Skip to footer

Baseball's Wrigley Field at 100: 3 books celebrating the anniversary

The centennial of Chicago's Wrigley Field – being celebrated this month – is also marked by these three books.

2. “Wrigley Field: 100 Stories for 100 Years”

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

By Dan Campana and Rob Carroll

Triumph Books

192 pages

( Insights shared by Reed Johnson, Cubs outfielder 2008-09, 2011-12)

"I think fans really make Wrigley. When I first got over there in 2008, in one of my first at-bats, I grounded out to second base. There was a runner on second or third base, and I had moved the guy over. As I'm running back to the dugout, the whole stadium was cheering. You don't usually hear that. The normal baseball fan is into the home run or the obvious play that kind of just stares at you. But I feel like the fans there really understand the game – they recognize the importance of advancing runners and those kinds of things, and I think that's really what makes that place special aside from it being one hundred years old.

"... I remember hitting a home run to left center and thinking, "Man, this place is just a porch.' You play in April, May, or June, when the wind is blowing dead in, and the place plays bigger than any other field you've ever played in. Then, throughout the summer, the place plays completely different. You've got to check the flags all the time. There's been games when I've taken batting practice in eighty-five degree weather only to come out for the game and it's fifty-five degrees and the wind is blowing in the complete opposite direction."

2 of 3
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.