Here is a very good photo of the Wrigley Field marquee, and it is from a very specific time frame.
The marquee was painted blue/green until 1965, as noted in this Wrigley Field history post (the marquee photo
there is from 1962).
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.
They won the final game of that series 6-1 behind Doug Bird and Mike Griffin, both of whom had been acquired for Rick Reuschel just before the strike.
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.
