at me: We crossed the Mississippi six times.”
That photo of the Dan Ryan Expressway is the best I could do on Shutterstock for a high-quality photo symbolic of the trip. The stock-image service’s only photos of Comiskey Park are for the one that replaced the original ballpark in 1991. There isn’t a single photo of old Comiskey Park available through Shutterstock. We tried, one-month free trial. We tried.
The image at the top of this post is a Google Maps view of the “new” Comiskey, now called Guaranteed Rate Field. A red arrow points to where home plate for the old ballpark used to be, now a marble plaque on a small, dedicated area next to the replacement stadium. The expressway runs north-south to its east.
A year after our trip, I got to see old Comiskey again. In the movie “Only the Lonely,” released on May 24, 1991, John Candy’s character takes Ally Sheedy’s character there on a date. Just the two of them. A picnic at night in the outfield. A cop, Candy’s character has connections. The surprise scene was a lovely reminder of our fun trip a year earlier.
There would be other games I’d watch to mark the end of a stadium’s run. I watched on TV on September 21, 2008, when the Yankees beat the Baltimore Orioles in the final game in the previous Yankee Stadium. Three months earlier, I wrote the last game-night column at the old Alex Box Stadium as the LSU Tigers advanced to yet another College World Series with a victory over UC Irvine. That final game had a football score, 21-7.
UC Irvine’s coach that year? Mike Gillespie, who had been USC’s coach in 1990, when we drove to Baton Rouge to watch the championship game of that regional tournament. In 2007, he managed the Staten Island Yankees, and that’s a whole lot of crossover for one blog-post ride down memory lane.
The old Alex Box Stadium was torn down, too. I’m pretty sure I wrote a blog post when that happened and linked to the Frank Sinatra song that gives this blog post its title. Some people get sentimental about such things. Can you imagine?
Thirty years since that day-night doubleheader in Chicago? No way. It was yesterday.
Photo of Wrigley Field sign by Felix Lipov/via Shutterstock.
Photo of Dan Ryan Expressway by Kristopher Kettner/via Shutterstock.