The Simmons Site

"But to fill a stadium you need more than that. You need to build and nurture a place that's an actual place. A place that celebrates not just a team but a city — and a city's refusal to plow the past under. Wrigley is the ultimate neighborhood stadium, the ultimate urban stadium, the ultimate statement that some semblance of tradition is more important than the money you could make with a hundred new skyboxes in some spectacularly soulless new stadium (sorry, White Sox). If the place is an actual place, little else matters. Owners should take note of the strange, almost inverted model of capitalism at play here. By not building a new stadium, the Cubs have filled the seats for 100 years. By not relocating it 50 miles outside Chicago, the Cubs have inspired fierce loyalty in its fans and the city. And by allowing the neighborhood to help shape it, and even profit from it, everybody wins.

Even if the Cubs never do."

I mean, that's just sort of undeniably good, right? Perhaps not to a grizzled Cubs fan, but to a national audience, which Grantland has, that paragraph should register as incisive, thoughtful, and well-written. In fact, a paragraph like that, and the piece preceding it, is, I think, exactly why Grantland exists. And why we, as lovers of good writing or at least the aspiration to such, should be happy that it does.

 

Except the Cubs didn't fill it for 100 years.

They had a lot of terrible attendance years. Even this year, there are lots of empty seats.

It was only as other older stadiums began to be replaced that Wrigley became a nostalgic place that everyone wanted to go.

The game day experience is great, but the actual stadium is a dump. Tribune let the building fall apart. They could have maintained it. They could have bought up buildings in the area. But they didn't.

The fact that people now want to go to Wrigley is not the result of some brilliant marketing plan.

People want to skip work and drink beer outside on a warm day. If there's a baseball game going on and they claim that they were entertaining clients, all the better.

 

That would sell a lot better to a national audience than Chicagoans. Not sure what that says about its validity.

By the way, the Cubs have not filled the seats for 100 years. The cult phenomenon started in the mid-80s. I grew up going to Cubs games in the Bill Buckner-Ivan DeJesus days, and most of the time, I could have switched seats every pitch for 23 innings. And if we're going to talk about the power of place, the loyalty is more to the idealized notion of Wrigleyville, with the stadium as its center, than the stadium itself.

The experience of going to a Cubs game is, overall, a better experience than going to a White Sox game. But that's because Cubs baseball is the background music for people who believe meta bullshit like this:

If the place is an actual place, little else matters.

Ugh.

 

I guess, as a Boston native, I'm kind of projecting my feelings for Fenway Park onto Eggers' piece. The idea of a stadium as a true place, and not just a building where games occasionally happen, resonated. And I'd say that certainly factors into Fenway's popularity, along with the obvious nostalgia. You can't say the same about, for example, the TD Garden - though you definitely could've about the Old Garden, dump that it was.

 

People have been writing about Wrigley's gestalt for a quarter century, at least. This is trodden ground, no matter how artful it is.

 

Yeah, I mean, of course. But artful is a step in the right direction for Grantland, isn't it? At very least it offers promise.

 

I was pretty preset to dislike it, LJB, but I can't fault it too much right now.

If they can turn out this number of reading options daily, this is superb. Don't like how they wrote the Wrigley piece? There'll probably be two other columns you will like.

 

From a mass audience standpoint, Wrigley is a good topic. But I'm thinking of a Jones footnote. Writing about Wrigley is like profiling the lead singer of a band, when the out-of-place drummer is almost certainly the better story.

 

Will those be about sports?

 

Yes. From what I'm seeing so far, yes. But I was wrong before.

 

I'll try to keep an open mind.

But this is already like the drunk guy at the party who is talking way too much about boring and trite stuff, and pretty soon all you can see is his lips moving with all other sound blocked out, praying for him to stop talking. If I don't want to read about Simmons' life, I sure as hell don't want to read about his pop's.

 

This guy agrees.