Cubs fans have been very prominent in the media lately even though their team has only made the LCS. However, I remember much less fuss when the other Chicago baseball team (one with nearly as inept a history) won it all in 2005. Why is the Cub fanbase bigger than the White Sox one? Do the fandoms align on geography or other factors? And for Chicago dopers, what are the White Sox fans’ reaction to the Cubs run?
The Cubs have a huge advantage with the location of Wrigley Field. Nice north side location, restaurants, bars, etc. Comiskey Park/U. S. Cellular is located on the south side, just a couple hundred yards from the Robert Taylor Homes, a crime ridden public housing project. You’d be wise not to remain in the area long after the game. I’m sure this is not the only reason, but it’s part of it.
I think that’s pretty much it. Cubs fans are (white) yuppies, hipsters and college kids. Sox fans are black kids and working class schlubs. (The Robert Taylor Homes are gone, but the TE Brown Apartments are ghettolicious, and practically in the Sox parking lot.)
Reporters who don’t want to get shot don’t hang out near US Cellular field much.
Yes, it’s very geographically fixed. If you’re a south sider, you’re supposed to root for the White Sox. North sider, Cubs. It’s written.
I’m a non-sports fan, but I’m from the neighborhood (spent my first year of life near the intersection of Halsted and Waveland), and have Cubs legend ingrained into my DNA apparently.
It all goes back to the 1945 Billy Goat Curse. The history and culture and wish to break the curse is something Cubs fans acquire and stays with them for life. The Billy Goat Tavern has a long history in itself. Link here: The Billy Goat Curse - The World-Famous Billy Goat Tavern - everything you need to know.
Yes it’s a historic ballpark in a nice neighborhood, too, but that’s not what generated the rabid fandom. While there’s a North Side/South Side thing going on, I have found the lines pretty fuzzy over the years. Take the CTA sometime during the Crosstown Classics, or just on either teams’ game days and you’ll find Sox or Cubs regalia on all sorts of people. I find myself surrounded by suburban idiots on either teams’ game day, trying to figure out how to ride the damn train while I’m just trying to get to work on time, dammit.
Despite growing up near Wrigley, I’ve always been a Sox fan. Referencing earlier comments w/regard to the respective fan bases, the Cubs crowd does indeed have a guppy look. At a Sox game much of the crowd looks like they just left work at a machine shop. These comments are not meant to be critical of either fan base.
Don’t their ballparks also have something to do with it? Wrigley Field is classically old and considered one of the more beautiful parks in MLB. US Cellular (formerly New Comiskey) Park, on the other hand, has been criticized as being a generic cookie-cutter stadium with all the charm and personality of a flat beer. About best thing you can say about it is that it’s functional.
The fandoms were already solidified long before the new Comiskey was built.
I think there’s a couple other factors in play as well. 1. The Cubs used to play a lot of day games and were broadcast on WGN nationwide. A lot of people growing up got to see a lot of Cubs games during summer breaks. I know as I got older, from about 12 until I was able to drive, I spent more time watching baseball as the pickup games of my early youth were far less frequent. When many of your friends are off at camp or on long family vacations, watching baseball on TV was more appealing.
Second, I think many casual fans without a strong team loyalty pick up a Cubs fandom if they move to Chicago. A lot of people who graduate from large Big 10 universities take their first job in Chicago and live in northside neighborhoods such as Lakeview or Lincoln Park. They may not avidly follow the Cubs, but they remember the fun times at a game at Wrigley or hanging out at the numerous sports bars in the neighborhood
I assume the geography and demographics explain the animosity between the 2 fan bases. I don’t think other cities with 2 pro teams are so divided. I work with a White Sox fan from Chicago and he is miserable from the Cubs’ success.
Yes, casual fans who, as a body, care more about drinking than baseball as such. Among all major league teams, Cubs attendance is the least responsive to team performance. They do fly those “W” and “L” flags to give people staggering past (or out of) the ballpark an idea what happened.
In my experience the difference between the fan bases can be succinctly described:
Cubs fans = happy drunks
Sox fans = mean drunks
There are a great many highly knowledgeable and passionate Cub fans, but as others have noted, it is also true that our ballpark is a tourist attraction/open-air singles bar, and many people who are neither knowledgeable or passionate do show up to games, which doesn’t happen at most MLB parks. This can cause the actual Cub fans to get an unfair bad rap, as demonstrated in the comment above. OTOH, we’ll take the revenue and live with the annoying post-fraternity element.
It is interesting that Chicago-area Jews are disproportionately Sox fans, even though it has been several decades since there were many Jews on the South Side; it has been passed on through the generations, even though the center of Jewish population is now solidly on the North side and northern suburbs.
I think most Sox fans now are doing what Cub fans did in 2005; most aren’t so gauche as to actively root against a Chicago team, but just try to pretend it isn’t happening.
I think it’d be interesting to see a study of how many present-day Cubs fans can trace their fandom to nationwide WGN broadcasts in the 1980s, especially of home games before lights were installed at Wrigley in 1988 (and, coincidentally, could also tell you what Empire Carpet’s phone number was). I became a Cubs fan in 1984, which happened to be the first year we had cable. I was 15, and had a summer job that had me home by noon almost every day – I was free to watch nearly every WGN-broadcast game. I stayed a Cubs fun until I switched my allegiance to the Rockies in 1992, but I’d probably still be a Cubs fan if Colorado didn’t have a franchise.
There was a lot of appeal to the Cubs’ broadcasts beyond the easy access: Harry Caray, the views of Wrigley Field, but I would’ve missed all of that had I not had the access to begin with.
WTBS broadcast Braves games nationwide as well, but most of their games were at night. And they didn’t have Harry Caray.
Living most of my life in central Illinois, I’ve seen a lot more Cubs fans than Sox fans. This is probably for the reasons mentioned, but also because there are so many Cardinals fans in the area, and the Cards/Cubs rivalry tends to increase interest in both teams.
raises hand
Basically, the answers above are pretty accurate, from my perspective. It’s mostly an issue of geography, and there is a class element to it, but I think that is a bit overstated, and mostly due to geography, anyway. If you grew up on the South or Southwest Side of Chicago or the suburbs out in this direction, you were geographically predestined to be a Sox fan. The other side of the city and suburbs, a Cubs fan. Chicago, though, has three sides (well, technically, there is a neighborhood called “East Side,” but that’s Southeast Side and you can lop it in to Sox fan territory along with Northwest Indiana), and West Side is, I believe, generally Sox country, too, but the geographic subdivision is normally expressed in a simple North/South Side divide. There’s a map here you can use for reference (there appears to be a pocket of Cub fandom in what I believe is Hyde Park/University of Chicago area on the map. Crazy college kids is the explanation for that, of course. Or, rather, the non-local influence.)
Anyhow, in response to the post I quoted: I grew up and still live in the Southwest Side of the city, about a mile in from Midway airport. This is traditionally heavy Sox country, although over the last decade or two, there seems to be a lot more acceptance of Cubs fandom and bars even have Cubs memorabilia in them. This, to me, seems unthinkable from my recollections of childhood, although I didn’t really go to bars much then, of course. (Although my dad would occasionally take me to the local tavern when I was a young gradeschooler.) I grew up a Cubs fan because of WGN. I’m 40, so my formative years (5-13) were spent watching day baseball at Wrigley on WGN. Television coverage of the Sox here was patchy. I seem to remember there being a period of time when they weren’t shown regularly on any non-scrambled (I’m dating myself here) terrestrial TV, but you had to watch most or at least a good chunk of the games on Sportsvision, a scrambled terrestrial pay-TV service. Otherwise, I believe the UHF station WFLD-32 carried them. Look like, according to that article, it was from 1982-1989 before they moved to cable (and eventually became SportsChannel.) My parents are both Polish immigrants, so I did not have any family loyalty to guide me. So during my summer vacations, I would watch this strange game on TV in the afternoon when the Cubs were in town, and I became a Cubs fan. I would say in my neighborhood, of baseball followers, Cubs fans numbered maybe 10%. I blame my years of misery on lack of strong parental guidance. 
(Writing that paragraph made me feel old, with references to UHF, scrambled pay-TV, and day-only baseball. Oh, and any child of the 80s or before in Chicago will of course remember, 588-2300 for Empire. Digging a little deeper, do you also remember Boushelle’s “HUdsen 3- 2700” commercial? That’s the last phone number–probably only phone number–I remember commercially being advertised with the telephone exchange name in it, instead of all numbers. I’m sure plenty of Dopers are thinking, oh, you young whippersnapper…)
I wouldn’t have remembered the number, but now I have “five eight eight, two three hundred, empire” going through my head. Is (was) that actually their jingle?
The one I remembered from over the air WGN is Hudson three two seven hundred
ETA: The entirety of that 1986 commercial is about how Empire Carpet only did carpet. It’s nothing like that today – there are Empire Today outlets all over the country, and they sell all kinds of flooring and window treatments.
Well, I guess that was embedded deep in my repressed childhood Cub-fan memories somewhere.
True, but wasn’t old Comiskey Park also not held in high regard (or at least not as high regard as Wrigley)?
Well, I would say that Wrigley is the more iconic park, especially with the famed ivy walls, the bleachers, etc. But it was fairly dumpy back in the day. Comiskey probably moreso, but, even as a Cubs fan, I liked old Comiskey and initially found New Comiskey to be a cold, sterile ballpark. It’s much improved since then and is, I would say, a more comfortable and manageable fan experience than Wrigley is (better sight lines, better food, not as cramped, although Wrigley has made some improvements in the past few years that have modernized it. It’s still fairly cramped), but I prefer Wrigley for the atmosphere and history.