Fans at Murphy's Bleachers who watched the Cubs fall apart during the 1984 National League Championship were allowed to booze during the seventh, eighth and ninth innings, and last I checked both Murphy's Bleachers and Wrigley Field were still standing. (Al Podgorski/Sun-Times)
Wrigleyville bar owners are up in arms over Mayor Daley's proposal for bars and restaurants to cut liquor sales after the seventh inning during potential title-clinching games, our Fran Spielman reports. The booze-sale hiatus would last all of two innings and pick back up at the end of the game.
This is a colossal waste of time. Never mind the fact that this could cause hordes of angry, drunken Cubs fans (instead of just dejected, drunken Cubs fans) to spill out of the bars and onto the streets. Never mind the fact that they put the west border of the Wrigleyville booze ban at Racine, leaving bars like Cullen's, Messner's, Hye Bar, Mystic Celt, Guthrie's, D'Agostino's and a smattering of others in the clear.
Calling this a voluntary moratorium on liquor sales while threatening to yank liquor licenses for those who don't volunteer kind of defeats the purpose of 'volunteer' in the first place and smacks of nothing more than governmental meddling.
As a former bar tender, I can say with confidence that bars are crafty places, and their crafty owners will find crafty ways to circumvent this proposal and they should, because those places tend to be pretty dead in the baseball-less winters. And in case you have been wearing earplugs and a blindfold for the past few months, these are tough economic times and the people who work in bars should be allowed to take full financial advantage of the Cubs' good fortune.
If you're going to ban booze sales in Wrigleyville bars after the seventh inning, you're clearly going to have to regulate how booze is packaged and sold during the seventh inning. If these bars are smart (and, as I mentioned before, they are) they'll start pushing sales of buckets of beer and three-for-one drink specials during the sixth and seventh innings.
Does the proposal call for stopping the sale of liquor after the seventh inning or the serving of it? If the language of the proposal says to stop the sale of liquor, what's to stop them from giving away free-drink tickets for use after the seventh inning?
That bars will craft more ways than I can think of to get around this proposal is reason enough to call it a waste of time. There's got to be a better way to keep fans responsible during the game and after. It shouldn't fall on City Hall to make it happen. It should fall on Cubs to encourage their fans to have have some class. It should fall on the bars to keep their clientele under control and it should fall, foremost, on the fans themselves to buck the stereotype that so many insist is unfair, yet manage to live up to night after night outside my bedroom window.
That said, Daley's essentially asking some of the most stressed-out, borderline alcoholic fans in the world to eschew their M.O. Their thirst for alcohol during the games -- especially the playoffs -- is an unstoppable train. If something idiotic happens after a Cubs win, it's more likely that it'll happen as a symptom of the tit-for-tat mindset that the ban would spur rather than in spite of the hour or so that fans won't actually have stopped drinking in the first place.
Deadspin weighs in with a Deadspinian photo of a compromised Mark Cuban.
Chicagoist weighs in and notes that the same doctrine will be in effect during the White Sox potential playoff run at Jimbo's and First Base on the South Side -- which, let's face it, is just silly for so many reasons.
Ardent Sox fan Richard Roeper agrees that the ban is ridiculous.
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