Time once again to renew my annual loud, obnoxious and ultimately futile call to reduce Wrigley Field to tiny, tiny pieces as soon as is humanly possible under the current rules and guidelines enforced by the various neighborhood associations and alderman (i.e., 34 years).
This is a little tradition I have every year, something I do around my two favorite parts of the Cubs’ season: 1. Spring training and 2. The always-delightful fiesta of Ticket Price Inflation ($42 for bleacher seats! Whee!). Ah, sure, it doesn’t solve anything, but it makes me feel better, thinking for a minute that I might be able, in some piffling way, to stunt the annual cascade of Floridian tourists, law firms, texting-happy interns and regional managers that constitute pretty much everyone in Wrigley Field these days who isn’t selling frosty malts (that is a jagged segue into my second annual tradition: A call to bring back the frosty malts. Loved those things. Vaguely chocolate-ish, granite-hard and deeeeee-licious, at least until you had to hit the bathroom to remove splinters of that weird balsawood spoon out of your tongue).
Full disclosure: I’m a Cub fan, and I’m tired and grumpy and I don’t care anymore. And I don’t want a bunch of e-mails from Sox fans about why no one’s writing about them; seriously, if a shiny World Series trophy hasn’t compelled you to stop keeping a regular tally of daily newspaper headlines, it’s probably time to look into farming or something.
Yes, I know Soriano is fun. Also fun is the idea of brainstorming what would make Ted Lilly worth $40 million (for instance: the ability to turn into a jet fighter and vanguish Megatron.)
But my argument this year concerns not the gross overpayment of moderate talent; no, my problem is totally with the outfield doors, which will, effective immediately, sport ads for something called Under Armour, a sports apparel company with one of the classiest names in all of American consumerism (sources tell me negotiations with Hooters and Spencer Gifts Vomit Spray fell through). Under Armour’s spokesman, you will be gobsmacked to learn, is Alfonso Soriano, which at least explains how they’re gonna pay for that guy.
The only thing that would make this story more comically tragic would be a lengthy wet burp of a PR quote, maybe one sopping with trivial buzzwords, from someone in marketing?
“We always have the tradition and the ambience of Wrigley Field in mind, and rather than make bold changes, we try to make subtle changes that deliver high impact with regard to revenue and television exposure to sponsors, yet have low impact on the visual quality of Wrigley Field. I think that’s what you see with the Under Armour (ad).
It’s just the next phase of keeping Wrigley Field updated,” Cubs marketing director Jay Blunk wordily told a large local newspaper with baseball ties. Future plans for keeping Wrigley “updated” include nanorobot shortstops and bathrooms in space, but until the technology catches up, we’ll just let those cherubic Dickensian moppets keep it updated with creative armpit-themed advertising.
It’s hard to muster up any moral indignation to the slapping of ads on anything, and the Wrigley-as-Rockwell-painting argument is just fantastically boring, so let’s just all agree that we had a good run, the wheels have fallen off and it’s over.
But let’s be fair. I, like bloviating marketing departments, need also to remain updated, so I’ll even amend my pitch: Don’t tear down Wrigley, just move the Cubs out of it. Have them play in Hoffman Estates, up by (or in) the new amphitheater up there, whenever they can get squeezed in between concerts by Duran Duran, Journey and Eddie Money. Those will be the games that count. Then, field a separate team of extras, and put them on the field at Wrigley to play meaningless exhibition contests. Most attendees, of course, won’t have the foggiest notion anything is going on. How, you might ask, could the Cubs possibly field a team full of castoffs, aged ex-stars and oft-injured bad bets to staff this second team?
(The pause is the joke there.)
This plan solves all the problems. It lets the Real Cubs fail in entirely new environs, while the New Fake Cubs get to burn out their last few years on a real live ballpark, where it doesn’t really matter who everyone in the stands is texting. Plus, it keeps Wrigley available for the occasional classic-rock reunion concert, and would be much more convenient for the contractors working on the space toilets.
Jeff Vrabel is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, Playboy, Billboard, No Depression and PopMatters. He can be reached at www.jeffvrabel.com.
