When the Red Sox celebrated the 100th anniversary of Fenway Park last week, they assumed the landmark festivities were honoring the only MLB stadium to last a century. However, late Thursday night, baseball historians at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., accidentally dug up what has proved to be the authentic birth certificate for Wrigley Field, revealing its date of birth as April 30, 1899, confirming the venerable old park to be 113 years old, over a decade older than the historic home of the Green Monster.
Wrigley Field (born Jose Contreras-Moyer), previously thought to have been born in 1914 in Normal, IL, had actually been born in Santo Domingo before the turn of the century and entered the United States through New Orleans. Like many baseballers from the region Wrigley felt the need to appear more attractive to MLB as a much younger park, hence the forged birth certificate acquired at a brothel in Louisiana. Settling in Chicago in 1899, the infant ballpark immediately became home to the National League’s Cubs who left their previous park due to big, prickly weeds on the infield that nobody wanted to cut.
The historians who discovered the real birth certificate had been searching artifacts related to the stadium in hopes of finding some early bootleg phonograph copies of “Take me out to the ballgam.e”. Instead, tucked away in old sock worn by Cub great “Cap” Anson, they discovered history.
