Warren Newson wrote:
They were leaning ino the "no public money for a White Sox stadium" thing in a very hard and self-righteous fashion. The only problem, at least when I was listening, was they couldn't find a stupid caller to disagree with them. You can only sustain the whole self-righteous chest thumping thing when you have some opposition.
I think a few things make that opposition hard to find. First of all, we're not blind, we can see that the economy is bad and Chicago is not what it was five years ago, and that there are better allocations of limited resources than building a new park for the Sox. Then there's the fact that with the aging demographics of the Score listenership being what they are, New Comiskey opened in their lifetimes. (It opened in
my lifetime, albeit when I was in preschool.) When you consider the work that's gone into Wrigley and the United Center--not to mention Comiskey itself!--I think there's an expectation that we build these places to last. Chicago knocks stuff down and builds new stuff all the time, but we don't have that culture of impermanence that's in, say, Atlanta or Dallas.
The other part, and maybe this is kind of a reach, is that part of the crosstown rivalry from the Sox side has always been that dumb rubes think Wrigley Field is the superior venue when the actual thinking man's fans of the Sox know that Comiskey is better thanks to its easy expressway access, ample parking, delicious concessions, open concourses, lack of piss troughs, and crap for kids to do. To renounce all that and say "no, this place sucks, the location blows, the seats are bad, bathrooms could be better, gotta throw it out and start all over" undermines an entire round of that pissing match. The harshest criticism I've heard from Sox fans, other than delusional ones who think the team should move to Crystal Lake or something, has been that you can't see the skyline. No self-respecting Sox fan is gonna call the Score and demand a brand-new stadium with more expensive tickets and more expensive parking so they can gawk at a skyline.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.