I could care less the selling the name of Wrigley story. I hope they don’t, but I know they probably will. Just as much, I know people will keep on calling it Wrigley, so they’ll likely be smart enough to sell it as something like “Wrigley Field, presented by Motorola.” The Cubs will continue playing baseball in whatever they call the field and life will go on.
I’m much more bugged about this idea of selling Wrigley to Illinois State Facility Authority. I don’t know that I can necessarily trust the state to manage an aging baseball stadium when they just blew multiple deadlines to keep the trains running and only accomplished that much with budgets held hostage so the Governor can start begging for votes. The Cubs have been historically mismanaged enough without a inept/corrupt state government getting involved.
I will grant that they’ve done a decent enough job with the Cell after the renovations, but they had to do the renovations because they screwed up so much in the first place.
This doesn’t seem like a long term method of keeping the Cubs in Wrigley. Yea, the Tribune can tie them to stadium after selling them, but the new owner is going to want to break out of any disadvantage deal, and selling the stadium separate from the team is probably not going to benefit the new owners at all. Splitting the stadium from the team sends things down a bad road.