Chicago Cubs in Pittsburgh tickets

Few franchises in sports are as intertwined with their home ballpark as the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs have played at Wrigley Field, the Friendly Confines, on Chicago's North Side since 1916, and the place still runs on vintage charms: ivy climbing the brick outfield wall, a manual scoreboard, and day baseball, which was the only kind Wrigley offered until lights arrived in the late 1980s. The Wrigleyville neighborhood wraps around the ballpark, apartment rooftops along Waveland and Sheffield look down on the outfield, and the whole scene makes Cubs tickets a Chicago summer ritual passed down for generations.

The franchise dates to 1870, when it took the field as the Chicago White Stockings, and it was a charter member of the National League in 1876, one of only two clubs from that inaugural season still playing today. Stints as the Colts and the Orphans ended in 1903, when the club adopted the Cubs name for good, and the new name arrived with a dynasty. The 1906 team won 116 games and posted a .763 winning percentage, the best in major league history, then the 1907 and 1908 clubs won back-to-back World Series behind the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double-play combination, an infield so famous that the 1910 poem Baseball's Sad Lexicon helped send all three to the Hall of Fame in 1946. The franchise then went 108 years between titles, the longest drought in major North American professional sports, a stretch that only deepened the bond between the team and its fans before the 2016 club rewrote the ending.

The franchise's greats hang from the Wrigley Field foul poles as retired numbers on pinstriped flags:

• Ernie Banks, number 14, the Hall of Fame shortstop known as Mr. Cub, who won back-to-back National League MVP awards in 1958 and 1959.
• Ron Santo, number 10, the third baseman who teamed with Banks, Billy Williams, and Ferguson Jenkins on the late-1960s contenders and entered the Hall of Fame in 2012.
• Billy Williams, number 26, the left fielder who won Rookie of the Year in 1961.
• Ryne Sandberg, number 23, the Hall of Fame second baseman whose two game-tying home runs in June 1984, in a game now known as The Sandberg Game, helped carry him to that season's MVP award.
• Ferguson Jenkins and Greg Maddux, who share number 31, with Jenkins winning the Cy Young Award in 1971 and Maddux in 1992.

The award shelf runs deeper still. Cubs players have won 11 National League MVP awards, from Frank Schulte in 1911 to Kris Bryant in 2016, along with five Cy Young Awards and six Rookies of the Year. A few seasons stand on their own: Hack Wilson drove in 191 runs in 1930, still the major league record, Sammy Sosa's 66-home run 1998 earned him the MVP, and Jake Arrieta threw no-hitters in consecutive seasons on his way to the 2015 Cy Young Award.

Cubs fandom is its own culture. Wrigleyville fills up hours before first pitch, and in the bleachers the Bleacher Bums, a crew of die-hards dating to 1967, keep up the old rituals, including throwing opposing home run balls back onto the field. One rooftop along Sheffield Avenue carries a sign reading Eamus Catuli, roughly Latin for Let's Go Cubs. After a win, a white flag with a blue W rises above the manual scoreboard, fans Fly the W at the ballpark and far beyond it, and Steve Goodman's Go, Cubs, Go plays over the speakers, a victory tradition since 2007. National League Central series against the St. Louis Cardinals and Milwaukee Brewers bring some of the loudest crowds of the year. That loyalty was forged across the long decades between titles, when the Lovable Losers tag became a point of pride, and it all paid off in 2016, when the whole city got to fly the W for a World Series champion.