In Which I Wax Superfluous

Nothing approaches the head-lifting sensation of strolling down Waveland Avenue toward Wrigley Field when, a block or so away, you hear the sounds of Gary Pressy's organ wafting over and through the neighborhood. A baseball team might someday replicate Wrigley in dimension and 'hood location, but the history—the literal amount of time, the roughly 36, 500 days that the park has been standing at the corners of Addison and Clark—cannot be matched, and that's brought home for me graphically by those notes lifting and settling over busy game-day streets. My favorite approach to the park is heading west on Waveland toward Sheffield as the rear of the old centerfield sign and flags looms and the place in all of its history and placeness welcomes you. Streaming up the road with hundreds of baseball fans past open-air bars, everything and everyone leaning noisily off of the crowded sidewalks into the narrow, centuries-old streets, knowing that a beery game in the sun awaits you and your buddies: unbeatable.

The game was terrific, a taut pitching affair until the fifth, when Miguel Montero blasted a grand slam that blew things open for the Cubs, who won in front of a packed house. As for the much ballyhooed, and in some corners lamentable, new Jumbotron scoreboards and expanded bleachers—they've been added tastefully and appropriately as far as I'm concerned. Nothing short of a wholesale tear-down of the park could expunge the palpable sense of time and culture and history of this place. Go there.