Here is a very good photo of the Wrigley Field marquee, and it is from a very specific time frame.
When Tribune Co. bought the Cubs, they replaced the manual letters and numbers with an electronic sign in 1982.
There’s one other clue in this photo — the car, which is clearly a 1970s or early 1980s car, possibly a BMW? Maybe someone here who’s a car expert can identify it further.
So now we have a time frame, and thus it’s a simple matter of looking through baseball-reference.com until there’s a match on the team and dates.
These games were played Aug. 10-11-12-13, 1981. In fact, they were the first games played after the players’ strike that year ended.
The Cubs had not been a very good team in the “first half” of 1981. When the strike hit they were 15-37. They lost the first three games of that series and their season record dropped to 15-40. Just two other Cubs teams (1999 and 2021) ever lost more games in a 55-game span.
The first game of that series was a wacky 7-5 loss in 12 innings. It had gone to the 10th tied 1-1, but both teams scored three runs in the 10th and one in the 11th before the Mets put it away with a two-run 12th.
Neither team was very good that year, the Cubs finishing 38-65 and the Mets just slightly better at 41-62.
And that was the last year the Wrigley Field marquee displayed information in that way.