Wrigley's breeze, Guaranteed Rate's heat: How climate change is impacting baseball in Chicago

CHICAGO - With the start of this year's Crosstown Classic just a month away, the Cubs and White Sox have more to worry about than just each other. Mother Nature is also upping her game.

In a Fox 32 special report, Mike Caplan has more on how climate change is changing the game of baseball.

Mother Nature is getting in on the long-time rivalry between Chicago’s two baseball teams. For her, it’s not a question of which team is better, but which ballpark has the better weather.

"My grandpa was a Cubs fan," said Matt Tuftedal. "I gravitated towards that as I got older."

Tuftedal is a diehard baseball fan and an atmospheric scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. He gets to combine his love of the game with his love of science.

"We can actually see how the city impacts the air quality and the conditions that they see at the different ballparks. Just the gradient between the north and south stadiums, we see just climatologically there’s a one-degree difference between the two sites," Tuftedal said.

Tuftedal said the data currently shows Guaranteed Rate Field is one-degree warmer than Wrigley Field.

"There’s a study that came out in 2023 that says that just from the global warming trend that 1 degree can equal roughly about 95 more home runs a year," he said.

"Warm, humid air is less dense so the ball can travel much further easier because it doesn’t have that resistance."

As you may have guessed, Tuftedal said the data also shows the wind is more of a concern at Wrigley because of the breeze from the lake. But when you look at the neighborhoods surrounding the ballparks, he said the North Side comes out on top.

"There’s more trees. There’s more grass. It’s much less industrial, whereas around Guaranteed Rate, you’ve got more concrete pavement. You’ve got the urban heat island effect, which can lead to more heat-related stress and those types of issues players may face. I-90 is right there. You get a lot of the exhaust," Tuftedal said.

"We have research-grade quality sensors that are almost identical to the ones the National Weather Service uses, and we’re placing them all around the city to give them much more localized impacts," said Max Grover, an atmospheric data scientist at Argonne National Lab.

"So right now the closest site we have to Wrigley Field is Northeastern Illinois University," he added.

Grover is another member of Argonne's unofficial team of atmospheric baseball scientists, as is Scott Collis. Together, they all work on the lab's Community Research on Climate and Urban Science program, otherwise known as CROCUS.

This summer, the plan is to set up more weather monitoring sites like the one at Argonne around Chicago to provide detailed forecasts for areas as small as 4 kilometers or 2.5 miles.

"What we are doing is going into the streets, into the suburbs we can look at the differences neighborhood by neighborhood and we’re already seeing those differences whether it being warmer for instance, down at Chicago State and Northeastern Illinois University and much cooler as we know by the lake," Collis said.

How could that help the Cubs and Sox?

"They would be able to see real-time temperature, the real-time moisture, real-time air quality. All those critical things that are important for understanding temperature and the human impact that has," Grover said.

In addition to helping a team put its batting line up together, this real-time information can also affect the fans.

"Is there going to be any heat index issue where players can have heat stress? Fans heat stress? Is the air quality poor," Tuftedal said.

While Chicago's baseball teams each have their own resources to monitor game day weather, Collis said they are missing a key piece of Mother Nature's puzzle.

"They don’t take into account that variability across Chicago. So that’s what we do at Argonne. We don’t do the forecasting. We do the science that improves the forecasting," Collis said.

Currently, as part of its CROCUS program, Argonne has three weather stations set up in the city. They are at Chicago State University which is close to Guaranteed Rate Field, another at Northeastern Illinois which is close to Wrigley and one at Northwestern by the lake.

The lab plans to set up 19 more stations this summer and to use the data to show just how different the climate is in each neighborhood across the city.