Given the longstanding state of baseball in Chicago, with the Cubs firmly planted on the North Side and the White Sox on the South Side, its surely difficult for modern fans to imagine the circumstances under which the ballpark we now know as Wrigley Field opened 100 years ago today.While the Sox, owned by Charles Comiskey, were playing in a ballpark down on 35th Street that had only opened in 1910, there were really no further similarities in the sports landscape in the city.PHOTO GALLERY: The Cubs home was in a ballpark known as the West Side Grounds, on Polk and Wolcott streets, near where Cook County Hospital sits. They were, at the time, baseballs most dominant team, having won the National League pennant four times from 1906 to 1910, anchored Mecole Hardman Jersey by the famed infield of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance, and the pitching of Three-Finger Brown.But the Cubs had fallen on hard times (and, arguably, have yet to recover). Team president Charles Murphywho alienated fans and players with cheapne s, heartle s treatment and refusal to upgrade his antiquated parkhad been forced to sell his stake in the team to co-owner Charles Taft, a Cincinnati newspaperman and brother of former president William Howard Taft. Having their team owned by an Ohioan gave a further dent to the civic pride of Cubs fans.The sharp decline in popularity of the Cubs in the National League, as well as the booming population in Chicago following the 1893 Worlds Fair and the ascension of baseball as the national game, provided an opening for the Federal League a would-be third major league trying to join the ranks of the AL and NL, with its headquarters in Chicago.It was there that the leagues stalwart owner, restauranteur Lucky Charley Weeghman, was based, having built a small fortune on his string of quick-serve lunch counters in the Loop. Weeghman was a dapper, affable and well-liked mana sharp contrast to the Cubs Murphy, known around town as, Chubby Charley.Weeghman knew he needed to give North Siders a ballpark of the highest order. Fewer than four months earlier, he had purchased a plot of seminary land at Clark and Addison for his Federal League club and, in part because an especially Eric Fisher Jersey cold Chicago winter, had not broken ground on the site until March 4. But in a matter of just 50 days, the ballpark we now know as Wrigley Field was erected.The book gives a thorough account of this timeas well as the politics and characters that drove the building of the field and the move of the Cubs from the West Side to the North Side. What follows is an excerpt from the book, describing the first game, played by the Chicago Federal League club, known as the Chifeds, against the Kansas City Packers:------------------------------------On April 3, Weeghman took Chicago sportswriters on a tour of the new park. The progre s the crews had achieved in just a month was remarkable. The steelwork was entirely finished and the roofing was to be done by noon on the fourth, leaving the stands completed. Weeghman had chafed at reports that the new park was to be smaller than the Cubs park and pointed out that the left-field line measured 310 feet, and the right-field line was 345 feet. He also said the park would hold 20,000 fans, 2,000 of which would be bleacher seats for the two-bit fans (tickets at big league parks acro s the country were divided into seventy-five-cent seats, fifty-cent grandstand seats, and twenty-five-cent seats in the bleachers). The president is planning an addition to his grand stand next year so that it will sweep far into left field. An enormous space has also been set aside for automobiles, but some of this extra room probably will be occupied by store buildings Anthony Hitchens Jersey next season.If part of the Federal Leagues succe s as a whole depended on the ability of the Chifeds to pull fans away from the Cubsstaggered as they were by the foibles of the only half-deposed Charles W. Murphy and compounded by the ineptitude of Charles Taftthen Weeghman and Federal president Jim Gilmore were surely ecstatic to see that Opening Day on the West Side had drawn just 4,000 Cubs fans. Weeghman had also done well in the run-up to his opening, to sell his new park to middle-cla s Chicagoans who were fed up with the ramshackle park on the West Side, one of the worst fields in major-league baseball where the first-base stands had been burned out by a big fire twenty years earlier. The West Side Grounds were known, too, for rude ushers and pushy vendors selling cigars, popcorn, and programs in the aisles, blocking fans view of the game. When discu sing his new park, Weeghman was careful to contrast what the experience would be like on the North Side against the miserable experience had at a typical ballgame. He didnt need Kendall Fuller Jersey to name the West Side park specificallyfans in Chicago would have recognized his meaning immediately.It is my belief that in order to draw and keep the fans, a club management must show plainly that the first thought is for the fans comfort, Weeghman told the Chicago Post in February. I have been a baseball fan for years and many a time, I have gone to a park all dolled up in my very best regalia, only to find that in order to occupy the seat, I must either buy a cushion or ruin my clothes. The dusty and generally dirty condition of several of the parks is not the only undesirable feature that the fan has been forced to tolerate. The retiring rooms for men and women are generally a disgrace to the park. We will have the best that is to be had in all branches, and we will spare nothing in making the park one solid comfort. There will be no abusive ushers to insult fans and there will be no dusty and dirty seats and filthy aisles for the fans to complain about.Weeghmans park would feature small but popular changes. He would sell refreshments behind the seats rather than in the aisles (the first ballpark conce sion stands) to cut down on vendors. He would employ a team of men to clean the park each morning to have our plant in a condition that would be a credit to Spotle s Town. He created a Ladies Day, and marketed heavily to Chicagos women, who were increasingly filling jobs in the downtown Loop and feeling more empowered after having just won Joe Montana Jersey suffrage in the city. For the teams first game, he gave out caps and pennants with the teams logo, the kind of freebie that is common now but was unheard of at that timemany major league teams were so protective of their logos in those days that they would not allow caps to be printed at all, even for sale, let alone give them away to fans. Before Opening Day, Weeghman ran an ad in the citys newspapers asking readers to Be a Fed Fan, and again contrasting the Feds against the Cubs and Taft, their Cincinnati owner:Tomorrow the Chicago Federal League (Weeghman Park) opens its gates to the Chicago sports-loving pu