Entries associated with the tag "Wrigley Field":

Common ownership has never been any guarantee that the Tribune would break the big stories about the Cubs and Wrigley Field. On Tuesday the Tribune got scooped on the Tribune Company's decision to blow off the deal former governor James Thompson had come up with for the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority to buy Wrigley and make lots of improvements there without charging taxpayers a dime. The magic wand was going to be a brand-new financial instrument called "equity seat rights."

"This plan violates so many rules that the parties have to live under, it doesn't even get to first base." an unnamed source said in Fran Spielman and David Roeder's story, whose headline, "ZELL NO," took over the front page of the Sun-Times. Sam Zell might be wondering why his flagship newspaper wasn't first with the news about the company ball park, but he probably isn't -- Spielman and Roeder relied entirely on unnamed sources, and Zell surely knows perfectly well which of his people did their talking to the Sun-Times and why. (If he doesn't, Cubs chairman Crane Kenney might be able to edify him.)

At any rate, the Tribune got in the game later in the day on its Web site, posting a piece by financial writer Jim Kirk. Catch-up is never fun, and the way the Tribune backhandedly acknowledged being scooped was to pretend the competition got it wrong. Said the Tribune: "Thompson, throwing cold water on a report in the Sun-Times this morning that a deal with the state was dead, said that ISFA is still negotiating with Tribune Co." Thompson was quoted as saying he'd get back to Zell and talk some more.

Whatever. Thompson put together an offer and Zell turned it down. And now -- the Sun-Times flatly reports and the Tribune strongly suggests -- the Tribune Company intends to try to sell the Cubs and Wrigley Field privately as a package.

As someone said in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." So there isn't much time to get this right. The legend of Katie Hamilton is closing fast.

Hamilton is the Tribune intern who starred in the take-that-Sam-Zell video that recently won a Sun-Times contest. After the Sun-Times ran a big story singing her praises, the Tribune gleefully revealed what was up. I posted an item on this blog trying to give credit to the actual schemers behind the caper, John Kass did the same thing and went into more detail in his Tribune column, and there were other efforts here and there to tell the tale and get the facts right. But on Sunday America's paper of record, the New York Times, ran a short piece in its baseball preview section (but not posted online, apparently) that said:

"With Sam Zell flirting with a new name for Wrigley Field, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a contest encouraging fans to produce music videos in protest. The winner was Katie Hamilton, a student at the University of Illinois and a Chicago Tribune intern, who rewrote the lyrics to the 1984 Twisted Sister anthem, 'We're Not Gonna Take It.'" 

I guess this is what we all want to believe, and in the long run it may be what we all will. Says Hamilton, "That's definitely how it's come across -- that I concocted it and I ran with it. I wish I had." By her own admission, Hamilton didn't write a word -- "and I feel kind of bad because it's my face on the thing and it's Kevin who put together the gang." That's feature writer Kevin Pang, who by Hamilton's account got together with reporter James Janega and some other Tribune musical talent "and jammed and came up with the lyrics."

Hamilton was chosen to front the stunt because nobody at the Sun-Times would know who she was, and when you watch the video you'll see her happily strutting her stuff in front of the camera. "It was awesome," she says. No legend's necessary.

Rick Morrissey has taken the pledge. "It's probably inevitable that naming rights will be sold," he e-mailed me about Wrigley Field, "but I guarantee fans will always call it Wrigley. And, yes, I would refer to it as only Wrigley in print."

That's a dramatic promise, for two reasons. First of all, the ballpark's owner, Sam Zell, is his boss. Zell likes to make his money hand over fist, and he thinks he can make a ton of it by selling naming rights. Morrissey's not paddling his corporate oar when he swears never to use the new name regardless. Other columnists are shaking a fist at Zell. Will they make the same promise?

I contacted Morrissey because his February 29 column, in which he asserted that the idea a  corporation can "plunk down $50 million a year [and] erase the very mention of Wrigley" is not only "silly, it is delusional" left me touched but skeptical. Morrissey went on, "Buying naming rights to Wrigley is like buying naming rights to the sun. The romantics who are in an uproar about a possible name change need to save their indignation for something that matters. . . . It always will be Wrigley." 

But only if sportswriters continue to call it Wrigley. If they cave the fans will cave.

Which brings us to reason two. Journalists are expected to report the world as it is even if they don't like how it is. I mean, how can we be sure they got the score right if they didn't get the ballpark right? I'm not about to read the code of ethics out loud to Morrissey. I'm just saying . . .

Anyway, five years ago, the White Sox sent a flack out to read a press release to reporters. Owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn were nowhere in sight. "Comiskey Park's good name was being sold for $68 million over 20 years," Morrissey wrote then. "Comiskey Park was now U.S. Cellular Field. U.S. Sell-Your-Soul Field. . . . In a truly amazing example of the past being dynamited, the three-page press release did not mention Comiskey Park once. Apparently, 92 years of the name was enough. If you read the release, it was as if Comiskey never existed." 

Back then, Morrissey was as indignant as a man can get. Now he's older and wiser.

"I don't think I'm a wiser man," he wrote me. "I think I'm more realistic now. The only way fans have a voice is with their wallets, and they've proven again and again that they don't care about corporate sponsorships and naming rights. But I believe Wrigley and Fenway would be exceptions." 

Comiskey Park, for all its 92 storied years, was no exception. But a wonderful thing happened. And Morrissey must be hailed for his role in making it happen. Morrissey ended the column I was quoting above by predicting, wrongly, that habit would win out. "Habits don't change just because money was exchanged," he wrote. "Then again, maybe people will call it The Cell . . . "

The rest is history. "One of the sweet ironies of it now being called The Cell," Morrissey's e-mail concluded, "is that it doesn't give U.S. Cellular (the phone company) the name recognition it wanted. The Cell could refer to any cell-phone company. It's generic. Maybe Wrigley will become the Beer Can."