Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Why do I go to a White Sox game? Hell-u-lar Field

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Why did I go to a White Sox game last night? It was so disappointing on so many levels. But my son won the seats as a reward for his academic efforts so it was to share his moment that I had to suffer with the White Sox.

It isn't the White Sox players themselves that disappoint me. Any White Sox player can become a Cubs player, some day. The Cubs lose but the Cubs fans go to the ballpark to enjoy the game, win or lose. White Sox fans actually think they are going to win the World Series again. Delusional!

I hate the stadium. It is so commercial and un-intuitive. Who designed that monstrosity of a public hassle? And to name it after a cell phone company only adds insult to injury. The cell phone companies are the biggest  rip-offs in our economy. They charge us an arm and a leg for service but they fail to provide adequate service. Not one of them. All of the services stink and they constantly drop calls. The cell phone industry doesn't work properly. it is plagued with bugs and failure. Co "Cellullar Field." Pathetic!

The parking around the stadium should be the easiest to get to but the fact is that it is easier to park at Wrigley Field -- built when? A few years after the turn of the 19th Century? -- than it is to park at Comiskey Park. There I said it. F-You Cellular Field! The parking there is horrendous. Some moron who flunked out of the Chicago Public schools -- and that is so hard to do, actually -- must have designed the parking lot patterns. And the idiots they hire to manage "security" around the park only make it worse. You turn on 39th Street to par and they immediately wave you away, even though the signs tell you to keep going to park with a ticket or for cash, they make you go around in circles on purpose. The signs are lies at White Sox park. The people hired to direct traffic are not directing traffic at all. They are mocking White Sox commuters.

A smart rat couldn't figure its way around the parking maze at White Sox Park! It's a hassle and an intentional mess. I think it might be a strategy to make life difficult for Sox fans so that they have lowered expectations before they get int he park and consume cases of beer and slosh around the F word like they were at the South Side Irish Parade.

The food at Sox Park is okay. It's not great. It is just okay and that's amazing for a politically connected place to give the food to people who are there only to make a fast buck rather than service the hunger pangs of the fans. What else is new?

The prices of food is not out of line with the prices at Wrigley Field or any other place. But the food at Wrigley is so much better.

Then there are the people. I think it is an anecdotal fact that South Siders are fatter than north siders, and maybe that's why the smartest south siders are also Cub fans and not White Sox fans. A lot of South Siders are heffers. (Who came up with Cows on Parade? A northsider mocking south siders, of course.)

And the souvenir shops had pure junk. At least at Wrigley Field I can buy my son an autographed baseball. Not at White Sox Abomination. Pure worthless junk.

But the drunks who stumble in to the White Sox games and then stumble out -- and are too afraid to walk through the local neighborhood even though many of the public housing units have been demolished to make them feel better -- don't care about the quality of the junk there because many of them  are dressed like slobs.

I actually sat there and watched a White Sox prodigy who was maybe 12 years old sit at his chair and spit constantly on the cement steps next to his aisle seat. His friend did the same. Spitting through the whole game. Fortunately a Cubs fan told them to stop. Who else would step up to the plate to teach them public manners?

Of course, the White Sox lost the game to the Detroit Tigers. But that isn't exclusive to the White Sox. The Cubs lose often. But when I go to a Cubs game, I go in knowing we have no chance in hell of winning anything. And it doesn't bother me because by the time I get to my seat -- which is just as expensive as the seats at the White Sox Rat Maze -- I am happy and hassle free and I am enjoying the food at the park. I'm content at Wrigley Field before the game starts, unlike the nightmare experienced at Hell-u-lar Field.

-- Ray Hanania


2 comments:

Irv Leavitt said...

You blindly demeaned The Cell. You make it sound like a children's hell while seemingly never noticing the Fundamentals Deck, where kids actually play ball during the game; you maintain there is considerable verbal obscenity, which there isn't; in fact, everything you wrote is Bizarro World-level untrue except about the parking, which is handled unkindly for the unfamilar, but totally avoidable by arriving just a little earlier or taking the easy rapid transit).
I have seen this before when Cub fans visit on Perfect Attendance Day, just seeing what they want to see. Often, what they see is bad behavior from non-fans with free tickets, but they don't know that. The gall to call Sox fans drunks, when boorish behavior at the Cell is the lowest of all major Chicago sports venues, and I've seen Cub fans walk just outside that decrepit Addison Street facility urinating as they proceed!
That's not done at the Cell, because a culture of mutual respect has been carefully fostered.
But what's unforgivable in this blog entry is the dehumanizing of South Siders. My late wife was a South Sider, and Irish, and a Sox fan, and so are all of her relatives, who are without exception, wonderful people who
are never, ever, drunk. And most of them are rail-thin.
Dehumanization of groups of people is the first step in justification of denial of human rights, correct? This is the underlying problem in some of the things you write about. If you can blithely dehumanize baseball fans from the other side of town, I doubt you really understand how people wind up in refugee camps.

Ray Hanania said...

Yea Irv ... but you weren't watching them snarf down food like there was no tomorrow. Thanks for elevating boorish behavior. I think the Boors deserve a country of their own.