CHICAGO (AP) – When the Chicago Cubs open their season at Wrigley Field next month, players and fans alike may feel a bit like a homeowner who lives in a house where workers are tearing apart the kitchen.
Members of the media were led on a tour Monday of the bowels of the Major League Baseball’s second-oldest ballpark, which has become a forest of beams and pipes on a dirt floor amid a massive renovation. Many of the steel girders that will support the ballpark’s huge new video board are still lying on the ground beyond the left-field wall because record cold in February made it difficult for steel workers to do their job.
But Cubs officials said the concourse will be open for business and the video board will be working come the team’s opening day game on April 5 against the St. Louis Cardinals.
To get everything done, Cubs officials will ask the city for permission to work around the clock, said Crane Kenney, the team’s president of business operations. And while the team has said for weeks that the bleachers won’t be open until May, on Monday officials said that only the left field and center field bleachers will open in May. The right-field bleachers won’t be open until June, officials said Monday.
“It is going to be a little dusty and a little dirty this year,” Kenney said.