ASSESSING WRIGLEY FIELD

Fenway Park is old, but this place is primitive. None of the ornaments seen at other parks, old and new, is here.

There's no video board.

There's very limited advertising, which is good. Fenway has sold out to advertisers, and the signs there look like bumper stickers on an old car. Wrigley is more pristine.

Unless you're scoring, you can't tell how many errors the competing teams have made. The only way you can tell how many hits they have is if your eyes are good enough to read a yellow strip low at the center of the scoreboard.

You need to have good eyes and arithmetic skills to tell the out-of-town scores, because though they do post them inning-by-inning, they don't total them. You can't even tell the Cubs score at a glance unless you look at the small scoreboards hanging from the upper deck down the baselines or in the stands behind the bases.

When I was in college here, the visiting team had to walk up steps from its dugout to its clubhouse and was visible, though wired in, to fans under the first-base stands. No more. Wonder when it changed?

Except for a very few modern twists, you could be watching a game during World War II. That's the charm of Wrigley.

I give it a B-plus.