If I refer to Wrigley Field as a dump, which I have been known to do, it would be a bit inconsistent if I suddenly became teary eyed at the thought of someone coming in and changing its name.

There’s a decent chance that if the State of Illinois buys the tired old ballpark from Tribune Co., it will sell the naming rights. Wrigley Field could become something like Donald Trump Park.

I’m finding it difficult to work up much emotion about the possibility.

I gave up my battle over such things in 2005, a few years after White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, as he is wont to do, sold something to make more money. In that case, it was the name Comiskey Park. The ballpark became U.S. Cellular Field, an ugly, antiseptic appellation that did not immediately launch 1,000 stanzas of poetry. For two years I refused to use the words in my column. Comiskey Park deserved better.

I eventually saw that my boycott was silly. Things change. We move on. Bob Dylan switched from acoustic guitar to electric guitar and was called Judas for it. The move worked out pretty well for him and for us, don’t you think?

The Sox ballpark unofficially is called The Cell, and it fits. I still refer to it as Comiskey in conversation. Others do too. But there is not a sudden outbreak of groaning when the words “The Cell” are mentioned in conversation.

I have news for whoever buys the naming rights to Wrigley. You might think that because you have plunked down $100 million, the park will be called Wrigley Field at IBM Park or some other ode to capitalism you have coined. It won’t be. Everybody will continue calling it Wrigley Field. Forever and ever, amen. That’s the closest I’ll get to sentimentality on this.

A corporation would have to be idiotic to come in, wipe out the name Wrigley Field and slap something like Great Dot.Com Ballpark across the front of the building and believe everyone will jump onboard. But corporations are not immune to viral attacks of idiocy, and it is not unthinkable that someone would come up with the bright idea of renaming the ballpark, say, Hostess Twinkies Field. You say no one would name a baseball park for something so silly? Just remember that when you get all nostalgic over Wrigley Field, you are doing so over a ballpark named for a chewing gum company.

The economists can tell you how much the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company profits from having one of the most recognizable ballparks in America carrying its name. Naming rights to stadiums obviously wouldn’t cost so much if there weren’t a proven financial benefit to it. And yet, I don’t hear “Wrigley Field” and immediately think “Doublemint.” I hear “Wrigley Field” and immediately think “beer.” You might be different. You might get a hankering for a piece of gum every time someone mentions the ballpark. If there are enough of you like that, then perhaps the Wrigley Company might want to think about stepping in and purchasing the naming rights itself – that’s right, paying millions of dollars to ensure that the name of the ballpark stays the same.

Yes, I have given up, if you want to put it like that. When the Cubs began allowing Fox to scroll its ads on the bricks behind home plate at Wrigley a few years back, I wasn’t outraged. And in February, when the Cubs sold the green doors amid the ivy on the outfield walls to Under Armour, I wasn’t fazed.

Wrigley is Wrigley because each game is an event, because the neighborhood is alive, because the sun seems to shine a little brighter on that piece of land (possibly because of the beer or the Doublemint).