The Knothole, New Bleachers, and More

Many of us are proud of certain papers we wrote in college: the ones we poured our heart as well as our mind into, or the ones we feel like we had fun with, or the ones in which we feel like we got away with something. Sometimes they’re the same paper. In a humanities honors class (not to try to sound haughty or highbrow), on the subject of reality, I wrote a paper comparing and contrasting Playboy magazine, and its version of (airbrushed) reality with the way that reality is captured by cartoons like the Simpsons and South Park. It wasn’t a bad paper, and I spent more time on it than many other things I wrote, especially since it was only a 7-pager, probably only about 2,000 words. I remember that paper, and I liked to tell the story about getting away with writing it on an unlikely topic.

My older brother remembers a paper he wrote for a symposium, for which the class title was “Sacred Spaces.” His final paper was on Wrigley Field, and he got an A from a professor not generous with awarding them. I’ve never read it, but I have a feeling I know what he might have written in some sense, because we share in the belief that belies the argument: Wrigley Field is in fact sacrosanct. The recent chatter -- on Bleed Cubbie Blue, for example, which refers to Paul Sullivan’s column in the Chicago Tribune -- about bleacher reconstruction and the knothole got me thinking about some of this stuff, namely reality, perception, and sanctity. This happens when people fear that something we care about is threatened.

Here’s what sacrosanct is: It’s the red marquis. It’s the white flag. It’s the old green scoreboard, with the old clock. It’s the press booth. It’s the bricks, and the ivy. It’s the north shore skyline behind it, or even the lake. It’s the view of a curveball snapping towards the catcher from the left-center bleachers. It’s the way that all of a sudden you’re next to Wrigley on the Red Line, or walking on Clark Street, when a block away you couldn’t even see it.

Sacrosanct... sacred... sanctified... inviolable? That’s the question.

What’s odd about the knothole is that it’s almost like they’re trying to make Wrigley Field more sacred, when normally we don’t think about such things in degrees except in cases of degradation. The knothole is obviously trying to appeal to an older time, a nostalgic way of stoking collective memories about children sneaking and peeking into ballparks. Let’s face it: these days, conjuring a feeling of nostalgia equals money. As Thomas Mann told Ray Kinsella:

They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway, not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. "Of course, we won't mind if you have a look around," you'll say. "It's only twenty dollars per person." They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it; for it is money they have and peace they lack.

It’s not always a bad thing, this marketing of nostalgia, or at least it’s not always unequivocally bad. The peace and fondness for the world that exists entangled with our better memories is worth channeling, by whatever means work. In an era when we are very prone to equate new, fresh and cutting edge with quality, it is important for art and artful things to remind us of the past, and our traditions. (Dare I say ‘values?’)

It’s just that in this case, I’m not even concerned about the targets of criticism regarding the project. I’m concerned with the criticism of the best-case scenario. The other criticisms make sense: it might be a nuisance for the city to deal with, as people try to line up or fight over the knothole view, etc. and so forth. Still, even in its best incarnation, with its dreamiest results, the question that remains for me is this: does Wrigley Field need such an improvement? Or more, is improving Wrigley Field (other than structural soundness) even possible?

Will the knothole actually help us revisit fond collective memories of earlier eras of baseball, and moreover of earlier eras of innocence, or will it just be conspicuously a gimmick, reminding us that even Wrigley Field cannot achieve its own mythic status as this status exists in our minds?

It’s at this point that the voice of reason kicks in, saying, “Hold on there buster. Let’s not go overboard, OK? It’s just a baseball stadium, even if it is the best baseball stadium in the world.” Fair enough.

Or maybe not fair enough. Maybe Wrigley Field is home to an altar, a window to the deepest cosmos. Maybe it’s a place where one can occasionally experience the best of what’s possible in this world, or at least perceive what this joy and wonder might look like. If that’s too much, maybe it is important enough that if it were to be destroyed, life would not go on in the same way for some of us. Maybe just its presence in the world is a source of comfort to those of us with memories and imaginations tied to our experiences there.

I don’t know. I’m babbling. Obviously.

Here I guess is the strongest argument: the soul of Wrigley Field is the soul of the people who come there, and if they’re changing the latter, they’re changing the former. It’s the communion of a people, a place and a time. The place is changing regardless of how we feel about it; I guess only time will tell whether the new bleacher seats and the new campus and the knothole and whatever else are damaging the essence or identify of the stadium. The time will come as it comes either way; opening day will arrive, and so will the end of September. What matters, then, is the people.

My inclination is that the souls of baseball fans – and Cub fans in particular – are awful resilient, and these changes will just be changes, not better, not worse. And for the young fans who will not know what it used to be like, this, too, is not to say that they’ll know a better Wrigley, or a worse Wrigley, only a different Wrigley. And when they play a World Series in Wrigley Field, we’ll all forget either way.

The sacredness and sanctity of Wrigley Field is not tied only to the old bleachers, or the old right field wall, or any other part of its structure. The stadium became revered because of the players and events inside it, and because of the witnesses to those events. It takes all three, but there’s only one area we can really influence, and that’s our own attitude.

As for me, I don’t know that they’re improving Wrigley Field and they might be pandering to a group of people who do not deserve pandering, but when I’m next in Wrigley, I’m not going to let that distract me.