Craig Lynch’s alter ego will forever be stuck in the bleachers, but Lynch has found a better seat at Wrigley Field.
“The guys that were out there, they knew the game, or at least they thought they did, and they bet on everything. It would get somewhat heated. It was a bit coarser out there than it is today, but it was more about baseball.” Everyone watched the game closely, because whatever the situation on the field there’d be money riding on it, though Lynch says he didn’t bet much.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Blind since birth, Lynch still attends about 60 games a season, a battered portable radio pressed to his ear so he can follow the action–just like Greg in Bleacher Bums. But his perch these days is in the press box, from which he phones in reports to WLPO, a radio station in downstate La Salle. Lynch works full-time as a customer service representative for the Social Security Administration, but he’s moonlighted as a radio reporter for the last ten years.
Lynch vividly remembers May 15, 1955, the day he first set foot in Wrigley Field. The Cubs were playing two against the New York Giants. “I went with my older brother and an aunt,” he says. “The Cubs won the first game 4-2 and lost the second 9-4. We left in the fifth inning of the second game and I was disappointed. I could have stayed longer.”
Lynch’s impossible childhood dream was to become a play-by-play announcer. He graduated from Foreman High School, then the only public school on the north side that taught in braille, and earned a degree in teaching secondary English from Trinity College in Deerfield.
That was the atmosphere that the young Organic actors, among them Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz, appropriated. When Bleacher Bums opened at the Organic in the summer of 1977, they invited Lynch to a performance.
Lynch crossed paths with Mantegna earlier this summer when the actor stopped by the WGN radio booth to talk with Pat Hughes and Ron Santo. “They were talking about Bleacher Bums, and [Mantegna] mentioned me and my connection to the play,” Lynch says. “Afterwards I went over to talk to him, and he was very friendly.”
