Brian Hanley "remembers" watching the White Sox at old Comiskey on a black and white TV. His first game was a Sox game and he "remembers" that the park was as drab as it was on that black and white television. He also watched Cub games on that same black and white set. But when he first went to Wrigley he was blown away by the vibrant colors and the green grass. Maybe he really believes this shit. Enough people repeat the same crap enough times, well, I guess it might as well be true. This is a perfect example of American myth-making. It's no different than the bullshit story Ke$ha keeps repeating about breaking into Prince's house. It's like the kids at Halloween getting apples with razor blades in them. If you prefer a sports analogy, it's like Bob Gibson single-handedly causing the mound top be lowered.

Anyway, I have a question for Brian Hanley: What color was the fucking grass at Comiskey Park?

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Don't take it personally.

In my case it was my grandpa's fault. He talked up Wrigley so much that when I finally went as a little kid, I was blown away. I assume if we were Sox fans he would have been talking up Comiskey and I would have felt the same way. If something is regarded as a shrine in your family, you get brainwashed as a kid. Now as an adult I realize that Wrigley is a POS and I dont understand the meatball attraction to it.

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I don't know, the first time I went to Comiskey as an 8 year old yute to watch a Wilbur Wood/Luis Tiant matchup, I was pretty fucking blown away.

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"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." ~ H.L. Mencken

It's all fantasyland bullshit. "I remember the smell of the grass". People are writing their own fictional narrative as if they lived in some concrete jungle without a flower or patch of grass anywhere and when they walked into Wrigley it was an urban oasis of truth, beauty, and GREEN GRASS. What a crock of shit!

First of all, you can hardly walk a more than a couple blocks in any direction in Chicago without running into a huge park loaded with GREEN GRASS. I'm looking out my window and there is a park with more GREEN GRASS than Wrigley has. My windows are wide open, and yet I'm not masturbating myself to the smell of it.

Second of all, the Wrigley of my youth- of Brian Hanley's youth- was in a blighted urban area where nobody really wanted to go. There were drunks in the alleys, Latin Eagles on every corner, and one any given day you might see Jimmy Woods getting a blowjob from a teenaged girl. Stop with the pointless romanticization. It's a fucking ballpark.

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Don't take it personally.

What did you like better about it?

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Don't take it personally.

As a little kid, you really thought about the bricks and ivy without anyone pointing out to you that they were supposed to be cool?

Anyway, you should like Wrigley since that's where your teams plays. I would hope if the Cubs played in Horner Park or in an airplane hangar out in Hoffman Estates, that's where you'd go to watch baseball. And I think you would. But I'm guessing many people are "fans" of the ballpark rather than the team.

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Don't take it personally.

So you are saying that the thoughts people have about the nostalgia of going to baseball games are not real?

Wasn't one of your only points on the "football vs. baseball" debate that people care a lot more about those memories?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Not to get this whole argument going, but the romantic angle of Wrigley wore off quite a while ago.

As a Cubs fan, I'd rather go to the Cell, tailgate pre-game, and head in to watch a game. Rather than drive around looking for a spot, trying to maneuver around the hordes of tourists and sitting in that dump.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "real". Obviously, people have these memories. Whether they're accurate is another question.



I haven't changed my view on that. Just because they're based on manufactured memories doesn't make the feelings less than vaild.

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Don't take it personally.

I understand what Hanley was saying. I only went to one baseball game in my youth and that was a Sox game in '85. But I grew up a Cub fan. Why? Watching the Cubs at Wrigley on TV , day games, people appearing to have fun in the bleachers, Harry Carry.

The Sox? Night games, a park that never appeared to be full (the upper deck was rarely occupied) and just as Hanley said, the park just seemed drab, dark and boring.

Except that's wrong. When Hanley was a kid, Wrigley was the park that closed the upper deck. The Sox were on a run of 17 or 18 straight teams that were better .500 and outdrew the Cubs regularly. And I can assure you that when both parks existed those who thought Wrigley was the better of the two were few and far between.

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Don't take it personally.

JORR I went to a few Sox games before I went to Wrigley.

Wrigley does have a look that is pretty awesome when you first see it.

I mean its not just Wrigley.

But are you telling me walking into Yankee Stadium or Fenway would invoke the same feelings as walking into Busch cookie cutter stadium?


The probelm is in the description.

Its not the grass.
Its the whole.

Wrigley is pleasing to the eye

Us Cellular won a W.S.

Id say US Cell wins there

Wrigley was a very cool place to sit in the daytime with the ivy on the walls and the sun shining. Beautiful.

Old Comiskey was a run down dump of a place that just felt drab and dirty.

Wrigley is/was run down also but sitting in the seats I wasn't dwelling on the disgusting-ness of the bathrooms as everything was sunny and green.

Sitting in the seats at Old Comiskey was darker, even in the daytime, and more depressing. My impressions as a yout'.

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You know me like that.

But he was talking about old Comiskey. That wasn't one of the "cookie cutter" parks. It was the "Baseball Palace of the World." When every team had an old park Fenway and Wrigley were never considered special. They were the two shittiest ones.

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Don't take it personally.

Opinions vary. I'm guessing ASFB remembers differently. I can remember smoking weed in the sunshine in the centerfield bleachers.

But here's the advertising part. You remember Comiskey as a dump and think of Wrigley as beautiful. The fact is they were/are both crumbling old dumps. But U.S. Cellular is relatively new and Wrigley is a dump in comparison by any objective measure. Yet somehow you don't see it that way. I mean Wrigley was the same, exact place when no one went there and no one cared about it in the 70s. How did it improve?

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Don't take it personally.

I don't believe this.

Old Comiskey was dark because of the low hanging upper deck that went all the way around the field. Wrigley is open to the sky/sun in the outfield.

My biggest thing that I remember being ugly about the old comiskey was the yellow railings that seemed to be everywhere, standing out against the dark green seats. Not a good look....

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They had the entire grandstand closed. About 5000 people saw Ernie hit his 500th homer. The Cubs were drawing about 600,000 per season in the mid-60s. In the SAME BALLPARK where they play now. Some years the Sox drew more. Some years the Cubs did. It wasn't until 1985 that Wrigley began to be fetishized.

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Don't take it personally.

I don't understand your point. Are you saying the green of the grass and the ivy inside the park, the brick, is a typical run-of-the-mill ballpark? Part of the allure is that it is becoming the last of its kind, the old-time ballpark.

But, so what if the Cubs market it that way? Who said the park did improve? It has but not as much as you may have liked. It is not a new, modern park with all the amenities.

Maybe it is just that the beauty of the park has been featured more in advertisements. That's smart, IMO. The ball club itself has been better on a more consistent basis. The neighborhood has improved significantly since the early 1970s. There are many reasons why people flock to that park/neighborhood to watch the games...those that don't already live there - which are many, typically younger, single people looking to do something.

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You know me like that.

This is a pretty fair assessment, spanky - I was brought to Sox games in the old park by my dad for the first few years of my baseball consciousness (he was able to get tickets through his job), and I remember the tall brick walls and the huge arches in the outfield. I know that it's kind-of lame, but Wrigley did have more of an inviting feel to it, and that's probably the best way that I can describe it. I'm not sure if that had a whole lot to do with my affinity for the Cubs, because I was just happy to be at a pro game at either park, but I can see how the venue may be more appealing from one location to the other...

[quote="Joe Orr Road Rod


They had the entire grandstand closed. About 5000 people saw Ernie hit his 500th homer. The Cubs were drawing about 600,000 per season in the mid-60s. In the SAME BALLPARK where they play now. Some years the Sox drew more. Some years the Cubs did. It wasn't until 1985 that Wrigley began to be fetishized.[/quote]

I am not questioning the attendance figures or that the Cubs had some bad seasons in terms of attendance. i am questioning the statement that most people though comiskey was the better ballpark, or in your words that people who thought Wrigley was better were few and far between.

Well, the attendance figures certainly suggest there wasn't anything considered special about it at that time. Trust me, there weren't Japanese tourists taking pictures in front of it in 1976.

But beyond that, it was just a shitty little dump. It was considered a small park with horrific concessions and very few amenities. I'm not trying to rewrite history. I'm telling you how it was. I mean, if Wrigley was so great, why would the Cubs play a World Series at Sox Park?

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Don't take it personally.

I'm not arguing against your other points, but this is a terrible point to support your argument. If the Cubs would have made the world series in 1984, MLB would have forced them to play at Comiskey because Wrigley couldn't play any night games due to the lack of lights. It had nothing to do with the condition of the park.

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JORR, as a Sox fan why do you care if Cubs fans like Wrigley better than the Cell? As a little kid I thought Wrigley was great and now I dont really give a crap where they play as long as they win. I just dont understand why it bothers you that Cubs fans have fond memories of the field where their favorite team plays.

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I don't really think they would have forced them to play there in '84. I'm talking about the one they did play there in 1918.

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Don't take it personally.

Because as a Sox fan he is obligated to have an inferiority complex when it comes to the Cubs.

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That is a very relevant point to make.

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JORR, let it go. You are Elmhurst Steveing the rest of the Sox fans on the board.

Who gives a flying fuck if anyone thinks either park is superior. Superiority of said ballparks is completely based on one's opinion, and after reading this thread, you are making it sound like you want everyone who has posted here to agree with you that the Cell is better. As a Sox fan, I agree with you. I like the Cell better. But the Phils, Douchebags, etc don't agree. Get the fuck over it and move on.

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I don't have a problem with it. I have a problem with false memories. If we can't agree on what's real, we really can't communicate. Every man is entitled to his own opinion (as dumb as some of them might be), but everyone isn't entitled to his own reality. I couldn't give a fuck if Brian Hanley preferred Wrigley to old Comiskey Park. That's not what he said. He said that Comiskey looked like it did on a black and white TV and Wrigley burst with color on the respective occasions when he first saw them. I've been to about 700 games in the two parks and the grass was never greener in one than the other. I guarantee you that's not an "opinion" Hanley formulated until years later.

It's like when Mariotti wrote that his kids preferred Wrigley to U.S. Cellular. I don't know his kids, but I believe that to be utter horseshit. I'm guessing if you took 100 kids to both parks, 99 of them are going to like the Cell better. Sure, if you spend two hours telling them why Wrigley is great and why you like it, that's going to color their view. But on their own, they're not going to feel that way. Kids don't give a fuck about bricks and ivy. They want to know about cotton candy and running around on that stupid playground the Sox have in leftfield.

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Don't take it personally.

I'm not making a Cubs/Sox argument, boyd. Forget about which team plays in which park. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm guessing I've been to far more games at Wrigley than most of the Cub fans here.

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Don't take it personally.