It was the Cubs’ 75th home game of year, and that meant Larry Bell was at Wrigley Field for the 75th time this season.
Bell, 56, is best known as the founder of Bell’s Brewery, which has grown from a 1980s home brewing hobby in Kalamazoo, Mich., to the nation’s seventh-largest craft brewery. His second vocation is equally dear: Cubs fan. It’s an affliction dating to his childhood in Park Forest; his parents would take him out of school every opening day so they could attend the game.
Bell spent much of the fabled 1969 season in the left-field bleachers with his brother and the equally fabled Bleacher Bums. It was sometime around then that young Larry thought that attending every home game in a season would be a most proper embodiment of his fandom. The urge never faded.
With his business humming and Wrigley Field celebrating its 100th anniversary, Bell, a season ticket holder since 1999, decided this would be the year to see all 81 home games. He has brought a different “play date,” as he calls them, to nearly every game. Last Thursday evening, as the last-place Cubs battled the first-place Dodgers, he brought me.
Bell wore tan pants, white shoes with red stitches like those on a baseball, a blue cap commemorating Wrigley’s 100th anniversary and an off-white Cubs jersey from the 1930s bearing No. 17. It was a replica of the jersey worn by pitcher Charlie Root, the Cubs’ all-time leader in wins. The Cubs sold replica jerseys this season for every decade the ballpark has been in existence; Bell bought nine of the 10.
We approached the stadium as Bell has all year long: on foot, heading east on Waveland Avenue, past blocks of brick apartment buildings, until the street opens to a hulking Wrigley Field tucked seamlessly into the neighborhood. But another losing season was taking its toll.
“It’s so quiet tonight,” Bell said.
He eyed a restaurant’s sidewalk patio to look for anyone drinking a Bell’s. When he finds such a person, he thanks them for drinking his beer and extends a business card. No luck on this day.
We walked to the left-field gate and veered into a shop selling a sea of pinstripes and blue. Bell loves to buy Cubs things. Most recently it was a jacket that he had to sneak home so his wife did not see. Mrs. Bell thinks Larry buys too much Cubs stuff.
We headed up the concrete steps and toward Bell’s seats — third-base line, about 20 rows up — greeting ushers and vendors by name with every step. He misses these people when the team is on a long road trip.
“It’s your Cubs family,” he said.
We sat, and Larry laid the black backpack he carries to every game at his feet. Inside were the essentials: a jacket (Cubs, of course — he’d just bought it on eBay), paper towels to wipe down our seats if it rained, a Cubs roster and his trusty brown Wilson mitt. He hasn’t caught any foul balls this year, but after a scrum in which he finished second, the man who bested him identified himself as a White Sox fan and graciously handed the ball over. It now sits with the rest of Bell’s memorabilia from this year — including 10 bobbleheads — in a cabinet at home.
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The game began unusually well for the Cubs. The team scored twice in the first inning, and when rookie Jorge Soler singled in a run, Bell shouted, “All right! And still no outs!” It was a moment many Cubs fans have experienced: deep in September, far out of the playoff race, but a first-inning RBI single somehow still matters.
Bell has missed only about 10 innings of the season, and there was no disguising his relief that things were winding down. Night games have been rough. He has driven to Kalamazoo and back in a day more times than he can count. April and May were particularly difficult. He would come home freezing and exhausted, and his wife would suggest that he abort the mission. Why not just wait for summer days like a normal person? But he had already told everyone he was going to attend every game this year. There was no backing out.
“It’s hard,” Bell said. “I wouldn’t want to do this 10 years down the road, when I’m older.”
I asked Bell if there were any grand lessons from the season. Did he think about the stadium any differently? The team? What it means to be a fan?
Not so much. He’s made friends. He’s created memories. He’s learned the rhythms of the stadium. And he can say he’s attended every game in a season, just as the teenage him wanted to do.
“I had cancer seven years ago,” Bell said. “It’s time to get things taken care of.”
By the seventh inning, the Cubs had imploded in Cubs-like fashion: errors, spotty relief pitching and bats falling silent at the worst times. Relief pitcher Neil Ramirez was hit particularly hard, allowing a 4-1 lead to become a 6-4 deficit.
“Get ’em next time, Neil!” Bell yelled.
The Cubs lost 8-4. As we headed for the exit, a few fans started combing the aisles.
“There are two types of scavengers here,” Bell said. “There are the people who collect the plastic cups and helmets that the ice cream comes in, and they sell them on eBay. And then there are the actual scavengers. They eat the leftover food.”
“Really?” I said.
“You come to every game, you see things,” Bell said.
We drifted to the same gate we had entered four hours earlier. A woman in a Cubs jacket told us to have a good night.
“See you tomorrow,” Bell said.
Twitter @joshbnoel