Looking at our great skyline and wondering about our places of sports worship
Standing here on a clear fall day at The 78, in the batter's box of a pop-up baseball diamond, staring north at downtown Chicago, a fellow is filled with thoughts. No. 1: Where did this place come from?
Obviously, these 62 acres a dozen blocks south of Madison Street along the Chicago River have always been here. But this empty baseball field seems to exist out of all context in an otherwise weedy, human-free mash-up of train tracks, landfill, cement slabs, roads that go nowhere and a nearby drawbridge rusted permanently up.
There are some net-free, pop-up pickleball courts, too. It's all just for show because The 78, the purported 78th neighborhood in Chicago (who knew there were already 77?), is owned by developer Related Midwest and ready for development.
I can barely tell you how I zigzagged and finally got to this odd spot. But the view, my goodness. What a skyline Chicago has. Almost nobody has studied it from this angle.
Which leads to the second thought: The White Sox have proposed building a stadium here, with the great view and allegedly great transportation (new street off-ramps, maybe a new L stop, water taxis), and what a spot it would be to see a game. Spectacular.
Thought 3: We're talking the Sox, the worst team in baseball, 222-losses-in-two-seasons bad. Who wants to give them anything? Above all, we're talking majority owner Jerry Reinsdorf, perhaps the least popular man in all of Chicago sports, career. Just Wednesday, it came out that he supposedly had spoken with a representative of a Nashville group interested in buying the Sox, which, one assumes, would want to move the team to Tennessee.
The news hit like a bomb going off in Chicago sports media. Me, I wasn't so surprised. After all, Reinsdorf said more than a decade ago that upon his death, he ''strongly suggested'' that his executors sell the team. He was 77 then. He's 88 now.
None of his three children has expressed interest in running the team. Unless Reinsdorf has genetics like Bears chairman Virginia McCaskey (she's 101), such a sale is coming sooner rather than later.
Maybe he's bluffing for more handouts from the city. Always — always — sports owners want something more from the taxpayers, with the stadium-begging game being the oldest on the books. The Colts left Baltimore for Indianapolis in the dead of night in 1984 — 15 Mayflower vans clearing everything out in eight hours — in a snowstorm because of stadium issues. Same when Browns owner Art Modell transported his team from Cleveland to Baltimore in 1995.
Disgusted Sox fans who just want Reinsdorf to sell should not, by extension, want the team to leave town. One way to keep it here would be to work out a deal in which the Sox could build a stadium at The 78 as long as any owner could not leave the site for, say, half a century.
Moreover, the request for hefty public financing would have a clear response: No. Unfortunately, the leverage Reinsdorf would then have, if he didn't care about jilting our city and being truly despised in Chicago, would be large. When you have suitors, you have options.
Don't forget, the Bears, too, are seeking a new stadium, theirs on the lakefront. They also want tax-payer concessions, public funding. This despite owning a vacant 326-acre site in Arlington Heights. But it's not in Chicago, you say? No issue. Remember, the two New York NFL teams, the Giants and Jets, not only don't play in New York City, they don't play in New York state.
The Bulls and Blackhawks also are involved in this building and financing churn. The Reinsdorf family and Wirtz family owners are all in on a $7 billion mixed-use development surrounding the United Center, planning to turn those Red Top parking lots into all kinds of new venues.
The Cubs? They've got their Wrigleyville empire buttoned up, but you wonder how thrilled the Ricketts family will be if the South Side Sox drift a couple of miles northward.
In truth, these teams have us in their cartel palms. Consider that in 1998, the U.S. population was 270 million, and there were 29 major-league teams in the United States and one in Canada. Now the U.S. population is 342 million, and there are still 29 American teams. Seventy-two million new citizens and nothing.
It's stuff like this you think about as you look at the Chicago skyline from a new perspective, wondering, more than usual, where it's all headed.
