A perfect endless summer: baseball, beer at Wrigley
By BRIAN SUMERS
Published May 21, 2006
As a sports reporter, I toy with the thought every now and then.
Sometimes, sitting in an eerily quiet high school gym watching a volleyball game or in a musty workout room covering a weightlifting practice, I get the urge to quit.
You know the feeling. Just get up, walk out and keep going.
I'd go right to Chicago, my childhood home. And when I got there - unemployed, of course - I'd have two goals: to see as many Cubs games and to drink as much beer as possible.
Common sense tells me I'll stay with the St. Petersburg Times for the foreseeable future. That means I'll experience few, if any, beautiful days at Wrigley Field this summer.
But for Kevin Kaduk, author of Wrigleyworld and a former sports writer for the Kansas City Star, the dream became reality. A little more than a year ago, Kaduk, then 26, quit his steady reporting job and moved to Chicago, near where he grew up.
As he writes it, Kaduk tired of the summer phone messages he received from friends at Wrigley Field, reminding him that they were at the game while he toiled in Kansas City. He refers to such calls as Rubbingmynoseinit, calling it "German for 'I'm here and you're not.' "
And so Kaduk, writing in an informal, diarylike style, chronicles the Cubs' 2005 season from Opening Day through the final home game. And though the Cubs - as usual - fall short of expectations, Kaduk's ability to capture the irreverent and ridiculous makes the book a winner.
Sometimes he actually goes to see the Cubs play. Other days he watches them on television in a bar or listens to them on the radio.
But he always comes up with good stories.
Take the time he and a friend are caught trying to sneak into an elite private party on a rooftop beyond Wrigley Field's leftfield wall. Or the college kid in Row 17, section 208 who nearly vomits on him.
Because Chicago's Wrigleyville is inhabited by so many 20-somethings with lots of disposable income, drinking - and vomiting - is a central theme of Wrigleyworld.
Kaduk, a University of Wisconsin graduate, seems to relish the drinking culture. Through he moves to Chicago just to watch the Cubs, Kaduk misses an April game when "an offer of 25-cent wings and $4 pitchers ... proves too enticing."
Many books wax merely poetic about Wrigley Field's romantic qualities (it is the second-oldest park in the majors) and the Cubs' losing ways (they last won a World Series in 1908), so it's refreshing to find a book about Wrigley's subculture.
During the season, Kaduk scuffles with scalpers to get the best possible price for tickets. And he tries to catch out-of-the park home runs with the ball hawks standing on Waveland Avenue, outside the field.
All the while, his new friends envy Kaduk, because, though he is unemployed, he spends an entire summer devoted to the Cubs.
In Tampa Bay, folks may not understand this devotion to a baseball team, its stadium and its neighborhood. But Kaduk's book spoke to me.
Maybe I could persuade my Florida editors to assign me this story: The political and sociological implications of the beer divide between Wrigley favorites Old Style, brewed in Milwaukee, and Budweiser, out of St. Louis.
Certainly that would take me all summer.
Brian Sumers is a Times staff writer.