8/5/2023 0 Comments The whale chicago(More than the Cubs drew on Wednesday night, I can assure you.) By April 23, the grandstand, the bleachers and the pavilion were ready for the Opening Day game against the Kansas City Packers, which drew 21,000 fans. It was designed by Zachary Davis, who had recently completed work on Comiskey Park. Weeghman leased the land for $16,000 a year, and immediately began throwing up a stadium, which he christened Weeghman Park. But the Federal League didn’t care what the Cubs and Sox thought. In 1909, the owners of two franchises in the minor-league American Association bought a lot in Lake View, with hopes of putting a team there. He wasn’t the first baseball man with the idea of playing on the North Side. Weeghman would help turn that relationship around. “In addition it made plenty of sense to claim this expanding part of the city…In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the power of the city lay on the South Side, and some North Siders felt like second-class citizens.” “They wanted to be far enough away from the White Sox and Cubs to build their own identity and not suffer in comparison to the existing parks,” wrote Stuart Shea in Wrigley Field: The Long Life & Contentious Times of the Friendly Confines. The North Side seemed like the place to go. The Cubs played in West Side Park, at Taylor and Wood streets. The White Sox had just moved into the new Comiskey Park, on the South Side. They played their first season on a borrowed field at DePaul University. Weeghman’s new team didn’t have a ballpark. He would end up spending a lot more money on his baseball fantasy. Yet I could find nothing commemorating them at Wrigley Field.Ĭharles Weeghman, the team’s owner, was a wealthy restaurateur who paid $26,000 to buy a controlling share of a Federal League franchise. The Whales were the first team to play baseball at the corner of Clark and Addison, and the first to win a championship there, in 1915 - 101 years before the Cubs did it. The team is barely a footnote in baseball history, but it played an important role in Chicago history, because it brought the game to the North Side, which is why tens of thousands of Big Ten graduates live there today. The Chicago Whales only existed for three years, as part of the Federal League, a renegade baseball outfit that challenged the American and National leagues from 1913 to 1915, before abruptly going broke. “It was a ‘C’ with a whale inside.”Īcross Addison Street, at Sports World, there was just one Whales cap for sale, among the hundreds of Cubs designs. “We had a shirt years ago, but it was a one-time-only thing,” he replied. “Do you have a Chicago Whales cap?” I asked the clerk. I walked into the Cubs Store in Wrigley Field, and made an unusual request.
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