Pic of the Week

The scene outside Wrigley Field before Friday night's
World Series game.

You may have heard this: The World Series is back at Wrigley Field for the first time since 1945. It's apparently a big deal, and a major attraction.

So much so that Wrigleyville bars were levying $100 cover charges Friday.

Pic of the Week

The crowd waits to enter Wrigley Field in Chicago Wednesday.

The Cubs celebrated the centennial of their home field last week.

Wrigley has a different name, a different look, even a different team from when it opened in 1914 to house the Chicago Chi-Feds, a team in the Federal League.

The Federal League lasted just two seasons, 1914 and 1915, but its brief life reverberated in baseball history for years. Two obvious legacies remain: major league baseball's federal anti-trust exemption, established in a Supreme Court ruling in a case rooted in the failure of the Federal League; and Wrigley Field, which was then called Weeghman Park, for the owner of the upstart team.

The park's iconic scoreboard, its even-more iconic ivy, the bleachers — all those came decades later.

And, of course, the park is still waiting for its first World Series championship.

The year of Target Field

Most of my wife's relatives live in a fairly tight radius in Minnesota-Wisconsin north of the metro area, and my typical route when going to and from there has been to get on I-35 early and ride that freeway through Minneapolis.

Target Field, Opening Day;
It can take your breath away

I changed the route north on Christmas Eve just to get another glimpse of Target Field — 169 to 394 to 94 to 35W — and for a few moments, before the turn to the right and the plunge into the Lowry Hill Tunnel, we were headed straight for that Twins logo towering above the video board.

A good moment on that snow-ridden day. Spring will come, and baseball will return.

And I will be headed again straight for that Twins logo.

The Star Tribune's annual "Sportsperson of the Year" for 2010 was Earl Santee, the architect of Target Field, and certainly his attention to detail on that ballyard will reverberate with Minnesotans for decades to come. (The visibility of that logo to people coming into Minneapolis on that freeway is no coincidence;  it was planned.)

Conventional wisdom holds that a new ballpark attracts fans on its own for a couple of years, then the novelty aspect wears off and the locale becomes an attendance/marketing nonfactor. To which I have two words: Wrigley Field.

The Cubs sold "beautiful Wrigley Field" to their audience for generations, and they have drawn no matter how crummy the team on that ivy-covered burial ground (Steve Goodman's song lyrics). Indeed, there is a line of thought that holds that the financial disconnect between winning and ticket sales has subtly encouraged mediocrity.

I don't know that I buy that argument. I do suspect that the Twins view the way the Cubs have long promoted Wrigley Field as a model for their own marketing efforts. It will be interesting to see if their 2011 TV ads are as focused on selling Target Field as their ads of the past couple of years were.

Football and concussions in Wrigley Field

Bob Dylan described this scene in
 "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)":
Obscenity who really cares, Propaganda all is phony.

They're going to have a college football game Saturday in Wrigley Field, Illinois vs. Northwestern, the venue serving as a gimmick to get Chicagoans interested in Northwestern football.

Padding (and ads) disguised
as the iconic ivy — which
long ago succumbed
to the change in seasons.

This won't by any means be the first time the inferior sport has been played on the home grounds of the Chicago Cubs.  Wrigley was the home field for the Chicago Bears through 1970, which means the likes of Alan Page and Dick Butkus played there. I don't remember it, but apparently the gridrion was laid out differently then, and one corner of an end zone was lost to the outfield wall.

This layout keeps all of the end zone, but there's sure not much room between the back of the end zone and the right field wall. If any — the goal posts are attached to the wall itself.

It calls to mind one of the old tales of Bronko Nagurski, the football legend from International Falls, Minn. He's playing fullback for the Bears in Wrigley, the Bears have the ball near the end zone, and they give the ball to Bronko. Bronko puts his head down and runs through a suddenly gaping hole, through the end zone and —BAM — into the brick wall.

He wobbles back to the huddle: I don't know who that last guy was, but he hit me pretty good.


Anyway... if they really must play football, they shouldn't contaminate Wrigley with it.