Building Blocks

With their season seven months off, the 3-13 Bears still managed to snare the entire back page of the Sunday Tribune sports’ section to discuss the quarterback situation.  Draft, trade or punt?  Who cares?  

Of more interest was the remark by Cubs’ chairman Tom Ricketts, of wanting to have his team recognized as “one of the great sports’ organizations in the world,” like Manchester United or Real Madrid.  Oh, whoopee, baseball taking on soccer.  Tom, nobody on the Iberian Peninsula or in the pubs of Manchester gives a yellow card how good your team is or for how long.  If they didn’t care about the Yankees, they won’t bother with the Cubs.

And of even greater interest to me was a columnist in today’s Sun-Times who referred to the area around Wrigley Field as Rickettsville.  Now, that’s what I call an astute observation, one which gets to the heart of the difference between Cubs’ and White Sox ownership.  The Cubs want to control and develop the surrounding real estate.  The Sox want parking lots, thank you very much.

How sad.  Comiskey Park always stood out from other major league parks for the lack of development around it.  In 1910, Charles Comiskey built his new park on the site of a garbage dump.   (Insert your joke here.)  Comiskey never moved to develop the rest of the property.  Just look at photos from the 1930s, and all you see is the ballpark surrounded by parking lots.  For reasons only known to himself, Jerry Reinsdorf, who made his money in real estate, never jumped at the chance to build “Jerryville” atop the old cinder lots.  Call it a stadium fixation that’s hurt the team’s perception for the last 26 years.  Cub fans go to a shrine and then hit the streets for the best of urban night life.  Sox fans go to a mall and then fight to get out of the parking lots.