WRIGLEYVILLE — Frustrated and slightly amused fans poured out of Wrigley Field around 1 a.m. Wednesday after a short rainstorm — but a lengthy rain delay — forced Tuesday night's (and Wednesday morning's) Cubs-Giants game to be called.
“We were doing well, it’s looking good, and now we got this," said Tony Dowell, a recent Indiana transplant who brought his son Jake to the game.
“They should have played ‘Go Cubs Go’ ” Jake said. “I mean the Cubs won, right?”
Despite the a 2-0 Cubs victory, there was little celebrating when the game was finally called.
Some four and a half hours earlier, San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey popped out to end the top of the fifth inning with the Cubs ahead 2-0. A light drizzle turned into a steady downpour. Though the rain stopped fairly quickly, the Wrigley Field grounds crew struggled to get tarp the field.
As the ten-minute rainstorm stretched into a stoppage that lasted hours, Twitter and other social media began poking fun at the effort to put the tarp on straight.
Jon Hansen chatted with a few fans during and after the lengthy delay:
What followed was a rain delay so long that less than 1,000 fans remained from the 31,000 announced attendance. Cubs General Manager Jed Hoyer, in a postgame press conference, said "out of respect for the game" and because the Giants are in a pennant race, neither team wanted the game to be called in the fifth.
"We waited as long as we could because the Giants are in a pennant race, and we felt an obligation to do that," Hoyer said.
Hoyer said the flash storm was being monitored on the radar, but it ended up being worse than expected. The White Sox, meanwhile, playing on the other side of town, saw no rain at all.
"The tarp started getting on the field later than it usually does," Hoyer said. "... It became difficult to pull because it got so heavy, and it probably got a little off-kilter. Listen, those guys do an incredible job, our grounds crews are fantastic. ... It was a bad confluence of events that led to that."
One Wrigley staffer said the crew used more drying agent than he'd ever seen in an effort to get the field ready.
Many fans left after 1 a.m. were clad in Giants orange.
"I’ve never seen anything more screwed up in my life. I’ve been going to games for 45 years," said Giants fan Jim Trembley.
Many of the other fans remaining past midnight were tourists, catching their first Cubs game at Wrigley Field. “At this point, It’s a battle of attrition,” said David Collins, a Cubs fan who just moved to the area from San Francisco.
Umpires sporadically came out to check the field conditions and chat with both Cubs and Giants managers. Three announcements were made on the public address during the delay, including the final announcement that the Cubs had won 2-0 shortly after 1:15 a.m.
Longtime Cubs fan Ronnie Woo-Woo, a familiar face at the ballpark, remained till the end.
“How long will I stay,” Woo-Woo asked rhetorically. “Till the next World Series.”
The Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field are 95 percent owned by a trust established for the benefit of the family of Joe Ricketts, owner and CEO of DNAinfo.com. Joe Ricketts has no direct involvement in the team's day-to-day operations.
