Lets Check Our Grammer Next Time

By Benjy Lipsman in News on Apr 2, 2008 4:15PM

Given the Cubs century of futility, it's only fitting that once again a joyous event in team history is tainted with failure.

As part of Monday's Opening Day festivities, the team unveiled a statue of Ernie Banks outside Wrigley Field.

When Mr. Cub himself saw the statue on Monday, he asked in disbelief, ""Is that me?"

Many others asked, "Um... isn't that a typo?"

Along one side of the statue's base, sculptor Lou Cella of Fine Art Studio of Rotblatt-Amrany carved Banks' famous quote "Let's Play Two" into the block of granite. Except he forgot the apostrophe, so it reads, "Lets Play Two."

Cella received a lot of attention for his little grammatical slip-up -- by the time the Trib's Mary Schmich contacted him up he already knew what her call was about.

In many ways, we sympathize with Cella. From our time here at Chicagoist, we know all too well how quickly others like to publicly pounce on every typo and misspelling. We also know any mistake we make can quickly be fixed. Such is the beauty of hypertext!

We're willing to bet that Cella can also fix his mistake fairly easily. We'll also bet that all the local news channels will have full coverage of the monumental event.

UPDATE: An engraver added the missing apostrophe to the Ernie Banks statue this morning. It took about ten minutes. Expect at least 15 minutes of coverage from on tonight's nine and ten o'clock news broadcasts.

Photo by kellyhafermann