In a very real sense, the first sports stadium to take on a corporate name was Wrigley Field – home of the long-losing Chicago Cubs of the National League.
Their building at Clark and Addison streets (which dates back to 1914) went by the name Weeghman Park for a few years, then Cubs Park, until the mid-1920s when chewing gum magnate William Wrigley bought majority control of the team and put his own name on the building.
But unlike baseball buildings such as Philadelphia’s Shibe Park and Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field that were named to massage the team owner’s egos, Wrigley openly admitted at the time that he was making the name change to promote his business interest – the Chicago-based manufacturer of such gums as Juicy Fruit and Spearmint.
The Wrigley name has remained on the building even though it has been nearly three full decades since the Wrigley family has had anything to do with the Cubs, in a sense making the place a free advertisement for chewing gum at the expense of the Cubs.
That’s why it’s a tossup as to whether it is obnoxious or pathetic that Cubs fans are whining these days about the possible renaming of Wrigley Field.
Crain’s Chicago Business is the latest media outlet to report on a possible corporate name for Wrigley, quoting Cubs fans on Friday as calling their building a “Mecca of baseball” (Yankee Stadium is the building that really deserves that overbearing title) whose “mystique” would “be hurt” by any name change.
Of course, such attitudes are typical of Chicago Cubs fans, who seem to think they are something special just because they root for a ball club that hasn’t won anything resembling a championship in 62 years and this coming season will “celebrate” a complete century without having won a World Series title.
It is ridiculous to think that Cubs owners would want to be exempt from the current trend of taking on some onerous-sounding corporate name in exchange for millions of dollars in cash that can help pad the team’s financial bottom line.
Even though some Cubs fans are claiming they will resist any new name, a younger generation will accept it and the older fans will come to be seen as ridiculous, trivial cranks in the same way that the people who are still complaining about the department store name change from “Marshall Fields’” to “Macy’s” are now being seen by many as people in serious need of a life.
Besides, whether it’s McDonald’s Field, ComEd Stadium, or whatever new name goes on the building, it shouldn’t detract from the activity on the playing field.
Scott Podsednik’s game-winning home run in the 2005 World Series wasn’t any less pleasurable to watch just because it sailed over the right field fence in a building known as U.S. Cellular Field, was it?
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Here’s a commentary from the past that some people might find relevant:
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Top_News/2003/02/08/commentary_comiskey_park_already_dead/9234/
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