All offseason, Cubs fans will likely be wondering what they need to do about their baseball team, the one that won 97 games and then crapped the bed in the first round against the now-down-2-1 Dodgers. Whether there is actually something to be done to clearly improve the team is questionable — more left-handed bats? a “true” lead-off hitter? — but the one thing most everybody agrees about is that Wrigley Field itself, for all its awesome charm, could use a few improvements itself. Like, say, not shedding concrete every couple of years.

Al at Bleed Cubbie Blue takes on that problem today, and manages to strike the perfect chord between rebuilding and renovating, between modernizing and maintaining. It’s a must-read. (Ryan pulled a quote from it in his links post today.)

Like any other slightly tenuous issue, there are numerous factions at play. They are: the Build It In The Suburbs group; the Gut It and Renovate group; and the Don’t Change A Thing About My Precious Wrigley group. Two of those positions seem difficult to understand, given the circumstances.

Building the stadium out in, say, Naperville, is not only geographically silly, it negates the Cubs’ main selling point through so many losing years: charm.

At the same time, those opposed to modern vagaries like, say, a Jumbotron, or a scoreboard ribbon, or any of the other stuff that they may or may not be opposed to need to get with it: nostalgia is great, but it only goes so far, and damn it, I want to see a replay from time to time. That’s not asking too much. And it won’t destroy Wrigley, the same way modernity didn’t destroy Fenway.

One thing is certain, and that’s that when it comes to Wrigley Field, the Cubs are about as conflicted as Don Draper — constantly wheeling between nostalgia for the past (”It’s not called the wheel. It’s called the carousel.”) and blind faith in the future (”It’s your life. You’ve got to move forward.”) I hope both of them figure it out pretty soon, before the Cubs end up next to Woodfield Mall, the equivalent of touring California with effete foreign hobos.

Did I bring that metaphor around? No, I did not.