The good thing about having Intrepid Readers like Cory (who e-mailed me about this) is that I don’t even have to put myself through the torture of reading a Bill Simmons mailbag to find out what’s in it.
As we know from him gleefully twatting on Thursday about what a neat-o thing the Cubs do by playing “Go Cubs Go” after a home win, Simmons was in Chicago on Thursday for the Cubs 1-0 win over the Dodgers.
In his mailbag yesterday he decided to pick the only nit he had about his first Wrigley experience:
• A Wrigley Field scoreboard that isn’t from 1935. On Thursday, I caught the Dodgers-Cubs game — my first Wrigley visit in 30 years — and loved everything except that stupid scoreboard. We all admire the old-school baseball experience, even if it’s undermined slightly by those two Under Armour signs on the ivy-covered outfield wall, but come on. It’s 2010. You could sneak a state-of-the-art scoreboard in there. I need replays, and I need to know things like “What’s the score?” and “How many outs are there?” without staring at an ambiguous, confusing block of wood from the Hack Wilson era. Besides, can you really have an old-school baseball experience when three-fourths of the crowd is texting or checking BlackBerrys during the game? Put a real scoreboard up there. It’s time.
(By the way, I’d like to thank Chicago for single-handedly keeping the following American big-city traditions alive: smoking, drinking during the day, eating terrible food, congeniality and breasts. It’s noble work you’re doing, Chicago. We’re all proud of you. Good luck with the Blackhawks.)
Seriously? The Wrigley scoreboard is too complicated? He couldn’t figure out what the score was? And big fucking number under the word OUT was in some sort of code he couldn’t understand?
There are a lot of things to bitch about at Wrigley (the quality of the home team is normally the main thing), but the coolest scoreboard in the history of Major League Baseball is not one of them.
And we’ve got news for Mr. Simmons, the “three fourths” of the crowd who are texting during the game, are not doing so to find out what the score is. They’re doing it to figure out which Volvo they’re taking to the wine bar after the game.
The best part is that Simmons couldn’t do the math to figure out the score of a game that was SCORELESS until the bottom of the eighth, and ended 1-0.
Like I told Cory in my thank you e-mail to him for this gem, the most disappointing thing any fan of Simmons’ writing will ever figure out is that the more you know about the subject he is writing about, the more you will learn that he doesn’t know that much about it.
But then again, Karate Kid scholars learned this lesson 15 years ago.
Dear Bill,
Eat a bag of dicks.
Love, Chicago
P.S. Good luck with those Flyers.
Glad to hear my son is smarter than Bill Simmons, had no problem adding the numbers this afternoon.
If you can’t figure out the awesome Wrigley Field score board you should probably quit at life. Also, what’s wrong with the food in Chicago? The Wrigley food sucks but the rest of the town shouldn’t be punished for that.
I’m going to give Simmons the unearned benefit of the doubt and assume he meant “food that’s terrible for you” rather than food that tastes terrible.
But WTF with the complaining about the scoreboard? It’s not fucking rocket science. My first-grader has no trouble figuring it all out.
You guys drive Volvos? In the heart of the Midwest? Shame!
In the same mailbag Simmons calls the NFL both too greedy and too socialist – in the same sentence. Can’t make it up.