McDonald's isn't a sore subject with me. Brick and I just disagree on why he loves it so much. Hell, he won't even admit he's lovin' it!

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Don't take it personally.

i dont know, maybe he is douche and hates the Sox for no reason so Comiskey had to be awful for him to be in...

I think the groundskeeper at Wrigley in 68 only had 3 fingers on one hand and he let my father in on an off day but lost his job because of it and had to move to NYC.

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Cool...

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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!

I can't find the link...you may be shocked to learn that the search function doesn't work....but you also probably don't want to mention Scottie Pippen's legacy or Baseball's popularity compared to Football's popularity.

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Don't forget the one about stolen bases...

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Joe, why can't it be that you are the one who isn't remembering it right and Comiskey was a dump of a place with the ugly green walls and funky seat/railing colors, the upper deck closing you up like a tomb while those light tower shadows covered the field?

Do you often tell people that their wives aren't good-looking also? Dude can think what he wants about her but I'm gonna tell him how it is. People's opinions are their own, Joe. You can't really win an argument one way or the other.

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You know me like that.

As a matter of fact, Doc, that kind of is how I remember Comiskey Park. Just because I'm a Sox fan I'm not going to tell you I levitated ten feet and blew my load when I walked inside the place. My memories there are my own. I'm not trying to convince you or Brian Hanley how great the place was to me.

We all know beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My argument is not with people who think Wrigley is great. It's more about the phony reasons why some of them supposedly think it's great. If you tell me that on a gorgeous Saturday in July of '87 you drank a hundred beers there, saw Andre Dawson make a great catch, got a handjob from Seka in the bleachers and then went across the street to Sports Corner where you met your future wife, and that's why you love Wrigley and think it's the best ballpark in the world, I'm not going to argue with you.

But that's not what I'm talking about. Comiskey Park didn't look the same in real life as it did on a 16" black and white Zenith. And Wrigley wasn't some lone patch of grass bursting with colors in an otherwise urban jungle of gray concrete. That's just unnecessary romanticizing. I'm sure there are enough reasons top like the place that you don't need to make more up. Isn't that fair?

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Don't take it personally.

Same color as the infield at Clemente High School.

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Change Saturday to Friday, adjust it by about 10 years and lose the part about the handjob and you got it pretty much 100% correct.

Scary.

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You know me like that.

Old Comiskey was enclosed with the arches and the upper deck in the OF, notice how even US Taxpayer park has no upper deck bleachers??? Most new places dont have it or it is always more open in the OF.

Comiskey had the shades of light that came through the arches that Josh Gibson used to hit 600+ ft homeruns though

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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.’”

And Mr. reason can give us a firsthand account.

JORR keeps talking about people's childhood memories of the parks, but a lot of the people posting here had childhoods in different eras.

I was born in '82; my earliest strong baseball memories are from the '89 Cubs division winning season. My parents weren't fans of either team - I got into the Cubs from watching them on WGN after school.

I probably only went to Old Comiskey once, but I was upset that they tore it down just because I thought it was cool that Chicago had the 1st and 3rd oldest barkparks at the time. My early memory of New Comiskey was being in that scary-steep upper deck. I wasn't particularly enthralled by any of the kid-centric attractions they had, (except for getting a '94 Michael Jordan promo baseball card that featured his stats if you converted them from basketball to baseball stats).

In my childhood's era at Wrigley, it DID always draw more fans than Comiskey (except for a couple years). I thought it was cool that you could watch a game from an apartment across the street (back when they just set up folding chairs). I thought it was cool that kids stood on the sidewalk outside the stadium and tried to catch home runs. I didn't know that the neighborhood used to be a dump - I thought it was cool that there were always people milling around outside for day games, even the firemen across the street. I thought it was cool that the only ads were on the adjacent buildings. I liked the scoreboard and wanted to go inside it. I thought it was cool that they played mostly day games, it fits the old fashioned fantasy of a kid playing hooky from school to see a game, or just kids traveling to the park without their parents in the summer, or even being able to stay up for a game on TV because it doesn't end at 10pm. I didn't like the trough urinals as a kid, although I got over it as I got older - it does cut down on waiting lines.

First of all, I specifically addressed a statement made by Brian Hanley who attended his first game right around the same time I attended mine.

But I think you may be post-remembering too. If you were born in '82 I'm not sure you could have your own memories of a few guys setting up folding chairs on the rooftops. I can't say for sure, but I think by the time you were about ten or so we had already entered the era of the rooftop clubs, although the weren't quite as elaborate as they have since become.

Also, your description of "kids catching balls in the street", while charming, is not exactly true. Most "ballhawks" are full grown idiots who would go to great lengths to knock down a child in their relentless pursuit of batting practice homers off the bats of such stalwarts as Mitch Webster and Luis Salazar.

Finally, did you really consider the attendance as a factor in your enjoyment? I would guess a kid really starts to know what's going on with the game at about nine or ten and during that period for you the Sox were drawing more than the Cubs.

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Don't take it personally.