Wrigley Field has felt like home to me for more than five decades. While I've sat in various parts of the ballpark, the bleachers have been home since 1979. I have made lifelong friends there and you've heard about some of them here.
Over the years, the park has changed, quite a bit, in fact. A small message board was added under the center-field scoreboard in the early 1980s. Lights came in 1988, suites and a new press box the following year, and the bleachers were completely reconstructed with 1,800 seats added in 2006.
Now, more change is coming. A video board will change the look and feel of Wrigley Field considerably when the park next opens for business April 6, 2015, and more changes will come as the Cubs complete their renovation/restoration project in about four years.
This photo gallery is all from the final day of the regular season, September 24, 2014. I walked around the ballpark taking photos from a number of angles during batting practice, so as to have a permanent record and memory of the last time Wrigley looked this way, and more after the game was over. It was nice to end this era with a Cubs win, especially over the Cardinals.
Don't take this in any way to mean that I'm not in favor of the changes. I've long said that if the Cubs wanted to put in a video board, that was fine with me; it will help produce revenue to improve the team on the field and I'm certainly in favor of that. The other changes will be more subtle and, in all, Wrigley Field will still be "Wrigley Field," only modernized to, perhaps, last another 100 years.
We adapted to all the other changes. We'll adapt to these. It will be the best of both worlds, modern fan and player amenities at the ballpark still located at the corner of Clark & Addison, with (mostly) the same views and brick and ivy on the walls and that old-fashioned manual scoreboard, so it can, at last, see a World Series championship.
No photo captions necessary on these pictures, I shouldn't think. Just browse the gallery and enjoy one final look at the "old" Wrigley Field.