page_title: History of Wrigley Field
section_title: Night baseball (1988)
hierarchical_section_title: History of Wrigley Field / "Building a New Tradition in the Friendly Confines" (1981–present) / Night baseball (1988)
caption_attribution_description: I took this photo at Wrigley Field in Chicago, Illinois on June 2, 2007. Exterior ivy is just barely visible, just starting to creep up the wall. 19:40, 9 June 2007 . . Baseball Bugs . .600 x 500 (110,062 bytes)
context_page_description: The history of Wrigley Field, the home of the Chicago Cubs of Major League Baseball's National League, begins well before the Cubs played their first game in that venue.
context_section_description: The Cubs had been run almost like a hobby by the Wrigleys, but the Tribune Company was interested in the Cubs strictly as a business. The new owners started talking  lights and began stirring debate on the matter. One of P. K. Wrigley's stated reasons for not installing lights was that it would upset the neighborhood, and the initial negative reaction to the Tribune Company's intentions validated P. K.'s prediction.
  Resistance to the installation of lights was not limited to those who lived nearby and opposed the lights on the practical grounds of bothersome brightness or the noise and crowds from night games. Many Cubs fans who lived outside Wrigleyville opposed the idea simply due to the fact that the Cubs' stance as the last team to resist night baseball was a point of pride, as it was seen as a vestige of baseball's heritage as a pastoral game, played in natural sunlight. Some Cubs fans also had fond associations with Gabby Hartnett's famous "Homer in the Gloaming," in which Hartnett hit a crucial home run in the bottom of the ninth of a game on the verge of being called for darkness, helping the Cubs to win the 1938 pennant.
  The City of Chicago had passed an ordinance banning night events at Wrigley Field, due to its presence in the residential Lakeview neighborhood, so Tribune was unable to install lights unless the ordinance was repealed. They compromised by scheduling a significant number of 3:00 starts, which typically carried games into the evening but did not require lights for games that completed within three hours or so.
  This debate continued for several years, and became more intense as the Cubs returned to competitiveness during the early 1980s. When the Cubs won the National League Eastern Division title in 1984, then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn announced that the Cubs would lose home field advantage should they advance to the World Series (home field advantage alternated between the champions of the National League and American League until 2003), since by this time nearly all World Series games were played at night in the Eastern and Central time zones. After winning their two scheduled home (day) games in the National League Championship Series, the Cubs lost all three games in San Diego, so Kuhn's threat became moot. But the following year, new commissioner Peter Ueberroth announced that because Wrigley Field had no lights, the Cubs would have to play all future postseason games at another ballpark, likely Comiskey Park, Soldier Field, or possibly even St. Louis' Busch Stadium, or Milwaukee County Stadium. The Cubs fell out of contention for the next several years, however, and the possibility of playing post-season "home" games in other cities did not arise.
  The Cubs, under team president Dallas Green, quickly changed the issue from lights or no lights to Wrigley Field or move out of town. With typical bluntness, Green said, "if there are no lights in Wrigley Field, there will be no Wrigley Field." Green seriously considered shuttering Wrigley and playing at Comiskey Park as tenants of the White Sox for a year, in hopes that the neighborhood would feel the loss of revenue and back down. The Cubs also explored moving to several suburban locations, including a site adjacent to Arlington Park in Arlington Heights and another in Schaumburg. There was even talk of a drastic move which involved selling the stadium to local college DePaul University, who would likely tear down Wrigley Field to host its indoor sports or convert it to a full-time football stadium in hopes of returning football to the campus. The Cubs would then likely build a new ballpark near the Rosemont Horizon (now the Allstate Arena, where DePaul plays its home games currently) in suburban Rosemont.
  The Cubs' new stance quickly changed the context of the debate, as even the most adamant opponents of adding lights didn't want to see the Cubs leave for the suburbs. Schaumburg officials were so convinced that the Cubs were actually coming that land was purchased by investors hoping to build a new ballpark off the Elgin-O'Hare Expressway west o
caption: Lights, bleacher expansion, and exterior ivy
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