Column: Can the Chicago Cubs make the summer winds of Wrigley Field their fickle friend?

Manager Don Zimmer was sitting in his cramped Wrigley Field office talking about lineup options before a game against the St. Louis Cardinals on Sept. 17, 1988.

This was back in an era when managers talked freely with newspaper reporters in their offices before games, knowing they could go off the record on occasion or use off-color language. It was a different time.

Nowadays manager Craig Counsell addresses the media in a dark, subterranean conference room with an ever-present TV camera fixed on him to satisfy the team-owned TV network’s pregame show. Candidness is optional.

But I digress.

Back on that day in ’88, Zimmer noted the wind would be blowing out at a decent clip for the afternoon game, so he inserted little-used rookie Darrin Jackson into the lineup.

“I just thought Jackson can get a hold of one,” he told reporters.

Jackson, who had four career home runs at the time, wound up hitting two home runs in the Cubs’ 6-4 win over the Cardinals. Zimmer was a genius.

“I don’t want to sound like I know everything,” he said afterward.

If you're wondering by how much the wind affected Patrick Wisdom's shoulda-been-a-homer today, the fine folks at Statcast3D and @WeatherApplied have you covered.

It was only .. SIXTY TWO FEET, thanks wind. Sorry @cubs. pic.twitter.com/523QvqiD1h

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) June 15, 2024

Zimmer wasn’t the first manager to watch the way the wind blows at Wrigley before making out his lineup. And he certainly won’t be the last. Though most lineups are pre-scripted a day or more in advance based on analytics and rest times, Counsell admitted to looking at the flags when walking into the ballpark.

“You think about it, absolutely,” he said Saturday. “Probably just putting your best team on the field trumps (the weather), but the longer you’re here you know just how much weather affects these games.

“We’ve talked about this … if you took the home run out of baseball, how much of a different game it would be. There are without question days at Wrigley where the home run is pretty unlikely.”

The fickle summer winds of Wrigley have long been part of the ballpark’s history.

Zimmer, who played with and managed the Cubs, used to call the ballpark “Wrigley One” and “Wrigley Two” because of its dual nature. Sure, it lacked poetry, but it was easy to remember.

When Zimmer managed in the late 1980s, he asked Cubs manager of baseball information Chuck Wasserstrom to begin keeping “wind trends” stats to dispute the perception the wind always blew out at Wrigley. High-scoring affairs, like the wind-aided 23-22 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies on May 17, 1979, were always remembered much more fondly than the 3-2 losses in April and September.

The question to Counsell on Saturday from WSCR-AM’s Bruce Levine was in reference to the home run that wasn’t to be on Friday — Patrick Wisdom’s eighth-inning contact that appeared headed to Waveland Avenue.

Instead of being a game-winning home run, Wisdom’s shot turned into another ordinary warning track fly ball in a 3-0 loss by a team that seems to have cornered the market in warning track power in 2024. Thanks to analytics, Wisdom’s flyout was still being talked about a day later. The exit velocity of 111 mph and 33-degree launch angle, along with factoids that the ball would’ve gone out in 20 ballparks and fell 62 feet shy of its projected landing spot due to the wind, contributed to the conversation.

Wisdom’s Zimmer-esque response to the near-miss — “Just wow” — was a T-shirt-worthy quote.

Wind and Wrigley go hand-in-hand, a beautiful relationship forged by the ballpark’s proximity to the greatest of the Great Lakes and weather patterns that can shift quickly in Chicago. Trying to find the right combination of players to fit the quirky ballpark has been a task of Cubs executives forever.

“Executives here have thought of these things for decades,” Theo Epstein said after being named Cubs president in 2011. “The day games, the nightlife in Chicago, the way the field plays when the wind is blowing in, blowing out, the cut of the grass, the lack of foul territory, the outfielders having to deal with brick walls with fans on top of them, a big media market … We’re not going to reinvent the wheel, but try to be thorough and have a thoughtful approach to all issues.”

Epstein’s approach worked in 2016. Now it’s Jed Hoyer’s problem to figure out.

Wisdom’s shot was not an anomaly. Like anyone else, I’ve seen hundreds of would-be home runs turn into flyouts over my 35 years as a baseball writer at the Tribune, and dozens more as a fan attending games. One of the ballpark’s most famous moments was Hank Aaron’s fly to deep left that the wind blew back into the park during Ken Holtzman’s first no-hitter in 1969. Billy Williams caught the ball in the vines as the entire ballpark exhaled en masse.

Whether would-be home runs outnumber the number of ordinary fly balls turned into real home runs by an outgoing wind is unknown, though certainly, Counsell could ask the media relations department to research the subject and let us know the answer.

As we know, the wind typically blows in at Wrigley during March, April and most of May, and blows out from June through early September when the weather heats up. But there are always exceptions to the rule, like Friday’s game, which also featured a fog rolling in for a few innings and ended in sunshine. It’s why we love Chicago.

Sometimes entire seasons seem to go against the norm, including the unseasonably cool summer of 2007. “I’ve been here a long time,” third baseman turned broadcaster Ron Santo told the Tribune’s Dave van Dyck that July, “And the wind’s been blowing in as much as I can remember.”

In a game that August, diminutive second baseman Mike Fontenot hit a would-be home run that stayed in the park in a 6-5 loss to the Cincinnati Reds. After his pregame interview in his office the next day, manager Lou Piniella turned to me and said: “By the way, I didn’t cry, Sullivan.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“You wrote yesterday that I cried,” he barked.

“Um, I don’t think so.”

Managers were allowed to bark at the media back in the day without fear of it going viral. It was a different time.

Upon further review, I discovered I had written about Piniella’s reaction to Fontenot’s near miss like this:

“Where’s that Wrigley Field wind?” Piniella cried afterward. “Where’s it at? I thought it was out of the ballpark. I really did.”

The traveling secretary had pulled a prank on Piniella, who hadn’t actually read the story, by giving him some misinformation. Piniella laughed when he finally read it and apologized.

I really miss those days. But I digress.

The official wind stats — in/out/crosswind — began to be included in the daily media notes on a regular basis in 1999.

For the record, the Cubs ended Sunday with a 9-4 record with a crosswind (Southeast or Northwest), a 5-3 record with the wind blowing out (South, West or Southwest) and a 5-8 record blowing in (North, East or Northeast).

That suggests Cubs fans have more reason than ever to root for a long, hot summer. It could mean the difference between a wild-card berth and another disappointing ending.

After spending his previous managerial stint under a climate-controlled roof in Milwaukee, Counsell seems to enjoy the unpredictability of our fickle weather and how it factors into the daily ballpark experience. The Cubs haven’t capitalized on their home-field advantage, but perhaps he can channel his Inner Zimmer and become a genius when all is said and done.

Looks like it’s going to be a hot one this week.

But I digress.