Tear Down This Dump!

Having been to Wrigley Field myself, more than once, the thought of nuking it and starting over entirely elsewhere is downright mortifying.

But then again, I am not a Cub fan. I am a fan of nostalgia, and a fan of keeping perfectly usable old stadiums for as long as we can.

Rich Cohen of the Wall Street Journal makes a far more compelling case, that it is indeed the ball park which is holding back this baseball team from ever being good.

"It's a false heaven—the bases, trestles, ivy, wooden seats and bleachers, the towering center-field scoreboard—all of it must be ripped out and carried away like the holy artifacts were carried out of the temple in Jerusalem, heaped in a pile and burned. Then the ground itself must be salted, made barren, covered with a housing project, say, a Stalinist monolith, so never again will a shrine arise on that haunted block. As it was with Moses, the followers and fans, though they search, shall never find its bones."

Cubs fans are the Buddhists of the game, free from the wheel of profit and loss, happy to live in the now of Wrigley, to enjoy the sun as routine grounders are booted and bodies wither and die.

A bad century has made winning seem like a fairy tale. It doesn't matter what wizard managers the team hires, players, executives—once it was Lou Piniella; now it's Theo Epstein. People who have won everywhere lose in Chicago. The tradition is just too powerful to deny.

The more I let Cohen's argument soak in, the more I could actually see the day when there's some actual momentum to say: "Enough nostalgic bullshit. Let's bury this old dump, and start over, where the only that will matter for the NEXT 100 years, is not fielding a horseshit baseball team."

Hey, sounds nuts. But then again, so did installing lights in the place back in 1988.