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America’s Most Enduring Monument to Failure

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Wrigley Field turns 100! 

The Friendly Confines turn 100 years old today, on the anniversary of the first game Chicago’s Federal League team played there in 1914. The Cubs moved in two years later; the ivy was planted and the outfield bleachers installed in 1937. The place has been a mecca of baseball ever since. Wrigley’s history isn’t exactly pretty: it is now officially 100 years absent a championship, and the Cubs haven’t won so much as a National League pennant in nearly seven decades. Wrigley is marked more by despair — curses of Billy Goats and Bartman and god knows what else — than it is by anything other than hope that the next season will be better.

Has any venue in the history of modern professional sports witnessed such an egregious litany of failure? If the Cubs were a nuclear power plant, they’d be a Chernobyl; if they were a fighter plane, they’d be the Brewster Buffalo; if there were an NFL draft bust, they’d be Ryan Leaf; if they were an American President, they’d be James Buchanan. I suspect that the misplaced adoration of Cubs “fans” for the Wrigley Relic has played some role in this hapless history, leading to a “Hell, why bother putting a decent product on the field” attitude in team management. If the few actual baseball fans of the north side of Chicago had any sense, they’d march on Wrigley and burn it to the ground.

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