I ran across this article today that says that Sam Zell, who just bought the Tribune Company, is likely to sell the naming rights to Wrigley Field. If you know anything about Sam Zell then this comes as no surprise.
Such a move by Zell is likely to create lots of angst and teeth gnashing among Cubs fans and baseball purists. For the realists among us, its a move that’s just taken longer than expected. Comisky’s gone. Chicago Stadium is gone. Tiger Stadium is gone. There all gone. Financial powers like the Yankees or the Cowboys are able to operate without selling naming rights, but for many teams and cities the selling of naming rights is the reality of the day.
The potential for change to an institution like Wrigley got me thinking however. Would it be possible to create a Firefox script that would allow me to not be subjected to corporate naming rights imposed upon a public stadium. Sure enough, with a little digging I was able to come up with something.
Starting with a utility called WebVocab, created by Scott Olsson, I’ve modified the script so that when a web page opens, Firefox will change the name of your favorite team’s stadium back to the original name.
The script is easy to implement and can be turned on and off very easily.
First, you need to have the Firefox Greasemonkey extension installed.
Then, download the StadiumNamer script here.
And you’re done. Now, when you open a page that contains the words “Heinz Field,” Firefox will change it to “Three Rivers Stadium.” “U.S. Cellular Field” will be changed to “Comiskey Park.” “TD Banknorth Garden” will be “Boston Garden.” “Invesco Field” will be “Mile High Stadium.” And so on.
If you want to change any of the revised names its easy to do. Just change the word within the quotation marks on any line. I didn’t put a whole lot of effort in coming up with names. Places like ARCO Arena just get changed to Sacramento Arena.
With two exceptions, I’ve limited the script to changing the names of stadiums. You’ll notice however that the last two lines relate to Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. You can remove those if you want. If you leave them then whenever their name is on the page an asterisk will automatically be added. Something like this.
The industrious among you will obviously have other names you’ll be able to play with. Have fun.
Here’s some additional instructions from the original WebVocab script should you need them. And the original documentation says that the script might cause gmail or other pages to run slow. Greasemonkey allows you to exclude sites from the script. Or you can just click on the monkey head and turn Greasemonkey off.
UPDATE: For those of you that don’t want to deal with GreaseMonkey, Brian Cook has turned this into a plugin.