Baseball, Spite, and Chewing Gum
The story (and speculation) behind the first Wrigley Field, which was located nowhere near Chicago.
If you asked a non-baseball fan to name all the Major League Baseball parks they could think of, I imagine Wrigley Field would consistently be one of them. Yankees Stadium and Dodger Stadium might rank higher, since they borrow the name of the resident team, but Wrigley has its own lengthy history, persists as a landmark in a major city, and enjoys the WGN superstation legacy to boot.
It wouldn’t be much of a leap if those same non-fans could tell you, at least indirectly, where the Wrigley name comes from. It’s the same as the chewing gum company, started by founder William Wrigley Jr. in 1891 and successful enough that Wrigley gained majority ownership of the Chicago Cubs in 1921.
That abbreviated history technically covers where Wrigley Field got its name. But the current stadium was not the first Wrigley Field; it may not even have been the second. And unlike our entry on Madison Square Garden, the predecessors to the Wrigley you’re familiar with weren’t a short walk away.
This post is the latest entry in What’s In A Name, the column topic chosen by paid Assigned subscribers last month. If you want to wield the power of the ballot the next time my writing angle is up for a vote, be sure to sign up for a paid membership!
William Wrigley Jr.’s name looms largest in Chicago, but his fingerprints extend all over Southern California. Heard of Catalina Island? In 1919, Wrigley bought almost the entirety of the company that owns and operates it, and the Wrigley family still controls the Catalina Island Company today.
A couple of years later, he made another purchase in the area, acquiring the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League in ‘21. At the time, the American and National Leagues didn’t have a team farther west than St. Louis, and the Pacific Time Zone wouldn’t have a team in Major League Baseball until the Dodgers and Giants left New York in the 1950s. The PCL was baseball on the West Coast, and the Angels were L.A.’s team.
Well, they were one of L.A.’s teams. They co-leased their home field, Washington Park, from the city with another PCL squad, the Vernon Tigers, who’d just won the league in 1920. By 1926, the Angels and Tigers would no longer be baseball roommates; the former enjoyed the modern amenities of a new Los Angeles stadium, called Wrigley Field, and the latter found itself sold and moved to San Francisco.
Let’s divide how we got there into What I Know and What I Think.
WHAT I KNOW
Early into his tenure as owner of the Angels, Wrigley found Washington Park lacking; some reports say he found the conditions of the ballpark “deplorable” and others said he had a problem with the parking setup. Whatever the cause, Wrigley quickly announced he planned to move the Angels out of the stadium and into a new concrete and steel venue that he would own.
At first, Wrigley extended a theoretical welcome to the Tigers … as tenants, not partners. That greatly insulted Tigers owner Edward Maier, who felt that he had done as much for California baseball as Wrigley and had always worked with the Angels on a 50-50 basis.
That led to a small war within the PCL, starting with Wrigley being forbidden by the league from building a new stadium until the territorial rights to Los Angeles could be determined. The Tigers believed they shared those rights with the Angels under the terms of their original invitation to the league. Wrigley argued part of the reason he’d bought the Angels at all was because it came with territorial exclusivity.
In January 1923, McCarthy voted with four franchises to give equal territorial rights to the Tigers. But the victory was short-lived. A few months later, Charles Lockard (the business manager of the Angels) and Red Killefer (Angels manager from 1917-1922) bought a controlling interest in the Seattle franchise, one of the four that had supported Maier and the Tigers. Rumors swirled that Wrigley supplied the money for the purchase, and McCarthy started an investigation, believing that Wrigley wanted to form a PCL syndicate to push out existing leadership.
After a few rounds in court, a handful of weeks with two presidents, and a decision from the Board of Arbitration of the National Association of Professional Baseball Clubs, McCarthy was ousted in December 1923, removing any opposition to Wrigley’s stadium designs.
On September 29, 1925, 18,000 fans traveled to the opening of Wrigley Field, just a stone’s throw from the Coliseum, which itself had opened just a couple of years earlier. They were treated to what the L.A. Times called “the newest and most modern baseball plant in the universe.” Glowing reviews poured in for the venue Wrigley had spent an estimated $1.3 million to build. The Chicago home of the Cubs would adopt the Wrigley Field name a little over a year later, a move that the Brooklyn Daily Eagle decried as “an undignifying, if legitimate, advertising stunt.” (Nobody in California had raised that objection in the newspaper.)
The PCL Angels stayed in Wrigley until 1957, when both the team and the field were sold to Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, part of a larger timeline that moved the Dodgers across the country. And when the Angels (owned by Gene Autry) returned to the city as an expansion MLB franchise in 1961, they played their home games in Wrigley Field for one season before moving to Dodger Stadium through 1965, and then to Anaheim.
Wrigley Field didn’t stick around a whole lot longer. The city had regained ownership of the stadium in 1951 when the Dodgers convinced them to more or less trade it for Chavez Ravine, and without a permanent baseball occupant, the case for maintaining the park was hard to see. So Los Angeles tore down the first Wrigley Field in 1969.
WHAT I THINK
The feud between Maier and Wrigley dragged out for years, growing uglier over time. Wrigley eventually decided that Maier and the Tigers would not be welcome to use his new field for home games, even if that meant leaving the stadium and the ticket booths unattended for 14 weeks out of the year. Maier could have sold his franchise to another PCL owner, William Lane of the Salt Lake Bees, and Lane made several attempts to acquire the Tigers.
Maier rejected them all knowing that Lane and Wrigley were friends. Wrigley, undaunted, announced in 1924 that the Bees could use his new field when the Angels were on the road, and Lane would eventually move the Bees to L.A. to take advantage of that offer. Spite enveloped the move from Washington Park to Wrigley Field from the beginning, and the venom between Maier and Wrigley never faded.
Given that backdrop, maybe (and again, I’m speculating as I do not have access to time travel) Wrigley named the stadium after himself to really hammer home to Maier and the media and any other PCL owners who had stood against him that baseball in Los Angeles belong to him and him alone. Wrigley Field could have been one last thumb in the eye of the roommate he hadn’t asked for and wound up running out of the sport.
If you’d like a gentler explanation, here’s one. The Wrigley Field that opened in 1925 was the first large baseball venue with that name, but Catalina Island, where the Cubs had been coming for spring training for a few years, christened their baseball diamond Wrigley Field in 1922. (The Cubs would play on Catalina Island until 1952, and the “W” flag that is still flown today after Cubs wins originally flew on Catalina, and stood for the Wilmington Transportation Company, which Wrigley owned.)
So maybe it wasn’t William Wrigley Jr. flexing his powerful capitalist muscles. Maybe Catalina just gave him a fun idea that he copied once in Los Angeles and again in Chicago. Shame he didn’t live long enough to see the Wine Mixer, though.