A blast from the past: day games at Wrigley Field

CHICAGO» Strange but true: The Cubs find themselves in the middle of a monthlong stretch with no night games scheduled at Wrigley Field.

The last night game at Wrigley was the 21, 10inning win over the Dodgers in the second game of a daynight doubleheader June 19. The next one is scheduled for July 19 against the Cardinals, a madeforESPN game that unfairly shortens both teams’ allstar breaks.

By the time this homestand ends Sunday against the Reds, the Cubs will have played eight games during the day and nine straight home day games, harking back to an era when day baseball was not only the law, it was the team’s primary marketing strategy.

Now the Cubs don’t have to do anything but open the gates. The best marketing strategy is winning, as it should be.

Nevertheless, fans have been enjoying the retro homestand, and all the games have been entertaining, including Tuesday’s 53 win over the Tigers.

The Cubs say they’d like more night games to bring them up to the league average of 54. Manager Joe Maddon called himself a “night game freak” last Friday and repeatedly has said he’d always prefer a night game to a day game.

“Then you can get things done during the day, meaning you could be a human being,” he said. “But when you have day games, it’s just a rush in the morning and afterwards you’re tired, and maybe your laundry or whatever is just not available at that time of the day. So I just like it for a more normal component. That’s all. I’m not here to complain or cry.”

That’s fine, though Cubs own ership has complained and cried about the need for more night games since the Tribune Co. owned them. This year the Cubs already have played 14 night games at Wrigley, with 15 to 17 more on tap, depending on whether ESPN and Fox pick up a game apiece for their national telecasts.

The Cubs slowly are conforming to the rest of the league under the Ricketts family’s ownership, and if they start their own network after 2019 you better believe they’ll do everything possible to get up to the league average. The Cubs will get their way eventually after reminding fans again of how big a tourist destination Wrigley Field is and how they need additional revenue to remain competitive — or at least to pay Yu Darvish for the next five years.

Day baseball is a tradition that made the Cubs different than every other team in the 1960s, ’70s and early ’80s, giving the franchise a rogue mentality at a time when cookiecutter ballparks were becoming the norm.

Next month will bring the 30th anniversary of 8888, the first night game in Cubs history, and it’ll conjure up plenty of flashbacks, even as the Cubs will be playing in Kansas City that night.

For those who were around to cover it, 8888 remains the most hyped affair of any regularseason game in Chicago sports history. Even Ernie Banks tried to make it memorable with one of his traditional Cubs slogans.

“The Cubs will be illuminated in ’88,” Banks said.

Mr. Cub thought about it for a second and shook his head.

“That’s a little weak,” he said. “I’ll have to do better.”

The Cubs chose Aug. 8 because the repetitive 8s would make it easy to remember, but the cosmic joke was on them. A downpour early in the game caused a postponement until the next day — the very unpoeticsounding 8988.

The death of day baseball was done for purely financial reasons, though thenPresident Dallas Green insisted at the time the Cubs’ main goal was to help them win a World Series, something that happened 28 years later. And not everyone was happy with the change, including longtime Cardinals pitcher Ricky Horton, then with the A’s, who called it “blasphemy.”

“I know progress has to go on and maybe financially it’ll be better for the Cubs,” Horton said. “But as far as the enjoyment of the game goes for a visiting player, it will be lessened. For the visiting players, the trip to Chicago was the best. You had the sun beating down on you, the smell of the green grass. Then after the game you could go out for a nice dinner like a normal person and have a night on the town. It was great.”