Wrigley Field
...as attached to the outfield walls to keep fans from falling over the wall, and to help keep trash from being thrown onto the field. The ivy along the outfield wall is Wrigley’s most recognizable feature. The ivy was planted at the end of the 1937 season. The purpose of the ivy was to give the field the feeling of a park, and not the sterile feeling of a stadium. The ivy gets trimmed 15 times a year. The groundskeeper has to do the trimming when the Cubs are on the road for a few days because it takes two entire days to complete the task. The crowd loves the ivy, as it is pleasant to look at, while players hate it because balls often get lost in the vines. A ball that gets stuck in the ivy is an automatic ground rule double, but if it bounces out it is a live ball. Wrigley is baseballs most unpredictable park as far as weather is concerned. The wind is very intimidating to pitchers because one mistake and that ball will be hit right out of the park. The Cubs did a study of the wind conditions between 1996 and 2000. 58% of the time the wind blows in favoring the pitchers, 30% of the time the wind blows out helping out the batters, and 12% of the time there is a cross wind. A Yale physics professor calculated that if a ball would go 400 feet in a windless condition, it would go 370 feet with a 10 mph wind against it, and it would go 430 feet with the wind in its favor. The scoreboard was built in 1937. At the time, it was state of the art - now it is just art. The scoreboard not only shows what is happening at Wrigley, it also has up to date scores from all the games going on around the country. It is still to this day operated by hand. There are usually three people seated inside the narrow space, although at night or on the weekends there can be up to five working in there as there are more games going on which makes more scores that need to be posted. They are five pound metal plates with white numbers painted on them that fit inside the holes in the sign. The scoreboard operators sit and watch the game out of the holes that do not yet have numbers posted in them - usually the visiting teams 8th and 9th inning spaces. Believe it or not, the scoreboard has never been hit by a baseball, and it has only had two close calls in all these years. Every day on top of the scoreboard there are the flags raised of all the teams in the National League. They are not however put up in any random order, they are put up by the teams current divisional standings. Also, at the end of each game there is another flag raised on top of the scoreboard. The white one with the “W” means the Cubs won, and the blue one with the “L” means a loss. The most recent addition to Wrigley Field is the lights. The lights were supposed to be put up in 1941, but after World Wa...