Long after most sensible people had retired for the day, and in front of a sparse crowd at San Diego Stadium, a called third strike immediately changed the course of baseball, until it didn’t. In the top of the 11th inning of a tedious game more suited for the doldrums of August than May, Billy […]
Tag: Ernie Banks
Ernie Banks’s Illness and the Civil Rights Movement
The summer of 1963 provided a number of defining moments of the Civil Rights movement, beginning in May with the Birmingham Campaign and climaxing with the March on Washington. The dehumanization and enslavement of black people was once again an issue that refused to be ignored, and it again threatened every area of white ownership, […]
Remembering Buck O’Neil
There has always existed an immense difficulty in portraying great men, in boiling them down to several quotes or anecdotes that get misplaced and misrepresented through time. It is perhaps even more difficult to capture the lives of good men, who exist in subtler forms transferred from person to person in hidden conversations and the […]
Cubbie Encores: How Top Cubs Followed Up Their Rookie Seasons
Last April 17th, BP Wrigleyville, then in its infancy, commemorated Kris Bryant Day by looking back at the debuts of some of the franchise’s most iconic players. Despite our initial wariness about celebrating yet another holiday manufactured by the greeting card companies, we came together to celebrate and put the heralded prospect’s arrival in historical context. Following […]
With Wrigley All-Star Game on Horizon, A Look Back
It’s been a lifetime since the Cubs have hosted an All-Star Game at Wrigley Field. No, literally—I’m a ripe old 24, and this season marks 26 since the light standards shone down on Sandberg, Dawson, and their All-Star peers in July of 1990. That drought will reach 28 years by the time the Cubs can […]
Rizzo Reaches for Greatness, Even as He Meets It
Theo Epstein and his front office crew have really turned over the roster since arriving in Chicago late in 2011. Now that Starlin Castro has been traded to the New York Yankees, the Cubs’ longest-tenured player is reliever/sometime-starter Travis Wood, who barely edges out clubhouse leader and first baseman Anthony Rizzo—Wood was called up on May […]
Cubbie Debuts: How Other Top Cubs Fared on Their First Day in Cubbie Blue
Happy Kris Bryant Day! If you live a jaded, cloaked-in-irony existence like myself, you are sick of holidays manufactured by the chocolate, greeting card, and chocolate greeting card companies. Kris Bryant Day, though, represents something else—it is pure, joyful, and created organically by the MLB Player Union’s poor negotiating. We here at BP-Wrigleyville thought it […]