Rooftop owners in left field over Wrigley debate

Published April 6, 2002

Instead of a baseball stadium, what if Wrigley Field were a movie theater?

And what if, instead of seats on rooftops offering views into the ballpark, neighboring business owners were selling DVD and videotape copies of the current movies; copies they'd made by bringing high-quality digital cameras into the theaters?

The analogy is close enough to illuminate the issue of the Wrigley Field "wind screens," "security barriers" or whatever management is calling them now.

Professional baseball is an entertainment industry--a lot like the movies only with fewer happy endings, particularly in these parts.

Customers buy tickets and obscenely priced concessions, then they sit for a couple of hours and watch very highly paid people do amusing things.

There are usually ways to watch without buying a ticket from the team or theater owner. Most movies eventually air on broadcast television, where you can also catch most Cubs games.

But there's a compromise--watching on TV is a pale reflection of the experience of being at the ballpark or sitting in front of an enormous, vivid movie screen.

Similarly, the seats atop buildings across the street from Wrigley Field are awfully far from home plate, just as bootleg copies of movies suffer from degraded sound and picture quality.

The ethical difference is this:

When you watch a ballgame or movie for free on TV, it's on the terms of the business that was selling tickets in the first place. In fact, that business is making extra money on the broadcast. (I hope this doesn't shatter any illusions, but Tribune Co. is not engaged in an act of charity when WGN-TV broadcasts Cubs games. It's engaged in an act of capitalism.) But when you watch a game from a perch above and outside the area where the paying customers are seated, just as when you purchase a bootleg copy of a movie, it's not on the terms of the original ticket sellers. It is, to put it bluntly, theft.

On a small scale, such theft barely rises to the level of a petty crime. Copying a CD or video for a friend or for personal use--which I will admit to having done and even defend for the way it ultimately benefits many artists--is a minor infraction, just as it was a minor infraction years ago when people who happened to live across from Wrigley Field invited their friends for rooftop barbecues on game days.

But these "rooftop owners," who have somehow acquired victim status in the Wrigley Field wrangle, are big-time pirates (not to be confused with the big-time Pirates from Pittsburgh who spoiled the home opener Friday). These entrepreneurs took a quaint custom and turned it into an industry by constructing hideous grandstands and charging yo-ho-ho prices--I was quoted $100 a seat recently when I called to inquire. And all along they have been seemingly secure in the knowledge that our long-standing civic love affair with rapscallions will protect their illicit trade.

So far they've been right. The city has been astonishingly accommodating to the poachers. Ald. Bernard Hansen (44th) introduced an ordinance to let owners raise their rooftops by 12 feet to make sure their customers could see over any new bleacher construction or screens the Cubs installed in the outfield.

What's next? An ordinance guaranteeing the rights of those who want to operate camcorders in theaters? The issuance of peddling permits to those who want to hawk illicitly duplicated copyrighted material?

The perpetually indignant Jay Mariotti, sports columnist for the for-profit Chicago Sun-Times, interrupted a name-calling screed against Tribune Co. Friday to argue that the Cubs use the "rooftop aura" to make money because, if I follow his logic, occasional TV images of rooftop fans lure paying customers to the park.

"The rooftop owners want to be partners with Cubs," he pouted. Right. Like those who steal cable signals want to be partners with AT&T Broadband or like those who grab a couple of extra papers out of a Sun-Times honor box want to be partners with Hollinger International Inc.

Yes, I work for a newspaper that is part of Tribune Co. Yes, the Cubs are owned by a unit of Tribune Co.

No, my overlords didn't ask me to write this. And yes, I think the company's prattle about the view-blocking screens around the stadium being an anti-terrorist measure is so goofy that it threatens to distort the debate over stadium-alteration plans.

In that debate, the rooftop owners have no place at the table. That's not the Tribune talking, that's principle.

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E-mail: Ericzorn@aol.com