Cubs Move Home Game to Avoid Overlapping With Neighboring Gay Pride Parade

Wrigley Field sits about five blocks away from Chicago’s Boystown neighborhood, which is hosting its annual Gay Pride Parade on June 29th. The Cubs had a home game scheduled that day, but moved it at the request of their alderman. A relatively confined area with a massively high amount of different hordes of very intoxicated people was thusly averted.

Estimates pegged Pride Parade’s attendance at over 1,000,000 last year. For the festivities, cops generally allow everybody to just drink on the streets. Revelers mostly have the decorum to use brown paper bags, but they’re getting wasted. If it’s a nice day, there are few things that are more fun than being there. Everybody is really happy and friendly. It’s not a dangerous drunken crowd.

The Cubs averaged over 32,000 fans each game last season, and there’s a bunch more foot traffic than just that in Wrigleyville on game days. While I wouldn’t say that the post-game crowds are especially out of control, there’s a fair share of aggression.

Holding the two events on the same day probably wouldn’t bubble over to anything entirely unmanageable, but the added traffic alone is a good enough reason to make sure that they never overlap.

[Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images]