Opening Day came early to Wrigley Field on Sunday night, with the Chicago Cubs losing to the St. Louis Cardinals, 3-0, at the only stadium in professional baseball that could’ve really used an extra 24 hours of preparation.
Television broadcasts covered Wrigley Field’s ongoing renovation at length, but what viewers at home didn’t see was the meltdown of desperation and ammonia taking place in the stadium’s concourses and upper deck.
Simply put, the Cubs’ restroom facilities were not up to snuff, and long restroom lines led to a messy jettisoning of dignity for fans desperate to relieve themselves.
UPDATE: April 7
As promised, the Cubs are bringing in portable toilets for Tuesday night’s game against the St. Louis Cardinals.
Twitter user Wrigley Renovations posted images of the john influx. Looks like sports fans will have more options than rain gutters and beer cups for urinating this time around.
Good times in Wrigley again!
—End of Update—
Pictures of long bathroom lines snaking through the friendly confines began surfacing on social media shortly after the game began. Fans needing to unburden their recycled Old Style faced an estimated wait times of 30 minutes or more.
Lines for the bathroom became so long they spilled out of the concourse, through the gates and into the seating area.
Naturally, with necessity comes innovation, which in this case meant fans peeing into cups. In lieu of waiting 30 minutes to pee into a trough, fans started urinating into plastic cups and leaving the used articles in corners throughout the concourses.
Warning: These are pictures of pee cups, which is kind of gross.
The Cubs have since addressed the bathroom situation, according to the Chicago Tribune’s Alexandra Chachkevitch. They say a temporary issue with facilities in the upper deck led to increased traffic in the lower restrooms.
Cubs spokesperson Julian Green apologized in a statement (via Chachkevitch):
Opening Day at Wrigley Field has always brought challenges with wait times and tonight was particularly extreme…With 35,000 fans showing up in the ballpark tonight, we were simply not prepared to handle guests during peak periods. We have high standards for service and we missed the mark tonight. We want to apologize to our fans for the inconvenience.
Green added the Cubs will be bringing in portable bathrooms to supplement their existing restrooms.
To review, the Cubs are low on bathrooms, and will bring in large, portable pee cups for fans to use until the actual toilets are ready.
But at least you won’t be at risk of kicking one over now?
Dan is on Twitter. A pee cup is a pee cup is a pee cup.
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