CHICAGO — On the last day of June, the flags danced in a stiff wind above Wrigley Field and Moe Mullins arrived more than three hours before first pitch, just like usual. He set up his camping chair under the ash tree at the corner of Waveland and Kenmore, across the street from the back of the left-field bleachers, and the neighborhood slowly came to life.
In time, the street vendors appeared and the merchandise stands opened and the patio at Murphy’s, a block away, started to fill in. Soon, the spectators gathered along the brick wall and waited for the bleacher gates to open. For a while, though, it was quiet, and the last refuge of old Wrigley, and its old neighborhood, belonged to Mullins.
He is the unofficial mayor of Waveland and Kenmore avenues, the elder statesman among the characters who give it character. The Chicago Cubs this weekend celebrated their 150th anniversary as a National League member. They’ve spent 110 of those years at Wrigley, where the corner just beyond left field remains old-school, a small throwback in the middle of ever-expanding change.
The Cubs have bought up many of the nearby buildings. The rooftops are a little less organically charming and a lot more expensive. Trendy bars and restaurants have moved in all over. Even Wrigley’s iconic marquee comes with a corporate sponsor, and has for more than a decade.
The corner, though, remains the corner. Lawn chairs. Lifers. Good banter, some of which is even suitable for children. The most prominent ad there is handwritten, for the Gatorade that Dave Davison sells out of a cooler: $3 for Cubs fans and $4 for Cards fans, with the $5 for White Sox fans crossed out and replaced with “stay thirsty.”
Davison, like Mullins, has been on the corner for a long time. It’s home to an eclectic collection of oddballs, super fans, ballhawks, townies, Cubs workers, dog walkers (free treats) and the occasional and keen-eyed, curious tourist, who can sense good company when they see it.
Among the regulars are Ken Keefer, 68, who lives in the first house on the corner. And Bob Krause, 54, who lives just down Kenmore. And Mary Ellen Gourley, 67, who’s been sitting in the bleachers for 50 years. They all walk from the corner and across the street to their seats, game after game.
There’s a sense, though, that even the corner isn’t immune to change. Its most prominent occupants, Wrigley’s venerable ballhawks, are dwindling. Mullins, 75, and Davison, who’ll only confess to being in his 50s, are the last of the old guard. A younger generation has not emerged. A decades-old Wrigley tradition isn’t dying, necessarily, but it’s not quite what it was.
While Mullins had the corner to himself for a time, a voice from above broke the silence. A man giving a stadium tour. He’d led his group to the balcony behind the bleachers, and from where they stood they could look down upon Waveland.
“You’ll see people standing on the street,” the guide said. “And what are they doing?”
As the guide gave his talk he looked toward the corner and noticed the man standing there. The man who’d presided over that corner for decades; who first came to know it in 1958, when he was 8 years old and learned he could sell the baseballs he collected for 50 cents and turn that into a hamburger at O’Henry’s. The guide’s voice rose in excitement:
“Everybody – Chicago street legend, Moe Mullins.”
“How many baseballs do you have?” the guide asked, yelling toward the corner.
“Over 6,400,” Mullins yelled back.
“And he had to miss a year to go to ‘Nam,” the guide told his group.
The Padres were in town and so many on the tour were visiting fans, and some wore Trevor Hoffman jerseys. They reacted in awe when Mullins shared his count.
“I don’t take ‘em home anymore,” he yelled again, and Mullins liked to tell anyone who’d listen that he no longer cared all that much about catching baseballs. That his knees were shot and he couldn’t give chase like he used to.
But then after a pause he couldn’t resist sharing. Bragging, a little.
“Two-hundred and forty-six game homers,” Mullins shouted. “More than anybody in the world.”
And it was clear that, yes, he still cared. That he couldn’t change who he was, bad knees and all.
He was a ballhawk.
———
Like a retired manager who looks back with a sense of what-if, ruminating over the defeats, Mullins still carries the weight of the baseballs that got away. He stood in the exact right spot for Ernie Banks’ 400th — “in the middle of the street, in front of that pole,” he said recently, pointing it out — until a rival swooped in “and snagged it in front of me.”
He had Sammy Sosa’s 62nd home run in that delirious summer of ‘98 in his grip, under a pile of people who thought they were after a million-dollar ball, until he felt someone bite his hand. Mullins can still see where Dave Kingman’s 530-something footers landed — the first way down Kenmore and the second on the front steps of the third house on the right.
He can recite the grand slams. And some of the career-firsts. And he knows random trivia because of his small role in those moments. He knows, for instance, that on Aug. 17, 1990, Shawon Dunston hit two home runs onto Waveland, and he knows that because he caught both. Mullins has them at home, where he keeps three large aquarium tanks filled to the rim with baseballs.
Now there are far fewer of them available for the chase. The giant video board the Cubs put up in left field in 2015 is the most obvious cause, but hardly the only one. The bleachers have expanded, with extra rows and a concourse and a big, block-lettered ad. The old chain link fence, raggedy and unpretentious and once the final barrier between the stadium and street, is a fading memory.
Even during batting practice, days can go by without a ball reaching Waveland. An entire homestand, or two, or three, can pass between a real, live game home run making it onto the street. Mullins still brings his old Mizuno, anyway, even though there’s not much of a need for it anymore. He keeps it on the arm of his chair, at the ready, just in case.
He has had that glove for who knows how long. Since the early ’80s, maybe? Back then there used to be a rotating cast of ballhawks. A group of a dozen regulars who’d come to Waveland and Kenmore with their gloves and their hopes — always in daytime, then — and wait while some in the bleachers turned around and chided them, playfully, about getting a job.
To which the hawks would yell: right back at you.
The art of ballhawking, and there is an art to it, was passed down from one generation to the next. Ballhawks learned to see the game without actually seeing it. They could tell from the sound of the bat whether a ball might have a chance, and by the reaction of the crowd. Now there are fewer who know these things. Among the longtimers, some have moved and some have died.
Others show up less and less often. A once-robust fraternity continues to shrink.
“Well,” Mullins said, his voice softening, “they haven’t been coming around much anymore.”
Some nights, it’s just Mullins and Davison. “Super Dave,” as Mullins calls him. The nickname came when Davison beat Mullins out for a Derrek Lee grand slam.
“I just got robbed,” Mullins said, and in listening to his retellings, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that he was robbed of every home run he ever lost. This one sounds credible, though, because “Dave came across behind me, and grabbed it. Because he was super.
“That was just when he first started. He was super fast.” Super fast. Super Dave.
The night of June 30, Davison parked his van along Kenmore about two and a half hours before first pitch. He unloaded his cooler and then a cart with baseballs and baseball cards and homemade baseball jewelry. At home, Davison has covers of 20 balls ready to be cut and encased in resin.
It was a hot night, one of the hottest of the summer, and the wind was blowing out at almost 20 mph, with stronger gusts. Davison set out a comically large glove near the corner, like something from a cartoon. He’d brought his normal-size glove, too, and the blue leather was faded and loose. In his cart he keeps an old bobblehead doll of himself.
“There was 125 of them made, for some strange reason,” he said, though his had seen better days.
“I’m missing the arm. I don’t know where the hell that went. The head falls off.
“The Waveland sign is gone.”
At the base it said, “Ballhawk Dave,” and with his blue glove he’d caught a couple thousand balls and about 100 game home runs. Now he looked up at the flags and they were stiff in the wind.
“You don’t really get too many nights like this during the year,” he said. “You might get five or 10 a year like this, where the ball is just flying.”
———
It came on the fifth pitch of the game and on a 2-2 count, an 80 mph changeup from Cubs left-hander Matthew Boyd. Fernando Tatis Jr., the Padres leadoff man, connected with the pitch just as it began breaking low and inside. The crowd hushed. A baseball sailed toward the street. It took one bounce before the crosswalk at Kenmore and landed in Trent Weyermuller’s glove.
At 32 he is the youngest of the regulars. And the only regular, really, who’d be described as young.
“That’s the seventh one out this year,” Davison said, and if not for the video board and the expanded bleachers there might’ve been 20 or 25 Waveland home runs by what was the Cubs’ 42nd home game of the season. Weyermuller had caught balls before. He’d managed to procure the first two batting practice home runs of the season.
But this was the real deal. Weyermuller’s first game home run, after years of coming to the corner. He lives in the neighborhood and something about Waveland and Kenmore drew him in. He learned it was kind of like Cheers, where everybody knows your name.
“We’ve been to each other’s weddings,” said Mario Irizarry, a one-time ballhawk who returned for a visit from Florida. “And, I hate to say, a few funerals.”
The few remaining regulars build their lives around their days and nights at the corner. Mullins is retired now but worked for a long time at the airport, loading cargo planes, and drove trucks. Davison keeps a flexible schedule at his job at Target. Weyermuller is a freelance photographer.
As he held the home run, turning it over in his hands, Mullins returned. He runs a daily pool in which participants try to guess the final score and he was making his rounds at the fire station and with the vendors.
“I missed everything,” he said, with some sadness, about the Tatis home run.
Davison prodded Weyermuller, who’s active on social media, to post the news.
“All seven of your fans want to know what the hell just happened,” Davison said, laughing.
The corner is many things and, among them, it’s home to first-ballot hall of fame banterers and storytellers. It takes thick skin and a bit of a twisted sense of humor to belong. And patience.
“I call it, ‘watching a brick wall,’” Weyermuller said. “I just tell people, like, have you ever fished before?”
There was a brief debate about whether to throw the home run back into the bleachers, where, presumably, someone would complete its journey back into the field. But Davison, who has been a regular since the early 1990s, quashed that idea.
It never made any sense to him.
“If he threw that ball back, I would’ve beat him, personally, in the street,” Davison said, laughing. “You don’t throw a home run ball back. That’s the dumbest (stuff) in the world.”
The leadoff home run proved to be an omen. Dansby Swanson hit two of his own. Alex Bregman hit one. So did Michael Busch and Pete Crow-Armstrong. Tatis homered again. The Cubs and Padres combined for nine home runs. A season-high for Wrigley.
Only the first made it out onto the street. And so the ballhawks mostly listened to the spectacle and kept their eyes high at the crack of the bat and the roar, just in case.
———
The corner extends on a plane to the top row of section 503, where Keefer and Gourley and Krause have sat together for years. The bleachers remain general admission but the longtimers all have their places, and this is theirs, atop Waveland.
They are fans but caretakers, too. Keefer lives in that first house, where Mullins sets up his chair, and Krause isn’t far. Keefer and Krause have come to host a summer cookout that has grown from a small gathering to 200 strong, and after a day game in mid-July people lined Kenmore for a plate.
The menu changes, but the star is always the corn, delivered fresh from a farmers market outside the city. Krause swears it’s the best corn anybody will ever taste, and that upon tasting it the reaction is always the same:
“Like holy (expletive expletive). That’s an ear of corn.”
The cookout, to Keefer and Krause, is a way to give thanks to the stadium workers, many of whom show up. It has become a small part of the culture of the corner, an annual summer rite and a way to honor the community that has defined their little slice of Wrigleyville.
The bleachers, like their surroundings, have changed. Some of the soul was lost in the expansion.
When they took out the old seats “it was like watching your neighborhood get razed,” Gourley said, and she keeps scans of old photos from the ’70s on her phone to remind herself of what it was like back then. She’s the longest-tenured of the group, and has been a bleacher lifer since her teenage years. She loved Steve Stone and took many pictures.
“We all had scrapbooks on all of our individual players,” she said. “I still have mine,” and she scrolled through the past in her pictures: the sparsely filled bleachers when the Cubs weren’t such an attraction; close-ups of players with ’70s haircuts; a glassy-eyed Darold Knowles, a relief pitcher back then, “always looking hungover every morning,” she said with a laugh.
Compared to then, the bleachers have grown up and gotten all fancy.
“Progress is progress,” Gourley said. “Let’s put it this way: I’m blessed to have been here when it was a little ballpark and more of a neighborhood.”
There’s still plenty of charm. Keefer for years during pregame warm-ups caught a ball in his beer, and gained some level of viral internet fame with the trick, which “ain’t easy to do,” he said. “I don’t drink anymore, but I loved my Budweiser.”
Sometimes he tells people he lives right behind Wrigley and they ask him what he means.
“I mean, I look out my kitchen window when I’m doing the dishes, and I see the brick wall on the back of the field,” he tells them.
“I’m so freaking lucky,” he said, and they all feel that way, even if it’s not quite what it was.
“I think that’s one of the bad things about getting old, is you think it’s getting worse, you know?” Krause said. “I don’t think it’s getting worse. I think it’s just getting different.”
It was a perfect summer night. Clear. A little cool. The Cubs in front. Behind them, down on the street, Mullins and Davison had the corner to themselves.
———
Mullins has this vision of what he’s going to do with his baseballs one day. This dream, of sorts. He’s going to load them in the back of a pickup truck and he’s going to put the word out for kids to come to Waveland, to line up on either side. And then he’s going to drive slowly, with the tailgate open, “and drop 6,000 baseballs on the street.”
In his vision, kids will chase after the balls. They’ll pick up all they can handle. It will be like Christmas morning, because what’s better when you’re a kid than to come out to Wrigley and leave with a baseball? Mullins was such a kid once, in the days of Ernie Banks and Billy Williams — his favorite player — and one day when he was 8 he got a ball. And then another.
And then he was hooked. And though he did sell some he kept most, and he started to write dates and names on the ones that were home runs.
He showed his collection one day in mid-August. At home in Elmwood Park, he went downstairs and turned on the lights and there they were: the three large tanks with baseballs, below walls of old pictures and mementos from 67 years in ballhawking. Sixty-six, with the year in Vietnam.
Before he left for Vietnam, in September 1970, he spent one last day at Wrigley. And the ballpark was one of his first visits when he returned a year later. Not long after, he married his wife, Donna, and after 54 years she still gets the same question:
“How’d you put up with him going to all those ballgames over the years?”
She encourages it, for one. Occasionally Mullins feels like staying home. Watching on TV.
“I push him to go,” Donna said. “I go, ‘Please. Why are you staying? Get out there.’”
And usually he listens.
Atop one of the fish tanks, Mullins keeps a stack of old pocket Cubs schedules, going back decades. Every little square contains the record of how many balls he caught on a particular day. Some of the schedules are coming apart at the folds, and he opened one from 1990 and sure enough remembered the day Dunston hit two out. Other dates, he can no longer read.
“I don’t know what the hell that says,” he said, squinting.
“Do you want your glasses?” Donna asked.
On the wall above there was a black-and-white picture of the old ballhawks. Seven of them, including Mullins. He was on the right, with a mustache and no shirt and a bit of a cocky grin. He had his glove on. They all had their gloves. It’s from sometime in the late 1970s, and about 50 years later Mullins is the only one, in that group, who’s still a regular.
But “you see me” out there, he said.
“I just sit in my chair,” and he figured that if he was meant to get a ball, the ball would find him.
He’ll do it as long as he can, and Davison says the same thing. They’ll do it if the Cubs expand the bleachers again or if they put a second deck somewhere up there. They’ll keep going even if fewer balls make their way out than they already do, because it long ago stopped being about baseballs.
The Cubs were at home that night and Mullins likes to get there early. And so after awhile he headed back upstairs and out toward his car, and he made his way toward the corner.
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