The Chicago city council voted on one of the elements of the Cubs‘ renovation plans for Wrigley Field last night, approving the expansion of the number of night games at the park from 30 to 46, plus allowing four nighttime concerts and six Friday games starting at 3:05 pm. And already, both neighborhood residents and team officials say it’s totally unacceptable:

“I don’t want more night games. I don’t want more people in my yard. I don’t want more traffic in my alley. I want to be able to get home at night to see my family. Last Wednesday night, it took 50 minutes to get from Lake Shore [Drive] to my house. It’s only 17 blocks,” said Mark Church, who lives just a few doors from Wrigley.

And:

[The bill] would require the Cubs to foot the bill for security and sanitation costs tied to more than 40 night games per season and forfeit a night game after any season that includes more than four “non-baseball events,” including concerts or college football games.

The Cubs were equally unhappy with the mayor’s decision to cap the number of Saturday night games at two per season and give the city “unprecedented” control over when rained-out games are rescheduled.

“If we’re successful on the field and chosen to play additional games on national television, we would need to choose between violating Major League Baseball rules or violating city ordinance,” Mike Lufrano, senior vice president of community affairs for the Cubs, told aldermen earlier this week.

Let’s see, MLB rules, or the law? Decisions, decisions.

This is a minor vote, obviously, compared to deciding whether to allow Cubs owner Tom Ricketts to build ad boards all over Wrigley and erect new hotels and retail buildings nearby, but it does signal that the council is inclined to give Ricketts some of what he wants, but not everything. On the other hand, Mayor Rahm Emanuel was supportive of the compromise night-games bill (he called it “an honest compromise”), so maybe this is just a sign that the council is inclined to do what the mayor wants, and on the renovations and new development itself he’s been mostly supportive. But at least Chicago lawmakers have carried on with their tradition of making everyone in the city miserable.

MLB.com really wants to be taken seriously as an independent news site separate from its MLB owners, but it’s tough with articles that begin like this one:

Fans interested in tracking the restoration of Wrigley Field and showing their support for the project can follow the progress on a new website, WrigleyField.com, which the Cubs launched on Tuesday.

Or, in English: Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts has set himself up a PR site about his plans to renovate Wrigley! One where the first thing that hits you in the face when you visit is a petition to sign supporting the project as a “win for the Chicago economy, the Lakeview community, Cubs fans and the team.”

There’s more on the site, but none of it would exactly qualify as new information, or even information at all. (Sample FAQ Q&A: “Q. Will the unique character of Wrigley Field change? A. No, the project will preserve the unique charm and historic traditions of the Friendly Confines.”) But you’re still better off visiting there than reading Carrie Muskat’s MLB.com article, which reads like it was lifted from a Cubs press release, concluding, “If you love Wrigley Field, and want to see it preserved and prosper, this is the site for you.” Now that’s hard-hitting journalism.

Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts quickly backed away from last week’s threat to move the team if the city doesn’t approve additions to Wrigley Field, but that hasn’t stopped several days of articles insisting that it’s either about time Ricketts threatened to move, a completely idle threat, or a great opportunity to fill column space with snide suggestions from readers about what else could go on the Wrigley site if the Cubs moved.

Meanwhile, the sticking point here, if there is one (Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel insists there isn’t) is mostly over how many and what size video ad boards Ricketts would be allowed to erect not just inside the ballpark, but outside it and on adjacent buildings as well. According to the Chicago Tribune:

The 63-page document obtained by the Tribune shows the team proposes to install 6,560 square feet of signs on a planned hotel. A plaza that the team would like to create on a triangle-shaped parcel just west of the stadium would include 5,825 square feet of signs.

The Cubs also would like to sell naming rights to a six-story office building it would like to construct on Waveland Avenue.

In all, the Cubs are seeking permission to place more than 35,000 square feet of signs on the exterior of Wrigley Field and outside the stadium. Much of the space would be devoted to advertising, featuring the names and logos of the team’s sponsors.

That is rather a lot of signage for a residential neighborhood (or any neighborhood), and has Lake View Citizens’ Council president Will DeMille worrying about a “Times Square effect,” which is quite an image for anyone familiar with Wrigleyville now.

The Wrigley battle is turning into an interesting one, in that Ricketts isn’t asking for direct cash subsidies (aside from federal historic preservation credits), but he’s asking for city concessions that could be just as valuable: the right to close off city streets for his own use on game days, as well as to evade city landmark rules and laws on outdoor advertising in order to rake in more revenue. It’s a clever line of attack, really, in that this way he can claim he’s privately funding the whole renovation, so what’s the problem? But as I pointed out to the Tribune, other owners have made similar claims without them being true, thanks to these kinds of hidden subsidies.

Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts has finally revealed renderings of what Wrigley Field would look like after his planned $500 million renovation and expansion … sort of:

There’s your 6,000-foot scoreboard in left field, carefully finessed to be less obtrusive by assuming that all the ads flanking it would be in black and white on a pleasant ivy-green background. Also, where it says “Wrigley Field” in nice script over the scoreboard? That would actually be an ad. As would where it says “Wrigley Field” in large neon letters in right field. And the small strip panel below it hyping a series against the Cardinals? Ad. Plus, outside the ballpark, according to the Chicago Tribune:

Advertising would adorn a proposed seven-story hotel at the northwest corner of Clark and Addison streets and six-story retail-office building on the triangular parcel west of the stadium. They would be linked by a walkway over Clark with its own sign.

Nonvideo, or static, ads would top the 91-foot-tall hotel, as well as the clock tower on the office building. A three-panel video screen would be placed on the office building, inside the plaza, where seven obelisks would carry more static ads. Banners featuring team sponsors would hang from the hotel, facing Clark.

Cubs President Crane Kenney called this “a historic restoration” and “not trying to make Wrigley new [but] trying to make Wrigley old.” The Tribune did not record whether he kept a straight face while saying it.

Kenney also tried to downplay the significance of asking the city of Chicago to allow the Cubs to plaster ads over every surface of a city landmark, inside and outside, saying:

“We may only get some use of sidewalks and a lane of street. I’d take the several hundred million dollars [over that]. That’s a very good trade on the mayor’s part…compared to what happens elsewhere.”

I’m not sure exactly where this falls in the stadium playbook: “Sure, we’re asking for a ton of concessions, but we could be asking for even more!” Maybe it should be dubbed the “just be glad I’m not Jeffrey Loria” gambit.

And speaking of the stadium playbook, the Cubs management pulled out some other items from there, too. Kenney asserted that “we have to catch up to our large-market competitors on ballpark revenues” (which, um, right), while Ricketts went for the big guns, declaring this morning that:

“The fact is if we don’t have the ability to generate revenue in our own outfield, then we’ll have to take a look at moving.”

Asked if that’s a threat to move, Mr. Ricketts said, “No threat.”

Funny, if I’d been a reporter in the room, I don’t think my first question would have been whether this was a threat to move, given that 1) on what planet is saying “we’ll have to look at moving if you don’t give us this” not a threat to move? and 2) owners always say they’re not threatening to move even when they are, which is why Joanna Cagan and I coined the term non-threat threat for this way back in the 20th century. I’m thinking I would have gone for something more along the lines of, oh, I don’t know, maybe, “You’re making more money than God right now with a team that hasn’t won anything since the second Teddy Roosevelt administration, thanks to your insanely good location and a ballpark that people come from all over the world to see. And you’re going to move where, exactly?

Ex-Chicago Cubs reliever Kerry Wood has declared that his former team will never be able to attract free agents without a half-billion-dollar renovation plan, according to DNAinfo. “I don’t think you’re gonna get free agent players coming over to spend time here when facilities are what they are compared to everyone else’s in both leagues,” said Wood, who signed as a free agent with the Cubs in January of last year.

Wood’s return to Chicago was cut short when he retired last May, in the midst of a Cubs rebuilding year that saw the departure of star pitcher Ryan Dempster, who’d signed with the Cubs as a free agent in 2004, then resigned with them in 2008; and despite the presence of outfielder Alfonso Soriano, who signed an eight-year, $136 million free agent deal in 2006 to make his home at Wrigley.

Soriano himself recently expressed the importance of free agent signings to the success of the Cubs, telling Chicago Now, “What I see now is that the teams that have the big names, they don’t win. … If you play good at the right time, with the young guys, you can do something.”

Chicago Tribune architecture critic Cheryl Kent has chimed in on the Wrigley Field renovation controversy (aka “Who Wants To Build a 6,000-Square-Foot Video Board?”), and she makes an interesting point:

Just about any alteration to Wrigley has to be cleared by the Historic Preservation Division of Housing and Economic Development.

Happily, the staff there has more control and negotiating power with these protections in place than it did, say, with Prentice Hospital, which the mayor and his appointed wrecking crew (aka landmarks commissioners) ran by themselves.

What’s protected at Wrigley? All four perimeter walls, the roofline, the exposed structural system, the “marquee” sign at Addison and Clark streets, the brick wall encircling the playing field (and that includes the ivy), the dugouts, the scoreboard and the “generally uninterrupted sweep and contour of the grandstand and bleachers.”

In addition to all that, any new signage has to be OK’d before it can be added to Wrigley Field, making the proposed 6,000-square-foot video screen considerably less than the sure bet suggested by the city and the Ricketts family.

The Historic Preservation Division is still a city agency, and I don’t quite understand Chicago politics well enough to tell why they would have more backbone in standing up to the Cubs (and the mayor) than the landmarks commissioners. Regardless, Kent makes clear that the landmarks commission is being asked to bend the rules a hell of a lot here, and the city certainly has grounds to reject or trim some of the more, shall we say, ahistorical changes that Cubs owner Tom Ricketts is pursuing.

And Kent makes clear what she thinks of some of those proposed changes as well:

Were the plan suggested so far to be fully implemented, Wrigley would be fundamentally damaged to dubious purpose.

There’s probably no problem with the proposed upgrades to the team facilities like batting tunnels and the clubhouse or locker room. These changes need to be fleshed out, but they appear to be tucked out of sight behind or beneath existing structure. Likewise, the renovation and modernization of the existing concourse could likely be approved as long as the expressed structure is respected. But these are impressions taken from undetailed sketches and renderings.

What about the “Jumbotron”? At 6,000 square feet it could measure 60-by-100, about three times bigger than the current center field scoreboard. So, if it were vertical, picture an eight- to 10-story building (100 feet tall) as wide as an articulated bus (60 feet long) sitting on top of the left-field bleachers.

The Rickettses are withholding a drawing presumably showing the scale of the video screen. It’s impossible to admit such an animated monster and preserve the essential intimacy of Wrigley Field. It would overwhelm the park and dominate its views.

People at Cubs’ games do not sit slack-jawed looking at video in between plays or innings. They talk to one another, they argue, they attend to their scorecards, they explain a bunt to a child, they sing and stand and stretch at the seventh inning. That’s the point of going to a ballgame instead of watching it at home.

This is an aesthetic judgment, obviously: Some people like ballparks without electronic distractions, others those with lots of bells and whistles. But even though Ricketts may own Wrigley Field, he knew he was getting a city landmark when he bought it — and limiting changes to private property for aesthetic and public-interest reasons is precisely what landmarks law was created to do. The debate about what happens to baseball’s second-oldest ballpark should be just beginning — whether or not that happens is going to depend more on that Chicago politics mentioned earlier than any number of architecture critics.

[UPDATE: Notre Dame architecture professor Philip Bess, who helped in the early planning that led to the Fenway Park reconstruction, has chimed in with his own critique of a Wrigley jumbotron at Chicagoside Sports. Scary rendering included:]

Chicago Tribune columnist Phil Rogers has written some not-very-smart things before about why he thinks the Cubs need to renovate Wrigley Field, but yesterday’s column is just awe-inspiring. From the title, “Key to Wrigley renovation: Will it lead to a title?” (spoiler: Rogers isn’t making any promises), we head straight to the opening lines:

Quaint ballparks are cool, no question about it. But they don’t win championships.

That’s why the Yankees did an ugly overhaul on the House That Ruth built in the mid-1970s and scrapped the original Yankee Stadium altogether five seasons ago.

Read that again, all together now. Yep, he said the Yankees. Yankee Stadium had to go, because it didn’t win championships. This is an actual argument made by an actual sports columnist on the actual payroll of an actual newspaper.

Now, I’m the first to acknowledge that money makes a difference in who wins championships. Though less so in MLB, where there’s so much randomness to the postseason scramble. (Consider that the Florida Marlins have won more World Series in the last 20 years than the New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Los Angeles Angels combined.) And while more spending money helps lead to more wins, more stadium revenue doesn’t necessarily lead to more spending money — that’s going to be about how much money your shiny new free agents can generate in additional income, which is going to be more of a matter of the size and wealth of your market than how new your stadium is. (When Pittsburgh and Cincinnati built new stadiums, that didn’t suddenly mean the Pirates andReds could earn back a $30 million a year outlay on a new slugger by selling $2,000-a-pop seats like the Yankees could.)

But anyway, back to Rogers: What does he say about the Cubs in particular, and why they need a renovated Wrigley?

[Cubs owner Tom] Ricketts is dead on when he says the business side of baseball and what happens on the field are “two sides of the same coin.” Spending money doesn’t guarantee success, but it is impossible to sustain it without revenues that rank at the top of the game.

Right, and the Cubs have been suffering along with revenues that are, according to Forbes, fourth out of all 30 MLB teams. That’s ahead of the San Francisco Giants, who won the World Series last year, and the St. Louis Cardinals, who won the year before that, and the Detroit Tigers and the Texas Rangers, who won the A.L. pennant those years. It’s behind the Yankees, who have won one championship in four years at their new stadium after winning four in the last thirteen years at the old one, and the Boston Red Sox, who play in a park two years older than Wrigley (albeit recently renovated), and the Philadelphia Phillies, who indeed won one championship in their new stadium, but are currently playing almost as badly as the Cubs.

There are certainly reasons to consider a Fenway Park-style redo of Wrigley: If the Cubs can shift some of the back-office and food-prep functions to an adjacent building as the Red Sox did, freeing up room for fans to get around and buy stuff and not crowd each other in the restrooms quite so much, that can only be good both for fans and for the bottom line. A 6,000-square-foot electronic scoreboard sounds like less of a win-win, especially for a park whose main attractions are its old-time feel and its view of the surrounding neighborhood. (Forget for a moment the griping of the rooftop owners across the street from Wrigley; will Wrigley still be Wrigley if you can’t see out of it because there’s a giant replay-and-ad board in the way?)

A new scoreboard will, undoubtedly, allow Ricketts to make even more money than he does now from Wrigley. But Chicago has no vested interest in that, unless you believe that a richer owner means a more successful ballclub. Which bears no resemblance to what baseball history has shown — but apparently knowledge of baseball history isn’t a prerequisite for being a Chicago Tribune baseball writer.

I’m not especially in the mood to write about stadium news after what happened yesterday afternoon. But the world doesn’t stop after a tragedy, even if it feels like it should, so let’s press ahead…

I didn’t get a chance to write about it yesterday, but Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel reportedly reached an agreement for a “framework” for the renovation of Wrigley Field late Sunday night. Said Emanuel in a written statement:

“For nearly a century, Wrigley Field has been a cherished institution in Chicago and the Wrigleyville community, as well as a cathedral of baseball. This framework allows the Cubs to restore the Friendly Confines and pursue their economic goals, while respecting the rights and quality of life of its neighbors. … It will have a long-lasting positive effect on Chicago.”

Nobody involved actually released any details about what they agreed to, though the Chicago Tribune reported that “sources” said the Cubs would seek a 5,000-square-foot video board in left field, double the size of the hand-operated scoreboard in center. But at least both sides have finally reached a compromise and we won’t have to put up with more public squabbling over—

Emboldened by the framework of an agreement with City Hall to rebuild Wrigley Field, Cubs Chairman Tom Ricketts has unveiled a long list of demands as the finer points are ironed out in the coming months.

Ricketts wants a property tax break reserved for those who renovate historic landmarks. He doesn’t want to pay the city for expanding the ballpark onto public sidewalks and streets. He plans to push for as much electronic advertising inside and outside the stadium as possible. And he’d like the city to crack down on street peddlers and performers, neighborhood billboards that conflict with the team’s sponsors and rooftop attendance.

Okay, so apparently by “agreement” the two sides just meant that they agreed to agree on what they agree on, and to disagree on what they don’t. There are still tons of community and zoning hearings to go before all this becomes official, so hopefully before any final votes are taken, Chicago officials will know what it is they’re actually voting for.

Apparently that new mega-scoreboard that Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts wants to build at Wrigley Field would have repercussions for more than just the rooftop owners who’d have their views blocked:

To accommodate a jumbotron in left field and minimize the amount it blocks the views of rooftops, the Cubs are pitching a plan to push an exterior Wrigley Field wall out eight feet, taking up part of Waveland Avenue…

The Cubs, according to several sources, are now suggesting pushing the left field exterior wall, the cantilevers and the sidewalk back toward Waveland Avenue. That would shrink the width of Waveland and possibly get rid of street parking on the north side of the street.

This probably isn’t a huge deal — the exterior wall was already rebuilt a few years ago when the bleachers were expanded, so it’s not historic or anything, and Ricketts is talking about finding replacement parking spots elsewhere. But it does make me wonder: Has anyone actually tried to establish why the Cubs need a scoreboard so huge that it requires its own support structure? I’m sure that they could make more money off a new video board (less because people would pay more for tickets if they could see replays than because the team could sell tons of ads on the thing), but wouldn’t it at least behoove somebody to ask how much revenue it would be worth to the team before going and closing streets to make room for it? Just in case, you know, a smaller board could work as well?

With all the bad blood between the Cubs and the rooftop owners (despite a deal the two cut a few years back where the latter tithe to the team 17% of their revenues), it’s hard not to see the new scoreboard as at least partly motivated as a way to stop fans from peeking in over the outfield wall without buying tickets from the Cubs. Which is their right — and there’s a long baseball tradition of such things. But if that’s what it’s about, there’s no reason the city needs to get involved in abetting such shenanigans.