“There are many reasons given for the fan apathy surrounding the Sox this season,” sports columnist Ted Cox writes (September 6). Among the reasons he considered, an amalgam of the fans’ contempt for the club’s current regime of owners, the numbing sense that whatever this is, it ain’t baseball that the joint causes in all but the shallowest of “fans,” and the fans’ memory of how the Sox threatened franchise removal to get the new stadium built at the taxpayers’ expense came nearest the truth.
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The new Comiskey Park represents the last of that generation of really lousy stadium design that began with the new California franchises back in the early 60s (don’t anybody try to tell me that Dodgers Stadium is a good ballpark), and that we find best exemplified (or worst exemplified, if you think about it) in those multi-use bowls that are already decaying in places such as Pittsburgh and in Houston’s Astrodome. The new Comiskey was delivered into this world DOA. Cox was right: Everything that’s wrong with U.S. society (from my perspective anyway) is “manifested in the new Comiskey Park.”
Personally, I dream of a day when none of the sports world’s stadiums could be filled, even if they gave the tickets away.
