No More Wrigley?

What’s in a name?  Would Fenway Park be as loved and cherished if all of the sudden there was a big neon sign lit up over the main gate that read “Welcome to Pepsi Park”?  There are only a handful of true baseball destinations that still exist, and among those, most are loved because of the traditionalism involved, which starts and ends with the familiarity of the stadium.  Eating a Bank of America Frank during the seventh inning stretch of a Sox game just wouldn’t be right. 

With the deconstruction of Yankee stadium scheduled to begin after this season, there’s just one other truly historic stadium besides Fenway, and its days are numbered as well.  Brace yourselves Chicago, Wrigley Field as you know it is on its death bed.  The bricks, the ivy, the bleachers, they’ll all still be there; they just won’t be part of Wrigley Field anymore.  Instead, it will be known as the Castrol GTX Ivy, or the AOL Time-Warner Bleachers, or the… well you get the point.

How can this happen, you ask?  Well, Sam Zell has decided to bleed every last penny out of the Cubs before he sells the team.  In an interview with CNBC, Zell stated that Major League Baseball has approved as many as six buyers, but he plans to sell the team and the stadium separately, and on his own time frame.

I’m not a good enough writer to describe the levels of disgust that I’m feeling right now, apart from saying that if some crazed Cubs fan attempted to assassinate Zell, I’d totally understand.  Sometimes we take sports way too serious, we put too much emphasis on stupid frivolities that at the end of the day don’t really count for anything, but the plot that’s brewing in Chicago matters. It deserves your attention.  No, it demands it.

There has to be something that can be done to stop this man from desecrating the identity of an entire region.  I’m just wonderingh, though, if this can even happen.  The sign hanging above the main gate has been deemed a landmark by the city of Chicago.  How do you go about changing the identity of this building? Zell has to realize the stakes at play here, which makes me wonder if this guy a complete moron.

You’d think after accumulating billions of dollars he’d have a little more sense, the negatively publicity that will be generated from this can’t be healed by a stack of hundreds. I can’t image that the winning bidder in this affair would come out totally clean either.  I just have a funny feeling that the idiot on camera behind home plate at the friendly confines of Wrigley Field at Alltel Stadium will be calling his buddies from a Nextel phone.  Or maybe it’s not that serious, but it should be.  If a boycott is threatened no one is going to want to associate themselves with Zell. 

My disdain for Zell aside, the issue here isn’t that a corporate sponsor is involved; it’s that the stadium is being renamed altogether. Yankee Stadium is set to come down after this season, and the new building will be named… drumroll please…. Yankee Stadium.  Some things should never change.  Ever.  It’s bad enough that they are tearing down the house that Ruth Built and relocating it, but at least they have a sense of history and enough decency to respect the past.  As for Zell, well he wants to desecrate the historic spot where Ruth hit his legendary called shot.  What a disgrace.

Here’s to hoping that Mark Cuban swoops in with his cape and saves the day…