A local columnist brought his son to Wrigley Field in late September not to watch lousy baseball but to have his son experience Wrigley Field before its jumbotronic advertising make-over.
Which leads to an interesting point. How many baseball purists come to Wrigley Field because Wrigley is a time machine to the golden age of baseball a century ago?
It may be more than one thinks.
There was quite the uproar when Ricketts took out the RF seats to create his own "mini-Green Monster" wall and party deck. It still must sting in criticism because if you notice during Cub broadcasts, the cameras do not pan into the RF corner to show this change in architecture.
And that RF project was out of character for the ball park. To some, it is a hideous boil on the face of the franchise.
And now, new signage and a huge electronic scoreboard has been approved for LF and RF. It will be a dramatic change from the current sight lines of most fans in the inner bowl. It will also clash with the iconic manual CF scoreboard (which begs the question, what will it be used for when you have a jumbotron three times larger in LF?)
Ricketts gets quite upset when people criticize his Wrigley rehab plans. "I'm not running a museum," is his favorite counter-punch. But in reality, he is running a museum called Wrigley Field. He sells guided tours before the games. The Cub fan base grew up with the old charm of a historic landmark. Many came to games because they were played at their Wrigley Field.
But that is all about to change.
In the next two years we will find out how much of the Cub ticket buyers were coming out to the park just to go to Wrigley Field for a day to soak up its history rather than watching bad baseball. Attendance declines may accelerate in proportion to the changes inside Wrigley Field.
Ownership claims that it needs these drastic changes into order to get new revenue streams in order to field a competitive team. But after tanking two seasons and gutting the old ball park, the purists may find no reason to return even if the Cubs turn around their losing ways.
