Truth is stranger than fiction.
If you've read Bernard Malamud's 1951 novel "The Natural," or have seen the movie, you remember when Roy Hobbs was shot in the stomach in a hotel room by a deranged female fan. Well, meet Eddie Waitkus.
Eddie was a good-hitting, slick-fielding first baseman from Boston, who began his major league career with the Cubs in 1941, only to see his rise interrupted by the war. When he returned from Army service in 1946, he quickly became the Cubs' regular first sacker with a .304 batting average and followed that with two more quality campaigns. He gained a lot of attention in the press -- which, in turn, brought him to the attention of a troubled young teenager named Ruth Ann Steinhagen, who became obsessed with the good-looking young player. Steinhagen became a regular at Wrigley Field, turned her bedroom into a Waitkus shrine, and began taking lessons to learn to speak Lithuanian, since he was of that ancestry. Then, in 1948, Waitkus was traded to the Phillies.
It was a good move for Waitkus, and for the Phils -- but for Steinhagen it pushed her across the line separating teenage obsession from psychosis. On June 14, 1949, while in Chicago with the Phils, Waitkus received a mysterious note requesting him to meet an unknown woman in a room at the Edgewater Beach Hotel about a matter that would "be to (his) advantage" to discuss. His curiosity roused, Waitkus went up to the room -- where Ruth Ann was waiting for him with a .22 rifle. "You're not going to bother me anymore!" she declared as she fired a shot into Waitkus's abdomen.
Waitkus survived the shooting, returning to the Phils' lineup in 1950 as a key part of the team's first pennant-winner in thirty-five years, but he was deeply scarred by the incident, both physically and mentally. His career fizzled out by the mid-fifities, and he went home to Massachusetts, where his only connection to baseball would be a job teaching kids at the Ted Williams Baseball School. He began to drink heavily, became a reclusive, nervous loner, and died of cancer -- possibly triggered by injuries related to the shooting -- at the age of 53.
Ruth Ann Steinhagen was sent to a mental hospital in Chicago, where she was held for four years, recieving electroconvulsive therapy, and was released in 1953. She never set foot in a baseball park again, and remained in obscurity until her death in 2013.
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Before it was Wrigley Field, before it was Cubs Park, it was Weeghman Park -- named after this man, Charles Weeghman.
The sporting crowd called him "Lucky Charlie," but his luck would only carry him so far. He started out running a one-arm lunchroom in Chicago around the turn of the century, and his luck carried him into a series of deals that built that one hole-in-the-wall eatery into a whole chain of lunchrooms thruout the city. There was money in the quick-lunch business, and ten Weeghman's Dairy Lunch establishments meant that, very soon, Lucky Charlie was doing very well for himself, owning a theatre and a couple of poolrooms to go along with his lunch chain. But he wasn't satisfied -- he considered his new prosperity a stepping stone toward his real purpose, entree into the high-stepping world of gamblers, athletes, actors, and the demimonde. They called him "Lucky Charlie," and he was determined to try his luck to the full extent possible.
Toward that end Weeghman got involved with a group of similar venturesome characters in forming what they hoped would be taken seriously as a new major league. "Lucky Charlie" bought into this new Federal League, opening a franchise in Chicago -- the Whales -- and bought a plot of land at Clark and Addison Streets to build himself a ballpark. He also needed players to go with his franchise and its ballpark, and he followed the example of his colleagues in encouraging established major league players to jump their contracts to join the new league. Quite a few players did just that, and by opening day 1914, the Federal League could boast some impressive rosters. The Whales had old-line Chicago favorites Joe Tinker and Three-Finger Brown in their camp, and Weeghman paid them lavishly, and the team finished second in 1914, and won the Federal League pennant in 1915.
But Lucky Charlie's luck was running out fast. His fortune had been built on mortgages and credit, and he had gone rather deep into hock to finance his baseball venture. The Federal League folded after the 1915 season, and one of the conditions negotiated with the rival leagues as part of the fold was that several Federal owners would have a chance to buy into the established clubs. Charlie Weeghman thus bought a controlling interest in the Cubs, and moved them into Weeghman Park in 1916. This move pushed him even deeper into debt -- but he was hoping to recover fast thanks to anticipated Cubs profits and the continued popularity of his lunchroom chain. Then the US entered World War I, and that was when Lucky Charlie's nickname became ironic.
Wartime austerity took a deep bite in the lunchroom business thruout Chicago, and baseball attendance suffered badly. And what the war didn't damage, the 1918 flu epidemic did. By the end of 1918 Charlie Weeghman was up against the not-yet-ivy-covered wall, owing a vast amount of money to banks and to various insistent shadowy personalities who weren't the sort to wait patiently for their cash. With nowhere else to turn he sold out his interest in the Cubs to chewing-gum king William Wrigley, and withdrew forever from baseball.
It got worse. Seeking solace in the pleasures of the flesh, Charlie found himself charged with adultery and lost his marriage. His lunchroom chain collapsed. His theatre folded. His poolrooms closed. He tried to go into the nightclub business, but Prohibition put certain demands on a nightclub operator that he found difficult to meet, given the business relationships required. Even before the Depression hit, Lucky Charlie was a ruined man. He fled to New York, failed to pull himself together, and died broke and forgotten from a stroke in 1938.
But he left behind his ballpark, the last remaining legacy of both the Federal League, and of a man who found that luck can only carry you so far.
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