8/16. Game time- 7:05 PM
Attendance: 36,814
Weather: 77 degrees, partly cloudy
Matchup: San Diego Padres at Chicago Cubs
Pitchers: Kevin Correia vs. Tom Gorzelanny
Result: SD 9, CHC 5, W- Correia (10-7) L- Gorzelanny (6-7)
Ticket Purchased: Upper reserve outfield- $29.25 including fees
Beer of choice: Choice? What’s that? Budweiser 16 oz. – $8
Food: None
Travel cost: $5.75 for a Metrorail All Day Pass
Other: None
Total spent: $43

If you’re a true baseball fan, and you’re self-sufficient enough to foot the bill, you’ve probably already seen Wrigley Field at least once. If you were lucky, it was a day game, which in the baseball world is an almost transcendent experience. If you haven’t, you’re missing out. It’s the complete opposite of the Cowboys Stadium experience. It’s not showy or flashy. It’s pure. It anchors a community. Even with the redone bleachers and the addition of electronic signage, that purity hasn’t been lost.

Wrigley’s pleasures are not evident at first glance from outside. The exterior treatment is bland gray with metal fences and little color to accent it other than green beams. The red marquee is its most distinguishing feature. It’s funny that the two surviving old ballparks, Wrigley and Fenway, are not known for the façades or exteriors. Everything fans love about them is on the inside.

Getting there

For the love of everything holy, do not drive to Wrigley. If you must drive, head over to the DeVry University parking lot, which is 2 miles west of the ballpark. Parking is $6 and the Cubs operate a free shuttle to ferry everyone to and from Wrigley. Or instead of driving, take the “L” Red Line to the Addison stop and walk one block west with the streaming throng of Cubs faithful. The Red Line runs north-south from near Evanston to the Washington Heights, past US Cellular Field and the Loop downtown. Fares are $2.25 each way, or $5.75 for an all-day pass. For an even cooler experience, head down to Wrigleyville well before the game. Several sports bars and pubs call the area home, including Cubby Bear and Goose Island.

Ticketing

The Cubs have a perverse ticketing system that chooses to penalize people who want to sit in what are supposed to be some of the worst seats in baseball: the bleachers. Yes, the bleachers feel more like a crowd at a high school football game hanging out instead regular baseball bleacher bums. If you really want that, though, why not just go to a high school football game? It’ll be a lot cheaper than the 40 bones you’ll shell out for a bleacher ticket. Even with that $40, you’re still shut out of the rest of the park, and vice-versa. I’ve sat in the bleachers once, 14 years ago, for a day game. Marvelous. Also, $16, still overpriced but not grotesquely so. Things really didn’t get out of hand until a couple of years later, when the Sosa-McGwire saga brought fans back from the strike.

I got a $20 Upper Reserved seat along the first base side, half way up. The upper deck is split into two parts, box upfront and reserved in back. Some of the UR seats are truly obstructed view, whereas other seats behind them will also have obstructed views yet not be marked as such. Should the Wolff/360 vision for Cisco Field move forward, view obstructing columns will be a source of great debate. Many, perhaps most, will feel that there is no place for columns in a modern ballpark with modern building and engineering techniques. Some purists argue that fans in new ballparks are too far back from the action, so the use of columns to bring them closer is a welcome change.

In reality, there may be a much more banal reason for the introduction of columns: cost. If you look at the picture of one of the columns from the new Busch Stadium and compare it to one at Wrigley, the difference seems exponential. Wrigley relies and columns and a spiderweb of truss work to hold up the roof and upper deck. 100 years later and beefy I-beams are responsible for doing the lifting. Updated building code requires materials that can handle substantial earthquakes, but I suspect that in going with columns the team will save millions on structural steel, hopefully not so much as it will appear that they are cutting corners.

Concessions

I took one look at the lines and passed. As I always do here. I’d prefer to, I don’t know, not waste half the game in line for a hot dog. Instead, I waited in my seat for a beer vendor, who poured my a 16-ounce Bud for $8. Food variety has apparently improved over the years, and now there is a restaurant in the batter’s eye and a club area sponsored by PNC Bank (this is starting to become a theme).

Circulation

Ramps, ramps, and more ramps. Want to get to the upper deck? Take a series of ramps. Need food? Take a ramp. Potty break? Ramp. At first, it may seem like you’re in a M.C. Escher drawing, but after a while it starts to make sense. One thing that gets lost is that there is only one full concourse at Wrigley. Ramps connecting to the upper deck do not a concourse make. There is a small area behind the plate along the upper level with two concession stands and some carts. That’s it. And as the Cubs pursued even more revenue with the bleacher rebuild, they still didn’t make it possible to walk all the way around the ballpark from the inside.

Other observations

• There is an in-game display below the old hand-operated scoreboard, though it only shows the batter and ads. LED displays are now down the lines. The display down the 1B line is longer and shows all pertinent in-game info, whereas the opposite display only serves up ads.
• The batter’s eye is not as bad as I thought it would look in person, but it serves to highlight how way off the dimension markers in the park are. The 400 feet sign is well into right-center.
• Generally when the Cubs suck, as they do this year, fans only stick around until the 7th inning stretch (and the guest rendition of “Take Me Out To The Ballgame”) are done. This night was no exception.
• I snuck down to the front row of the upper deck by the 5th inning. From that vantage point, columns are welcome at Cisco Field.

Wrap-up

As much history and character Wrigley has, perhaps the best thing that could be said about it may be that it’s not going anywhere. When the Cubs were up for sale, there was talk of decoupling the team from stadium, mostly for financial reasons. Thankfully, it is part of the price Tom Ricketts paid for the team. So if you haven’t gone to Wrigley yet, there’s plenty of time.