The Reason Wrigley Field is Terrible

A lot of St. Louisans have an anti-Chicago bias. Most people seem to think it's a little brother complex, in the same way that Bostonians hate New York. I don't hate Chicago though. It's a great American city. It has produced so much of our culture--its enormous influence on the blues (and thus on rock and roll), on comedy, on our national folk heroes and antiheroes. But I'm not here to wax poetic about Chicago because it's not the kind of city that really commands poetry to be waxed--it's basically out there to be the country's biggest working-class city. New York is cool but it's a city that you associate no less with the hipsters of Brooklyn or Manhattan than you do the working-class enclaves of Italian or Irish Americans (among others). Los Angeles has lifers but it's a city that self-consciously pushes the image of glamour, of Hollywood, of transplants. Chicago isn't about movie stars or bohemians--it's about regular joes. I'm down with that.

Its sports teams by and large exemplify this. The Chicago Bears have never really had a glamorous quarterback: Other than Walter Payton, their most iconic players are generally linebackers. The Chicago Bulls, image of Michael Jordan notwithstanding, have been built for nearly their entire existence on rugged big men and tough perimeter defenders. The Chicago Blackhawks--have they ever had a player particularly known for finesse? And the Chicago White Sox, the preferred baseball team of the city of Chicago, do not masquerade--they play on the South Side of Chicago and they haven't had a good non-power player in fifty years. The most iconic White Sox player of my lifetime was nicknamed "The Big Hurt", for God's sake.

And then there's the Cubs.

The Chicago Cubs are the opposite of what the more tolerable Chicago teams represent. And their obnoxiousness is what makes a team that hasn't won a World Series in 105 years hateable. But this obnoxiousness is best exemplified by the godawful Wrigley Field.

The problem with Wrigley Field isn't that it's a shithole, though it is. The problem with Wrigley Field is that it's an intentional shithole. Wrigley, like Fenway Park in Boston, was built in an era where there was limitations--the stadiums are in cramped neighborhoods, have crazily small dimensions, and have certain unavoidable seating limitations. The difference is that Boston has proactively tried to adapt its old stadium over time. Notably, the seats on the top of the Green Monster. The Red Sox did this crazy thing where they, like, tried to give people what they wanted. And they made a lot of money and won a couple titles in the process. Win-win, right? Well, not the Cubs! The Cubs are so engrossed in their traditions, yet still with an eye on being the only people to make money, that they've effectively prohibited rooftop viewing from across the street. Like, the dickery of this can't be overstated. You have a stadium of 40,000 seats that sells out almost every game--you don't really need to stop a few hundred people from getting a terrible view of the game. Yet the Cubs won't expand the stadium--no sir. In fact, until a rule was put in place which would have prevented them from hosting playoff games, the Chicago Cubs didn't even have lights at their stadium until the year I was born.

The Cubs and their fascinations with day games is an obnoxious part of baseball history that we regrettably must remember. It was one thing to have exclusively day games in the 1930s when there weren't viable alternatives. But by the time, say, the 1950s rolled around, most teams were embracing night games. It's not because baseball is better under the lights, but it's because baseball fans are able to actually watch baseball during night games. If your Tuesday game starts at 1 p.m., most people can't watch, or at least can't watch a majority of it. Most people, including sports fans, have these things called "jobs", and for almost no job, whether you work a standard 9-to-5 or a second shift, is a baseball game going from 1 to 4 p.m. convenient. Luckily, Cubs fans found a workaround to this general problem--have fans who are rich, entitled dicks!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8S0CDtEz_Bo

Keep in mind these are the words of a Chicago Cubs EMPLOYEE. I can't even imagine what people in other organizations were saying. Luckily, the Cubs came to their senses and decided to cater to its fans who might not be trust fund babies or retired ex-CEOs by putting lights in their stadi--oh, that's right, they added lights because if they didn't, the NL was going to mandate Cubs playoff games to be played at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. Luckily, this was never really an issue because the Cubs are almost always terrible, but they got lights and now begrudgingly play games that people can watch. 

And it's all for the sake of a terrible stadium where people pee in troughs. Seriously, it is 2013 and people are peeing in goddamned troughs. Because TRADITION! It has been recommended by many people over the years that regular night games at Wrigley might get the Cubs players on more regular body cycles and this might improves their chances at championships. But it's evident that championships are secondary, or maybe even tertiary, to Cubs fans. It's about the ability of rich assholes to go drink at a cramped stadium and pee in troughs.