What if Comiskey II....

a little revisionist history, if you please. Try chewing on the following questions: 1. What if Comiskey Park II hadn't been built in 1990? What if a less anxious Jerry Reinsdorf hadn't minded waiting a little and Camden Yards in Baltimore had openned before Comiskey. What effect would the Baltimore park had on Chicago? Would we have followed the route of retro-park (ball park as attraction) in the downtown area? Would a retro park been built on the current site of Comiskey II (a few cities, very few, like Philly and Milw, chose outskirt ball parks rather than downtown). Where would the park been built and what would it have been like? Would it have been closely related to Balt, Clev, SF, Pgh, Hou, etc? 2. Did things actually work out better than we thought on the South Side? A good percentage of the retro parks are a bit over the top with their assymetrical fields, their quirks for the sake of quirks, their too cute ways of trying to emulate old fashioned ball parks. Is it just possible that conventional wisdom is wrong and the Cell's straight forward lines (plus correcting errors, particularly the super steep upper deck) is almost refreshingly clean cut and down to earth? Is it also possible that a neighborhood ball park in Bridgeport is better than a downtown ball park...especially in light of what is arguably baseball's best environment is tucked away on Chicago's North Side at Clark and Addison? Could we actually have gotten this one right...or is that too much to hope for? 3. And a third totally off-the-wall question (just for fun): what if one of those older leagues (like the Federal) had survived and Chicago had a franchise in it What would baseball have been like in Chicago with three major league teams, not two...with the Cubs on the North Side, the Sox on the South, and the immaginary team in the new league on the west? Any thought what such a (admittedly unlikely) set up might have meant in our city.>