Say your friend has a restaurant, one he has owned for 40-some years. It’s in a neighborhood that’s in play among younger people because of reasonable real estate prices and proximity to downtown. The food, though, is poor and the service mediocre, and your friend at times seems indifferent to, if not clueless about, those problems. Yet he can’t understand why the place doesn’t do better and tends to blame the customers for not coming
There’s talk of a spiffy new neighborhood taking shape in an abandoned rail yard roughly 2 miles away, designed to attract trendy types with money. Boy, would business take off if he could relocate there.
And by the way, how about some public money — $1 billion or so — to build this new place? Or a bigger slice of a hotel tax that threatens to drive away business if it gets much steeper?
The analogy came to mind with the news of Jerry Reinsdorf’s latest public money grab for a new home for his Chicago White Sox. They’re a poorly run franchise that is not playing good baseball and not drawing fans, sponsorships or broadcast income. Reinsdorf doesn’t seem to get the correlation. It’s Major League Baseball, he believes, so come support it, as if we’re duty-bound.
I don’t mean to sound like a get-off-my-lawn grump, Mr. Chairman, but I’m not seeing it. And I rather like baseball.
New Comiskey, U.S. Cellular Field, Guaranteed Rate Field . . . by whatever name, the ballpark where the White Sox play is 33 years old, which makes it the fourth-oldest in the American League behind Fenway Park, Angels Stadium and the soon-to-be extinct Oakland Coliseum.
But there’s nothing wrong with it that a competitive, interesting team wouldn’t fix. Between the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority and the “Sodfather” Roger Bossard, the park is comfortable and well maintained. The ISFA gets a save for lopping eight rows off the acrophobia-inducing upper deck and partially covering it 20 years ago.
The food is good and varied, there’s easy access via the el or Metra, and the old saw about Bridgeport being a “dangerous” place is an outdated red herring, though it would be helpful if someone in the know came clean about what really happened to the woman who was shot while seated in the left field grandstand last August.
Comparisons with Wrigley Field are unfair and unavoidable, particularly among those genetically suspicious Sox fans who believe the baseball world has it in for them.
For all the Ricketts family upgrades, Wrigley retains its charm and remains a must-see shrine to baseball, thanks in part to shrewd marketing in the days when the park was a better draw than the ball team. “The Rate,” “the Cell,” “Sox Park” — whatever you want to call it, it has none of that allure. And the surrounding area will never be a year-round funhouse like Wrigleyville thanks to a demand for acres of parking that sit there desolate as the Siberian steppes all winter or when the Sox are on the road.
Reinsdorf groused that “we didn’t crack the 3 million (attendance) mark” when they won the World Series in 2005. True — the Sox drew 2,342,833, or 28,924 fans per home game.
But attendance momentum builds off a championship and kicks in the following year. The Sox drew 2,957,414 in 2006 — 36,511 per game — and likely would have surpassed 3 million if they hadn’t spit the bit after the All-Star Game and gone 33-40.
You could call it the start of a downward spiral. The Sox have made just three playoff appearances in the 18 years since the baseball gods embraced them in 2005, losing all three series and winning just three games. Too often they’ve cursed themselves with baseball’s double whammy — bad and boring.
And Reinsdorf blames the fans for staying home, then cans a broadcaster who at least made the television experience palatable, his worst decision since the exhumation of Tony La Russa. And for this he deserves a new ballpark?
Try putting a winning, entertaining team on the field, Mr. Chairman. It works wonders.
Meanwhile, street crime is perceived as out of control in Chicago, and even if the perception is overstated, it is out there nonetheless. There are homeless people everywhere, a migrant population in desperate need of lodging and assimilation, chewed-up streets that are borderline impassable and symbolic of a decaying infrastructure.
That’s where our tax dollars should be going, not to a new ballpark for a billionaire with a suspect track record and a deep-seated aversion to spending his own money.
And I love baseball.
Speak Your Mind