By Bob Ryan, Globe Staff, 08/04/85
This is the first of a three-part series by Globe columnist written in 1985 celebrating the genre of the classic ballpark.
Everybody in baseball loves the old parks. Trips to Fenway Park, Tiger Stadium, Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park are high spots on all baseball itineraries. These parks are charming and timeless, and they have made real contributions to American culture.
But there is one unfortunate fact to consider. These parks really are old. Built between 1910 and 1914, they are not unlike any old house or car. They are lovely to look at but not so delightful to maintain. Their charm comes at a price.
Jim Campbell is president of the Detroit Tigers and he knows whereof he speaks. "Tiger Stadium is a wonderful old lady," he says, "but she's still an old lady. It's always patch-on-patch."
The Tigers say they wouldn't be able to keep up the 73-year-old stadium at all if the team hadn't sold it to the city of Detroit for one dollar 10 years ago. That transaction enabled the city to apply for a $5 million Federal Urban Development Grant that served as seed money for desperately needed renovation of the structure. The city then sold $7 million worth of revenue bonds, and by now over $18 million has been spent on fixing up the park.
If the Tigers had had to pay for the renovation themselves, there would be no Tiger Stadium today. Instead of playing the Tigers in a truly great old ballpark, American League teams would be traveling 20 miles northwest of Detroit to play them in the stultifying indoor world of the Pontiac Silverdome.
But the sobering fact is that old parks are a terrible burden. "We are," Campbell says with a sigh, "already renovating the renovations."
In the case of Tiger Stadium, among the improvements was the replacement of every seat in the main stands, exclusive of the bleachers. But the key work was done in areas the fan never thinks about. All old parks have had to fix up their plumbing and wiring, and they all have had to be shored up structurally.
In a sense, these four old parks we know and cherish today have kind of just happened. Each has evolved into its present look from the original shell structure. Comiskey Park didn't receive its double deck until 1926, 16 years after it was built. Wrigley Field didn't really take its current shape until the expansion of the bleachers in 1938. Fenway Park underwent a major overhaul in 1934. And Tiger Stadium, which stands on a site where major league baseball has been played since 1901 (the home plate of Tiger Stadium's ancestor, Bennett Park, was where the right-field foul pole is today), assumed its final look in 1938. Each park added a little here and a little there, and nobody was keeping track of what was going on.
The danger in this haphazard approach was brought home to Campbell several years ago when the press box caught fire in the middle of the winter. "The fire department called me out to the park," recalls Campbell, "and they asked me where this was, or where that was. You know what? We didn't even have any blueprints of the ballpark, because it really wasn't the same park we had started with." Now, of course, the Tigers have the proper records in their files.
Don't laugh. Haywood Sullivan acknowledges that there probably isn't any one person "who knows where everything is at Fenway Park." Such is the reality of owning an old ballpark.
Everyone who reads the sports pages is well aware that the Chicago Cubs are threatening to move out of historic Wrigley Field if lights aren't installed, but fewer people realize that Wrigley Field is not the only endangered ballpark in that town. White Sox owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn are restless men, and they are not at all enchanted with the idea of operating their business out of Comiskey Park much longer.
While paying lip service to Comiskey Park for its history and accessibility, Reinsdorf outlines his basic posture. "There are three major problems with owning an old ballpark," says the team's chairman of the board. ''The first is ongoing maintenance. You fix something today, and something else goes tomorrow. Next there is parking. We have maybe 5,000 legitimate parking spaces available. If we have a crowd over 30,000 people, we have a definite parking problem. The third thing is seating. Too many of our seats are behind poles. We are very limited in the number of box seats we have available, especially in comparison with someone like the Yankees, who have over 30,000 box seats to sell."
Yankee Stadium, built in 1923, once had that very same pole problem. The solution in New York was to get the city to put up $24 million (the final figure ballooned, as figures are wont to do, to $40 million), close the joint down for two years, rip out all the seats and poles and completely rebuild the ballpark while the Yankees played the 1974 and 1975 seasons in Shea Stadium. Not every team has that option.
Reinsdorf cries about his box-seat ratio, but he's better off than he would be if he owned the Red Sox, who have the smallest park in the major leagues (33,583), and who, along with the Tigers, have a ballpark that is 20 percent bleacher seats. So while the Yankees list 30,430 box seats to sell at $9, plus 18,422 reserved seats priced at $7.50, the Red Sox have to make do with slightly over 27,000 box and reserved seats combined, with prices from $8.50 down to $6.
Because they were built at a time when the automobile's full impact on society could not be foreseen, the four old parks have terrible parking problems. The two Chicago sites were chosen, in part, because of their proximity to existing el and trolley stops. Fenway was, and is, accessible to public transportation. The Michigan Avenue street car ran right up to Tiger Stadium until the '40s. But people now want to take their cars, and there the trouble starts.
Anyone who ever has driven to Fenway does not have to be told what a chore that is, but it is equally aggravating in the other cities. For example, one of the big issues involving the proposed lights at Wrigley Field is parking. The park is located in the middle of the city's Lake View section. There are very few sanctioned parking lots, and the standard practice is for patrons to park on side streets for Cubs games, most of which begin at 1:20 p.m. When residents return from work in late afternoon, they can expect to find their normal parking places. Those spots would not be available were the Cubs to start playing night games. No one has yet figured out where people would park for night games at Wrigley Field.
Just as people in Boston always have managed to get to both Fenway Park and Boston Garden - no matter how tedious a task it may be - so, too, have people always figured out how to get to Wrigley, Comiskey and Tiger Stadium. The last, at least, has good road access. When the city built its expressway system in the '30s, access to Tiger Stadium was paramount in the thinking. But as for parking . . .
"We have what I call 'scatter parking,' " says Campbell. "People have their favorite little spots they've known for years. Parking is so important to a stadium. We're a lot like Fenway. People park in backyards, driveways and the like. And they know how to get out of here quickly. You'd be surprised how quickly we can empty people out of the general area."
Parking is a problem that directly affects the fan. But there are other problems inherent with old ballparks that also directly affect a fan, even if he doesn't realize it because he is so used to the situation. With the exception of Comiskey Park, old ballparks have an inadequate number of concession stands, and, what's even more important, rest rooms.
Comiskey does not have this problem because, during the Bill Veeck regime, these items were given top priority. The fortunate thing is that Comiskey was inherently big enough to accommodate the expansion. The other parks aren't nearly as fortunate.
"We just don't have enough space to do the things we'd like to do," points out Campbell. "I am so envious when I go to new stadiums and see their concourse space. We're cramped, and so is Fenway. There isn't enough room for people to move around. For years people have come to me and said, 'Why don't you put TV monitors at the concession stands so we can see the game while we're waiting in line for a beer?' I might add that we are one of the few teams that does not sell beer in the stands. Well, I agree. It would be nice. But we can't, because our aim is to get people out of there. If it's raining a little, they'll tend to congregate down there, and we don't have room for them.
"Storage space," continues Campbell. "We don't have nearly enough. Our clubhouse is only two-thirds as big as it should be, but we've got nowhere to expand. We should have a better room for the wives to wait in after the game."
The old parks were built with different priorities. Veeck says that when he took over the White Sox in 1959, he went out to the Comiskey Park bleachers for a visit. He encountered an old woman he had seen on previous trips, and he asked her what she would like management to do.
"Put a ladies room in the bleachers," he was told.
"You mean," said Veeck, "there's no ladies room out here?"
"There never has been," she informed him.
Says Veeck, "I promised her there would be a ladies room, just for her, by the start of the next home stand. But, you see, when they built Comiskey Park in 1910, women didn't ordinarily go to games. And they didn't drink beer, either."
The Red Sox have their own rest-room story. "The first thing we did in '79," explains Haywood Sullivan, "was put in a ladies room in our bleachers. Then we found out there wasn't a men's room in Fenway down the third-base line. We put one in. Stevens (the Fenway concessionaire) raised hell because we had to take one of their storage rooms to do it."
Here's another problem with an old park. Suppose you wanted to put on a special money-making attraction when the ball club is out of town. You might not be able to do it because old parks don't have sufficient ramp size to bring in equipment. Nobody was thinking about 1985 entertainment needs back in 1912.
Sullivan's estimate at the amount of money spent on Fenway Park in the past six years is around $15 million. This includes the amount needed to construct the 44 private suites (42 of which are rented, the other two are being held back by the club) that, surprisingly, have only enhanced the park's physical beauty. The White Sox, likewise, installed 33 luxury boxes selling for $35,000 annually. In both cases, there is a substantial waiting line for buyers.
Both teams feel the boxes are necessary if the teams are to compete economically with the richer franchises. Reinsdorf and Einhorn spend every waking hour trying to find new sources of income. "We have increased our gross income from $12 million to $30 million since taking over," claims Einhorn, "and we're still losing money."
But the White Sox duo does concede that when they gained control, the ballpark was an asset, perhaps their only one. "At least we owned it," says Reinsdorf, "which meant we controlled the concessions and parking. We had two problems, however. The neighborhood was perceived to be bad. And we had an image problem inside. Comiskey Park was being referred to as 'the world's largest outdoor saloon.' We've gone to a lot of trouble to change that image."
Agrees Einhorn, "When I took a look at what we had, the ballpark was probably the best thing we had going for us at the time. We put in a new scoreboard and the luxury suites, thanks to revenue bonds. We have done what we could, but we can't do it forever. Every time we start a project, we find out there is something else wrong. You're always painting and fixing things. Now we've got to get new lights."
Campbell puts the ongoing maintenance problem in medical terms. "You know how they say, 'Well, the doctor opened him up and saw that the cancer had spread so far that he just sewed him right up.' That's how it is with our ballpark. Our problems are buried in concrete."
Meanwhile, what Reinsdorf and Einhorn really daydream about are more good seats. "It's very important psychologically," says Einhorn. "The good seats go first. We're maxed out of the good seats. We can't sell enough season tickets because we don't have enough attractive seats."
Haywood Sullivan agrees completely. "What we need more than anything else," he contends, "are priority seats." But they are not forthcoming in Fenway. "We have done what we can. We've had two engineering firms investigate the situation, and there will be no upper deck."
But while Haywood says the Red Sox can live in Fenway Park "for about 20 years," and Campbell says the Tigers will make it into the 21st century playing in Tiger Stadium, the White Sox owners are less optimistic about the future of Comiskey Park. "People don't like to hear this," says the ever- blunt Einhorn, "but this ballpark really doesn't have a place in the modern era. It's a shame, but to say anything different is not realistic.
"Don't think I'm not a traditional person," Einhorn protests. "I'm a collector. I keep score when I go to a game. I like old-timers games. I like series about old ballparks. I like the Andrews Sisters. But this place is a dinosaur."
As for Wrigley Field, its future is wrapped up entirely in the lights. The Tribune Company, which owns the Cubs, insists that without the installation of
lights that will enable the Cubs to play 18 night games a year, the team will be forced to leave Wrigley Field.
Right now, however, life goes on. The old parks keep opening for business. It still says "Welcome To The Friendly Confines Of Wrigley Field" on the first-base dugout in Wrigley, and fans buying reserved seats in Fenway still sit in the very same oak seats their grandfathers sat in as young lads back in 1912. When somehow or other the cars are parked and the stands have filled up, another game starts and the fans focus their attention on the field.
And those fans include the chief operating officer of the Boston Red Sox. ''I love this facility," says Sullivan. "I love coming to work here every day."
PART I: