Wrigley Field, Chicago, and the Last Inconvenience In Sports

The Cubs lost 3-0 to the Cardinals on Sunday night in the first official Major League Baseball game of the year. Beyond the existential reassurance inherent in a disappointing Cubs loss, it was a strange way to start a baseball season. The league has excelled in recent years at starting its seasons strangely, but this, thanks to the unfinished construction at Wrigley Field, was an especially strange sort of strange.

Wrigley Field is not entirely ready to host a baseball game yet. One imagines this fact would be something Major League Baseball would like to sweep under the rug, instead of unveiling anticlimactically in prime time for baseball fans to see and say "wait, whaaat?" the night before everyone else's Opening Day.

You may have heard the reports of Wrigley Field attendees pissing in their beer cups in an effort to avoid the party foul of suffering a ruptured bladder while waiting on a 45-minute bathroom line. You may have seen the makeshift Ernie Banks memorial tarps covering the exposed steel girders of the bleacher expansion project, as if last minute "oh shit, we're not gonna get this done" construction tarps could serve as a fitting memorial for anybody, let alone Mr. Cub himself. But you might not be as familiar with the Wizards of Oz insisting that you pay no attention to them from behind these desperation tarps.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is facing a runoff mayoral election today. The reasons he has been forced to fight so hard for his political life, despite every conceivable advantage, are varied. Most, though, can be reduced to a citywide sense that he treats his constituency with contempt, most notably displayed in political end-arounds he's run with public school closures and traffic cameras. Perhaps more important to Chicagoans, Emanuel has done those things with a sneer rather than the more traditional wink they've come to expect. He may still win re-election anyway.

He certainly has the money for it, and his opponent, Jesús "Chuy" García, will never be mistaken for a dynamic candidate. But long before all of this mayoral election hoopla, as is his wont when not getting his way, Rahm got into a fiery standoff with the Cubs-owning Ricketts family, without which standoff we would never have seen all these piss-filled beer cups and that lovely Ernie Banks Memorial Construction Tarp. Rahm is not going to bat for the Ricketts the way he has for DePaul University, on whose new arena Rahm is spending many millions of dollars on that could just as easily have been used on anything else.

And the Ricketts? Well they're just your basic odious corporate billionaire overlord types. Pretty much what we've come to expect from sports ownership in particular and the ownership class in general. To their credit, if that's the word for it, they seem at least to be efficient and organized at wringing money from their investments. Since their purchase of the team in 2009, they scrapped the organizational tendency to pay a premium for middling results and undertook a concerted, focused approach to low-cost rebuilding. It hasn't done anything yet, and prospects are just prospects, but it has some baseball observers very excited for the immediate future.

But baseball isn't what the Ricketts care about, really. On-the-field product enhancement is only the public face to what the Ricketts are doing with the Cubs. Smart owners know that championships operate as sort of a bonus in terms of enhanced brand identity and visibility. The real money is in real estate development. Urban sports teams surrounded by un- or underdeveloped land are, to investors, something like that gag in cartoons where one guy is hungry and the other guy turns into a steak.

It is hard even to imagine the deference a business entity that delivered a Cubs World Series title to Chicago would receive. The Ricketts' can, though, and they're already asking for it. They look out over the immediate area surrounding Clark and Addison Streets and see an ocean of money surging in with a tide of drunken frat boys. Clark Street has over the last twenty years or so evolved into Chicago's premier douche district, the to-be-avoided-at-all-costs-by-sane-natives entertainment area that every city has, a place for noxious twentysomethings to foment white privilege and rape culture under adult playground conditions. These idiots are floating dollar signs to investors as discerning as the Ricketts, and the court-stalled Wrigley Field renovations are only step one in a cashing-in process that should eventually put a serious squeeze on Clark Street's small businesses.

It seems absurd on its face that these two, Rahm and the Ricketts, are in conflict. They're both fairly obviously on Team Money, after all. But pettiness is pettiness, both sides have it in spades, and as a result Wrigley Field, of all places, is stuck in mid-Icarus ascent, like a Led Zeppelin t-shirt logo made of i-beams and large-format print shop rush jobs.

The construction/piss-cup situation brewing in Wrigley has all the aesthetic markings of the great historical what-the-fuck-was-that-about imagery that baseball sometimes offers us. Stuff like "oh yeah," and "oh yeah, Astroturf was a thing" and "as a small child I was convinced I could fall off the face of the earth if I leaned too far forward in my seat in the upper deck of Baltimore's Memorial Stadium." Like the Montreal Expos playing some home games in Puerto Rico in 2003 or a weird old highlight of a home run that lands in some cavernous '70's stadium's farther reaches, deserted but for parked school buses and some random dude in a t-shirt disinterestedly smoking a joint.

This is not waxing rhapsodic about a better, simpler time. It is waxing rhapsodic about a patently worse time, before everything was sufficiently monetized and the stakes raised, before it was in general easy or even all that nice to sit and watch baseball, when the only food was hot dogs and those hot dogs were awful. This was a simpler time only in the sense that the game's owners were too busy pulling rinky dink bullshit on the expense side of the ledger to even imagine Ricketts-grade aspirations on the revenue side.

Take a look at some old pictures of Wrigley Field, for instance this one from 1970, and see the neighboring rooftops as yet undeveloped into the parasitic luxury Cubs experience for businessmen that they've become, and you'll get a sense of where all of this is going. The old and unleveraged and generally smaller game is on its way out, slowly but surely. Even in Chicago, where as Rahm Emanuel is finding, old rinky dink bullshit is entrenched and embittered and angry as hell, and may have a thing or two to say about the good old ways and good old days before letting Rahm's value-neutral neoliberalism bleed the city dry. Even here, where the baseball stadium is old and grand and cramped and dangerous, the clock is ticking, and ticking down towards an experience much like any other, both aesthetically and in the broad thrust of its economics.

Witness, therefore, the splendor of this early season at as of now busted-ass Wrigley, and marvel at the last great inconvenience of modern major sports spectatorship as it declines before the conjoined forces of sports and money, bulldozing their way ever further into the oblivion of hissing white luxury. And if you're so inclined, vote for Chuy.