Upon first light in Wrigleyville early Thursday, the marquee at Murphy’s Bleachers, the venerable bar at the corner of Waveland and Sheffield avenues, still counted down toward a day people had been anticipating for the past 166 days, since the Cubs ended last season. All around, the neighborhood was just starting to come to life, sidewalks filling with anticipation.
Longtime season ticket holders were already lined up outside the entrance for the bleachers. A crowd of kids started to gather down the street for the Cubs’ “Blue Carpet,” and the arrival of players to the park. Vendors wheeled T-shirt stands into place and rolled beer carts into Wrigley, while a city slowly awoke to the rebirth and hope that only a new baseball season can deliver.
Five hours before first pitch, a new dawn had rendered the Murphy’s sign out of date.
“Opening day or bust,” it read, in all caps, and the countdown had dwindled to one.
But now that day had arrived, and a doorman climbed a ladder with a handful of letters and arranged them into a new message: “There’s no place like home,” followed by “Cubs @1:20.” The place opened not long after, at 8 a.m. sharp, and about a dozen people streamed inside and sidled up to the bar and partook in some of the first pours of the 2026 baseball season.
There was a “nervousness” to the start of it all, the doorman said, and though he didn’t want to give his full name, he said everybody knew him as “Popper.” This was his ninth opening day working across the street from Wrigley, he said, and the return of baseball, for him, meant the return of some annoyances and antics “that I endure 81 times a year.”
“Do we have a bathroom? ‘My name’s Murphy, do I get a discount?’ Stuff like that.”
But then Popper smiled and the arrival of opening day momentarily mellowed his gruffness.
“It’s just fun to see everyone,” he said. “I spend six months with all the people here, all the people in the neighborhood, and see them pretty much every other week … And then you don’t see them for six months.”
Opening day in Chicago conjures a lot of emotion for a lot of people, and to a great many of them it’s one big family reunion. Indeed, “Opening day is a holiday,” as the saying went on the T-shirts of a lot of fans on Thursday, and many greeted old friends and familiar faces with refrains of “Happy New Year.”
Al Yellon, from left, Miriam Romain and Christopher Sorley wait to get into the bleacher seats outside of Wrigley Field before the Chicago Cubs host the Washington Nationals on opening day, March 26, 2026. (Eileen T. Meslar/Chicago Tribune)
So it was across the street from Murphy’s, outside the entrance for the bleachers, where Christopher Sorley said he arrived at 5 a.m. He plopped down a folding camping chair and sat in the dark for a while as friends slowly began to line up next to him, drawn to Wrigley by the pull of a new season and old bonds that grow deeper by the year.
“It almost brings a tear to my eye,” Sorley said, and over the past 15 years he’d found community and friendship in the seats beyond the outfield fence. “We’ve been catching up. We’ve been catching up for the past 15-20 minutes here, just, ‘How was your winter? What’s going on? … The pipes burst,’ you know?
“It’s just all that catching up and staying in contact with each other and just creating that family atmosphere that you would get at your grandma’s house, or your parents.”
Two spots down the line, Al Yellon, 69, was attending his 49th opening day at Wrigley. Yellon and Sorley traded memories and stories — the 2008 opener, featuring Kosuke Fukudome’s tying three-run home run in the ninth inning, still resonated with both — while the neighborhood came more and more alive with each passing minute.
Opening day is an event every year at Wrigley, and on the South Side at the White Sox’s Rate Field, but this year it came with perhaps a little more anticipation than usual. For one, Chicago endured its longest and coldest winter in a while, with temperatures during one prolonged bitter stretch remaining below freezing for almost three straight weeks.
For another, the city itself has endured a lot of turmoil. When the Cubs ended last season, on Oct. 11, the city was still under siege by federal agents conducting immigration raids. Operation Midway Blitz, as it was known, continued for several more weeks, leaving behind trails of tear gas and traumatized residents. Opening day, then, brought unity and renewal that felt like an elixir.
Easton Smith waits to get an autograph from Pete Crow-Armstrong outside Wrigley Field before the Chicago Cubs host the Washington Nationals on opening day, March 26, 2026. (Eileen T. Meslar/Chicago Tribune)
While the line grew at the entrance for the bleachers early Thursday, dozens of kids crowded near the Cubs parking lot and waited for their heroes to walk past on their way into Wrigley. Easton Smith, 9, was among those who otherwise would’ve been in school Thursday morning, had school been as important as a chance to meet Pete Crow-Armstrong, his favorite player.
“We pulled him out of school for the day,” Smith’s dad, Brandon, said. He and his family live near Peoria, and he started the drive to Chicago at 5 a.m., just so Easton could get into position.
“PCA is his favorite,” Brandon Smith said, of Crow-Armstrong. “He’s a little red-headed kid, so we call him ‘Pee-Wee C-A.”
A few minutes later, a gate swung open and out walked Crow-Armstrong to the delighted screams of the kids. He stopped and signed their baseball cards and balls and Easton turned around to have his favorite player sign his jersey — a Crow-Armstrong jersey, of course. But the marker didn’t work on the fabric. Opening days aren’t always perfect, after all.
By then, a little after 9 a.m., the neighborhood had fully awakened. The patio at Murphy’s grew fuller by the minute and an hour or so later, the Wrigley ball hawkers — a dwindling group of fans who gather along Waveland Avenue to catch home run balls launched well over the left field fence — were starting to take their positions.
Longtime season ticket holders Bob Krause, left, and Jim Reinhold celebrate during the first inning of the Chicago Cubs game against the Washington Nationals on opening day at Wrigley Field, March 26, 2026. (Eileen T. Meslar/Chicago Tribune)
There was still about another hour before the gates opened and, when they did, Bob Krause and his crew of 15 or so fellow fans poured into the bleachers and headed for one of the top rows in left field. They placed towels on the metal and made themselves comfortable for the start of a new season. It had been a morning of reconnection for him and his old friends, of rebirth.
“It’s seeing everybody that you haven’t seen in six months,” he said, and when they crossed paths again after all this time they greeted each other with a familiar refrain that did not at all sound out of place in late March in Chicago:
“Happy New Year.”