A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred by George Will

Series, it should be mentioned that this was not the only time an aggrieved and armed woman had consequences at Wrigley Field.
    The headline on the obituary in the New York Times of March 24, 2013, read, “Ruth Ann Steinhagen Is Dead at 83; Shot a Ballplayer.” She had actually died the previous December 29, but no public attention was paid until a staffer at the Chicago Tribune , while researching an unrelated article, stumbled upon a notice of her death.
    Hers was a story of the peculiar melancholy of madness.
    Born in the South Side suburb of Cicero, by the time she graduated from a Chicago high school she had a pattern of falling in love with famous men from a distance. Her fixations included the movie star Alan Ladd and the Cubs’ outfielder Peanuts Lowrey. Her interest in Eddie Waitkus, the Cubs’ first baseman, became an obsession. Because he was the son of Lithuanian immigrants, she studied the Lithuanian language and listened to Lithuanian radio broadcasts. Because he was from near Boston—he graduated from high school in Cambridge and attended Boston College—she began craving baked beans. With a calm lucidity unique to a lunatic, she said, in a court-ordered autobiographical essay, “As time went on, I just became nuttier and nuttier about the guy.”
    When the Cubs traded Waitkus to the Phillies following the 1948 season, Steinhagen suffered a breakdown. Although she held a job as a typist for an insurance company, she moved into a small apartment less than three miles from Wrigley Field, and in this apartment she built a shrine to Waitkus that included scorecards, newspaper clippings, photographs, and fifty ticket stubs. And there she decided to kill the object of her veneration.
    When the Phillies came to Chicago in June 1949, she took a room at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, where the team stayed, and paid a bellhop five dollars to deliver a note inviting Waitkus to her room. Having fortified herself with two whiskey sours and a daiquiri, she admitted him to her room around eleven-thirty P.M . “For two years, you’ve beenbothering me and now you’re going to die,” she told him. Waitkus, who had survived two years with the army in the Pacific during the Second World War, and who had won four bronze stars, might have died if Steinhagen had fired a weapon more powerful than a .22-caliber rifle. She called the hotel’s front desk, said she had shot a man, and waited by Waitkus’s side until the police arrived.
    He was back with the Phillies later that year. In 1950, he hit .284 for the pennant-winning “Whiz Kids” and was named Comeback Player of the Year. In 1952, the novelist Bernard Malamud, who was not a baseball fan but knew a good story when he saw one, and who perhaps had noticed that early in Waitkus’s career sportswriters had referred to him as a “natural,” published The Natural , the story of Roy Hobbs, who is shot by a woman.
    Three weeks after the 1949 shooting, a judge declared Steinhagen insane, and she was institutionalized in Kankakee State Hospital, where she underwent electroconvulsive therapy to alter the chemistry of her brain. Released after three years, she lived in quiet anonymity until her death at home on the Northwest Side. Waitkus had died in 1972, at age fifty-three.

    The most remarkable Cubs career of Wrigley Field’s prewar years made up with gaudy numbers what it lacked inlongevity. Like the country itself, Lewis Robert “Hack” Wilson’s career roared in the intoxicating, and intoxicated, 1920s. And like the country, it crashed spectacularly in the 1930s. He was born with the twentieth century but would not live to see its second half. Yet one record he set will probably survive into the twenty-second.
    It is not certain how Wilson came to be called Hack. Some say it was because his first major league manager, John McGraw, thought he resembled a taxicab, which back then was commonly called a hack. Others say it was because he brought to mind Cubs outfielder