Crumpled Notebook

Wrigley Field.

What can’t you say about Wrigley Field? Wrigley opened in 1914, so it’s about 6 years shy of a century old. Wow. I have plenty of pictures to come, but I’m having trouble uploading tonight. I won’t list out all the pros/cons of Wrigley. It’s a great park. I haven’t been to Fenway yet, but as far as baseball atmosphere goes, Wrigley would be tough to beat. It’s a small park. I love the bleachers on top of the buildings surrounding it. It is old. There is nothing fancy about it. No escalators. It’s not particularly clean. If there was anything I didn’t like about it, I have to say I miss the video screen. They have an old school outfield scoreboard. It’s electronic, but looks like a manual one. However, the scores for the other games going on is manual, which is pretty much awesome. But, like I said, I do miss the big screen replays. What can I say? I’m spoiled. Suffice to say though, the Ivy, the bleachers, the fans, Wrigleyville, and everything else more than makes up for that one thing.

Best ballpark, I’ll buy that. Nicest, not a chance, but who ever said those two things went hand-in-hand.

So, I’m going to break my trip stuff up into several posts. I’ll do the baseball stuff tonight (Chicago teams anyway). So, we’ll start with US Cellular and the White Sox.

Here are the things I liked about US Cellular:

Heated bathrooms
Easy to get in/out of
View of city if coming in from the El
Great at blocking the wind inside the stadium
Great intro video (here’s a video of it here someone else did. I might have one too).

Here is what I didn’t like:

The food in the place smelled horrible!
Fireworks during the day, pre-game, seemed a waste. You couldn’t see them.
No real view from the park.
Grass was only decent.
Seats were average (and over priced)
It was empty!

Here is the main thing about US Cellular Field. It’s an okay park. It’s not crappy. It’s not that old (about 17 years). It has decent seats. It’s decently clean. But that’s the thing. It’s only decent. There is nothing special about it that stands out to me. It has no character and that is boring.

White Sox won their game against the Twins though. So that was good. After game one, Home Team 1–Visitors 0.