Is There a Way to Make the Walls at the Confines More Friendly to Pete Crow-Armstrong?

[Rice Cube]

Baseball enthusiasts (particularly fans of the Cubs) find themselves at odds between protecting their favorite players and preserving the historical aspects of Wrigley Field. What can be done to reach a reasonable compromise?

Image courtesy of © Patrick Gorski-Imagn Images

My first visit to Wrigley Field was in May 2001, when my friend graduated from college. Sammy Sosa was still on the team but had the day off, though the Cubs did win that game. (In fact, they swept the Reds that series and Sammy played the day after we went. Lame. On the other hand, I can say I was there for the fourth game of the famous 12-game winning streak that year.) It was a cloudy day with a light rain, and the ivy had barely started to bloom. You could see all the bare vines, with a few hopeful sprigs along the iconic brick wall. I've since been to Wrigley over a dozen times as a Chicago citizen, seeing the ivy in its various states of fullness, and it is always a welcome sight.

As recently as last year, when Cody Bellinger ran into the not-yet-fully-covered brick wall, which cracked some ribs and landed him on the injured list for a couple of weeks—and certainly long before that—there has been discourse about what to do about that potential menace. Seasoned veterans like Ian Happ know where the wall is and how to time and manage a jump so as not to obliterate themselves on a catch attempt, but even the best outfielders can't always avoid a full collision. The best-case scenario at that point is that you maintain control of the ball but get the wind knocked out of you. I'm guessing these conversations have been held since time immemorial, but this is going to be a different twist from all those stories from before.

The Premise and the Challenge
Of course, any Cubs fan worth their salt knows that Wrigley Field is protected as a US National Historic Landmark, which the Ricketts Family used to secure tax relief during their renovation of the ballpark. Protected features include the center-field scoreboard (reasonable), the red marquee sign (yes), and the bricks and ivy. The purist Cubs fan would agree with all of those decisions, but the realistic Cubs fan (there is a Venn diagram intersection here!) would wonder how outfielders are supposed to not hurt themselves. Granted, you cannot get rid of the brick wall (they painstakingly preserved the wall as they tore down the bleachers during that first major phase of the renovation), at least not very easily.

In short, we need a solution that does not damage the federally protected bricks, allows the ivy to continue to grow as it has for decades prior, and will protect the outfielders (for the most part) if they were to go head-on into the walls. Sounds easy, right?

Things I Learned About Ivy
So the ivy at Wrigley Field has gone through several iterations, but the current growth is of Boston Ivy that is mixed with Japanese sweet vines. There's at least some period of Wrigley's earlier history where the ivy was anchored to a wiring system across the outfield wall, but it seems the ivy is capable of using its innate rooting system to attach itself to the bricks. This is, of course, very convenient in adhering to the landmark regulations, and helpfully, there is no rule against the bricks and ivy. Nothing in the collective bargaining agreement (the Basic Agreement between the MLB Players Association and the league), the Official Baseball Rules, or the Major League Rules (yes, those are two different sets of rules, with some overlap) proscribes them, nor mentions padding on the fences at all. In fact, Rule 5.05(a)(6) in the Official Baseball Rules mentions vines or shrubbery on or along the fence, specifically allowing for it.

I did some quick research and found that ivy generally doesn't do well on plastic, which would preclude most padding options, and padding would obscure the brick walls, anyway—which would seem to run afoul of the landmark protection.

A Plea For Creative Engineering
In addition to what we discussed in the introduction with respect to protecting the player and preserving the ivy, you do have to see the brick wall. The padding used in football games hosted at Wrigley is temporary and kind of ugly, but those options (plus the padding along the baselines) at least provide a reference for the thickness of padding you need to genuinely protect players. My guess is that most padding of that nature is similar to this general specification, where you have size-customizable pads made out of polyurethane.

The part about being able to see the brick wall is important to preserving the mystique of Wrigley Field, though, and the team's hands are tied by the protected status of that wall. I suppose one way you can do that is to have porous padding to allow the ivy to root on the wall and flower through the padding, but that would seem like a logistical nightmare: You have to first ensure the plants can anchor into the underlying brick wall, then find their way to one of the "pores" before sprouting out where we can see them. And since I'm not a horticulturist, I am unsure how that affects the health of the ivy. The padding might need to be (somehow) removable when the team is on the road, to allow the requisite water and sunlight to reach the plants.

The second method, barring the invention of electromagnetic force fields (which could be useful against rain!), is to set up clear padding. It is possible to make optically clear plastics of many types, though not exactly polyurethane, as I only found varnishes and liquid coating agents of that particular plastic. Optically clear plastics I've personally worked with include polystyrene, polypropylene, PVC, and of course the many types of plastic bottles we get our sports drinks in. I did mention previously that ivy will have trouble rooting effectively on most plastics, so that would require some kind of etching into the surface of the plastic so the roots can take hold, which would probably cause a scattering of light at that etched surface and obscure the bricks. The other issue is that, unless you intend to make that clear plastic padding inflatable (wouldn't it be crazy to hear snaps, crackles and pops as Pete Crow-Armstrong smashes into the wall and blows up the padding?), progressively layering plastics will also distort, diffract, and block light, also obscuring the bricks.

There's probably an engineering solution that would work, but I will leave that to smarter people than I. So if you're a materials scientist, a botanist, or a bit of both (like Matt Damon from the Mars movie), I'd love to hear your thoughts. In the meantime, here's to Pete not killing himself diving for a fly ball in center field. This might be a problem for which the only solution is the one players have used for the last 100 years: more-than-usual caution when going back on fly balls.

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