During my friend Rocco’s recent visit we decided to catch a Cubs game. This is a fun thing to do at any time, but because the Cubs have been in a re-building process (It’s been what –- 106 years since the team’s last World Championship), it was especially easy just to walk to the park and pick up tickets, for less than face value, on the street ten minutes before the anthem was sung.

September is an odd time to go to a game when a team is not contending for anything. It’s a time to see players just called up from Triple A and get a feel for whether they’ll make it to the roster next year.

Shortly after our tickets were scanned, we roamed around the park before claiming the best unoccupied seats in the grandstand. Then we watched an odd sort of parade. Rookie pitchers that just joined the club wore pink Hello Kitty backpacks as they made their way to the bullpen. All part of a hazing ritual, I guess.

We paid a lot of attention to at bats of highly touted prospects and gave, perhaps, less attention to players we expected would be back in Iowa next year. We found ourselves starting easy conversations with people sitting nearby.

And, of course, it was hard not to get nostalgic as we looked around — at the ivy covered brick outfield walls, the tall green scoreboard, a fixture at the friendly confines since 1937, and the Cubs’ old-fashioned blue pin-striped home uniforms. We recalled other visits to the park and swapped stories about special moments at games we attended. Rocco boasted that he was going to catch a foul ball.

It seemed important that I make a pilgrimage out to the park this season although I have not been following the team closely. This summer marked the 100^th year anniversary of baseball being played on this field, tucked away in the middle of the Chicago neighborhood that now bears its name, Wrigleyville.

The park has undergone some changes since first opening as Weeghman Park a century ago. Sky boxes and the Captain Morgan’s Club were added fairly recently.  Lighting for night baseball was added in 1988. (Until 1988, only day baseball was played.)  But I like to think that the experience of watching a game here now is pretty much the same as it was decades, maybe even a century, ago.

Since this wonderful feeling of time standing still can’t exist in a culture geared toward meeting commercial goals, plans for the Disney-fication of Wrigley Field have been drawn. Construction for many projects should begin as soon as this 100^th year celebration of the park is over.

They will be expanding the bleachers, re-locating the bullpen, adding new suites, updating the press box, renovating the concourse, and putting in a least one Jumbotron giant scoreboard. I guess they’re going to put up a hotel across the street.

It felt like a special time to be at the ballpark, like sitting on a baseball cusp of some sort. I watched a team of unknowns, some possible future stars, play in a 100-year old ballpark filled with memories and a lot of spilled Old Styles while a construction crew was poised to come in and make a new Wrigley Field.

Of course I feel wistful about the changes and hopeful about not waiting another hundred years for the Cubs to be crowned World Champions. Right now, I feel blessed.

Being at the intersection of the future and the past is no small thing.