"Get Creative"

The Tribune had an AP story today that made me smile; it was about baseball coming up with a plan for the upcoming season, assuming there is one.  Among the ideas floated were doubleheaders and thirty-player rosters.  Not to brag too much, but I mentioned both those possibilities to Clare well over a week ago.  Great minds think alike, I guess, provided Rob Manfred isn’t the other mind we’re talking about here.

 

The story was divided into subheads, the last of which was “Get creative,” as in round-robin tournaments and neutral sites for postseason play (or November in-season play at D-I stadiums, just speaking creatively).  Better late than never, I guess, with that creative thing.

 

Too bad nobody with the White Sox wanted to be creative on the question of Comiskey Park back in the 1980s.  No, Jerry Reinsdorf insisted, we need a new home, in Chicago or elsewhere.  I was part of a group that floated the idea of turning Reinsdorf’s ballpark into a working national monument.  The park could have been structurally updated while restored to some agreed-upon era.  We also proposed a museum and archives focusing on Chicago baseball, complete with oral histories from Chicago baseball figures great and anonymous.  It seems we were prematurely creative.

 

Among the objections raised was, where would the White Sox play during the renovation?  It couldn’t be Soldier Field, because that would’ve meant a field with dimensions similar to the Coliseum, where it was 251 feet down the left field line (with a 42-foot high fence on top).  Oh, how the purists wailed, though not enough to force the Dodgers to move back to Brooklyn.  The Coliseum was a major-league venue from 1958-1961, and nobody demanded those transplanted Bums be stripped of their 1959 World Series win, other than White Sox fans, that is.

 

At one point, I was told baseball has some kind of rule to prevent the creation of any such dimensions again, and nobody wanted to consider erecting temporary bleachers around a field with more ordinary dimensions.  Creativity was not the order of the day, not when it came to saving Comiskey Park or Tiger Stadium, which also had a diehard group of fans fighting to save it.  But the new mallparks are quite nice, if you go in for that sort of thing.  Did I mention that the color line fell in Comiskey Park, where Joe Louis won the heavyweight championship and the Beatles played?

 

But I welcome creativity in baseball, most of all now.  After all, better late than never.