For I the lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. –Exodus 20:5
Of course we were in Baltimore, revisiting Oriole Park at Camden Yards and reconsidering the way things are and might have been. The Sox were at the new Comiskey, playing in front of their dwindling faithful.
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The new Comiskey, opened in 1991, was again a ballpark built with an eye for cutting corners. But again it was such an initial success that it prompted other cities to follow suit, all of them setting out to surpass the new model. Oriole Park in Baltimore and Coors Field in Denver are both lovely, traditional-minded, but utterly contemporary baseball stadia, and we have also heard grand things about Jacobs Field in Cleveland and the Ballpark at Arlington, Texas. They have made the new Comiskey seem shabby, and the new Comiskey has little of the moldy charm the old Comiskey had to make up for it.
Last Sunday, we went out to Wrigley Field, where the Cubs, square on the season at 67-67 and with little legitimate hope for a wild-card finish, were playing the defending-champion Atlanta Braves. Again the weather was hot but pleasant, Wrigley sat nestled in its “neighborhood of baseball,” with our old apartment across the street, the game well attended on that and other rooftops, and with the other buildings nearby and the lakefront high-rises in the distance and, beyond them, the lake and the sailboats and the pumping stations and the horizon. The Cubs may not have much chance of making the playoffs but we felt it was the place to be, and we were rewarded with a 2-1, 12-inning victory over the Braves.
We remember how public funding for the stadium was the product of Reinsdorf threatening to move the team. How he insisted on three levels of skyboxes with prime locations, the better to milk the city’s numerous corporations. How the friendly neighborhood bar McCuddy’s, promised a spot near the new park, was torn down and never welcomed back. How hard-liner Reinsdorf fomented and then pressed the 1994 strike, and how he continues to fight against a settlement. (If Reinsdorf, as he claims, isn’t opposed to a settlement, why isn’t he doing more to fight for it?)
