They should keep the organ but also incorporate music for player intros.

NO. Let's NOT have guys come out to butt-rock like they do everywhere else. I love the organ at Cubs and Hawks games.

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love bar rescue. i like when taffer sends in his trophy wife to go undercover with her tits hangin out. has anyone been to one of the chicago bars he rescued?

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Frank Coztansa wrote:
Please die in a fire.

The Onion is on it.

http://www.onionsportsnetwork.com/articles/theo-epstein-disgusted-to-find-cubs-playing-in-old,26488/

The ironic part is I agree with most of the story!

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Proud to be UNVERIFIED.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what makes the Cub so popular. It's the park. li'l danny bernstein may believe that the Cubs would be exactly the same playing in a mega-stadium in Schaumburg. They wouldn't.

This kind of post inevitably draws responses from guys saying they'd buy their season tickets if the Cubs played in Beloit. So what? I'd go see the Sox in Mokena (thought not St. Pete or Vegas). Every team has a fan base. What every team doesn't have is a steady stream of tourists standing in line to see baseball "the way it used to be played" (or at least the way the think it used to be played).

I don't know exactly what makes Wrigley Field "the best experience in baseball". It's definitely not the baseball. I think we can all agree on that. Can the rooftops be closed and the experience maintained? Maybe. Can you put ads all over the park and mainatain the special experience? Maybe. Take away the scoreboard? Maybe. But at some point it ends and the Cubs are then just another shitty team playing in another comfortable park. The Cubs aren't selling comfort. They're selling nostalgia. It isn't hard to figure out.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Matthew, Tulsi, and Don

At first they would be, maybe even bigger. But that novelty would wear off pretty quick I believe unless they won.

But I agree with this and everything else you said.

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As long as the Cubs stadium sits where Wrigley currently sits, the Cubs would still be popular. They can do whatever they want to the inside for the most part and people would still go to the games.

I'm sure the location plays a big part in things. I'm not sure that they would draw the way they do if you knocked down Wrigley and plopped U.S. Cellular Field there. But the footprint of the property is limiting anyway.

To me the cries about how a lack of skyboxes and advertsing hamstrings the Cubs ring hollow. They may not have those things that every other team is selling but they have a monopoly on something else. I would suggest that that is better. It would be like Apple whining that they can't compete because they don't have a platform supporting Flash and killing their iTunes store to develop one.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Matthew, Tulsi, and Don

Fenway was able to change/update things without losing that sort of appeal

Personally I think you could build an electronic replica of the current scoreboard and that would be fine.

Cubs should do something new and crazy.

Put the Jumbotron on the roof behind home plate. Then the rooftops could see it!

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Or just put a giant mirror up there.

Exactly. You can just create a clone frame of the old one and then right underneath it allow a spot for the Cubs game scoreboard to be hand operated. Since they don't allow ads this one wont be cluttered up like some others with all of the ads on the sides and top.

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That's my purse! I don't know you!

No. Soriano has enough trouble with the sun already.

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Mulligan and Hanley traded Dunn for Soriano this morning.


Good luck with him. You'll love his streaks and hate his strikeouts

Unfortuanately the latter happens a lot more often.

They didn't make any radical changes like replacing the hand-operated scoreboard with a jumbotron or replacing the Jimmy Fund ad with a McRib sign.

I may be a Sox fan, but I recognize the value and specialness of Wrigley at this point in time. I'm not Dave Wills. I like watching a game there.

But I also remember when I was in high school and there were 2000 people there for a Wednesday game and the grandstand was closed off, and there were Latin Eagles smoking weed in front of the L stop, and you didn't really want to park your car on the next block for fear of finding the windows smashed upon return. It was the same damn park.

My point is, I think you can appreciate something without fetishizing it. And a lot of people who are eager to knock Wrigley down in pursuit of more revenue for Tom Ricketts or a "better" (more expensive?) ballclub will lament the fact that it's gone when that finally does occur.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Matthew, Tulsi, and Don

There are definitely things about Wrigley that are crappy, however the lack of a jumbo tron is one of the best aspects. If you go to one of these modern stadiums, in between innings you have some annoying PA announcer broadcasting and screaming about the Kiss Cam, Fan Cam, Crazy Hat Cam, T shirt Cam, D Bag Cam, etc and a million advertisements.

One of my favorite parts of the Wrigley experience is being able to have a conversation with your pals between innings without having to scream to be heard over the PA announcer hawking whatever stupid "in game experience" garbage is occuring on the jumbo tron.

If I want to watch the game on TV, I'll stay home. But when I go to a ballgame I want to be able to watch the game and bullshit about the game with my pals without having to shout over the PA announcer or have obnoxious fans in my area preening to get on the fan cam.

All Wrigley needs to update are the locker rooms, the bathrooms (which I heard they did anyway) and remove the smell of beer/piss/peanuts that permeates throughout the concourse.

I agree. That's the NBA style of marketing. It worked well here, let's make all the teams do it! That isn't really working out in the NBA, is it?

One of the best games I ever attended was the Sunday Darryl Kile game. I imagine that was as close as you could get to an "old time" baseball experience.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Matthew, Tulsi, and Don

Weeds growing on the fences. Very nice

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Middle Aged Crazy, like Uncle Terry

Just build the fucking videoboard then deal with it.

"Don't ask, Just Do"

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"That's what the internet is for. Slandering others anonymously." Banky
“Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey ‘He said for you to give me your fuckin’ share.’”

I have been a Cubs fan all of my 46 years on this planet but I have said for the last 15 or so that the Cubs need to get the fuck out of Wrigley Field. Build a brand new place and start a new atmosphere. Hell, they will never tear old faithful down so play a couple series there a year. Maybe the crosstown against the Sox in June/July and another against the Cardinals or Brewers in August. Play all the rest in a new, modern ballpark. What the fuck do they have to lose by doing this? Another 103 years?

What happened so Soldier Field is what will happen to Wrigley. They will protect the landmark status by keeping the exterior the same and completely redo the interior of the stadium.

Hopefully it will not look like a spaceship landed on Wrigley Field. Of course, aliens invading Chicago is about as likely as the Cubs winning a World Series.

You can't "just build" anything when it comes to dealing with a landmark.

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They put a jumbotron up at Fenway. Not a big deal. Hope they block some of the douche bag roof tops

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Aren't the rooftops a major part of the marketing effort? I guess a good strategy is to tell people for twenty years, "THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE WRIGLEY FIELD" and then try to make it as much like every place else as possible. Brilliant!

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Matthew, Tulsi, and Don

I see no issue with a replica electonic scoreboard. It could look the same.

I think most of the people that attend games there agree Wrigley Field is special. I'm not sure exactly which components make it special and which can be altered/removed while allowing it to remain special. And I don't know if anyone else does either. What I do know is that if you keep fucking with it, at some point it won't be special any longer.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Matthew, Tulsi, and Don

I think as long as the park maintains the same look, youre fine.



As long as their is ivy on the wall, the scoreboard is green, and the buildings can be seen in the background, it stays Wrigley

Maybe, but I think every little thing matters. The quaint hand-operated scoreboard is part of the charm. I certainly don't think doing away with it will cause the park to be empty, but I do see them taking the ballpark's charm away very slowly, little by little. One day you may look up and it will just be another ballpark with another bad baseball team playing there. Unless you're under the illusion that Theo Damn Epstein is going to make it so a bad team never plays in that park again, an idea I find patently absurd.

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Matthew, Tulsi, and Don