# Cubs vs White Sox fandom **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [October 15, 2015, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cubs-vs-white-sox-fandom/734688 "2015-10-15T02:40:28Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Ulf\_the\_Unwashed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/b4bc9f/32.png) [@Ulf\_the\_Unwashed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulf_the_Unwashed)\ **Post date:** [October 16, 2015, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cubs-vs-white-sox-fandom/734688/21 "2015-10-16T00:30:07Z")
I agree with a lot that’s been said here. I’m in my mid-fifties, so about 15 years older than **pulykamell** , and grew up in Chicago. We were South Siders but the Sox didn’t really register much. Part of it was indeed the park–Comiskey was not an especially nice place to watch a game. (I’ve been to 20 MLB parks, past and present; it rates about 18th on the Ulflist.) Part of it, as mentioned, was the day games. Night games ended kind of late; we didn’t go to many of them when I was young. “Let’s go to a ballgame” really meant “Let’s go see a day game,” which in turn generally meant “Let’s go to Wrigley.” Part of it was absolutely TV. The Cubs were on channel 9. Yeah, you got ghosts, but you also got nearly every single game, and it was VHF so the picture quality wasn’t bad. The Sox were on 32 or 44, when they were on at all, and mostly you got snow if you tried to watch them. (The audio came through pretty clearly.) Also fair to say, and this may be specific to me and my “generation,” that there was a buzz around the Cubs when I started watching baseball seriously (1969) and there wasn’t around the Sox. The Cubs were not playing home games in Milwaukee, and no one was talking in the seventies about possibly moving them to Seattle or somewhere. For comparison: I live in NY State now, and most of my neighbors are Yankees fans, but those who are my age or who were born in the late seventies, it seems to me, have a better than average chance of following the Mets (who were more relevant than the Yankees in 1969-1793 and again in the mid-to-late eighties). ---
**Author:** ![Jim\_s\_Son](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19adc/32.png) [@Jim\_s\_Son](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jim_s_Son)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2015, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cubs-vs-white-sox-fandom/734688/22 "2015-10-17T14:35:15Z")
> [@Gordon\_Urquhart](#): > > 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. Ironically Caray had been the White Sox broadcaster from 1971 to 1981. The way he told it, he didn’t like the White Sox plans to broadcast games on cable since he saw himself as the voice of the working class. There may be more, he could get on players. I remember one game where he and broadcast partner Jimmy Piersall (a man who proudly show you papers that prove he is sane) ripped Chet Lemon every chance they had for an hour for a base running gaffe that proved harmless. White Sox ownership may have been happy to let him go. ---
**Author:** ![Jonathan\_Chance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jonathan_chance/32/701_2.png) [@Jonathan\_Chance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jonathan_Chance)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2015, 4:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cubs-vs-white-sox-fandom/734688/23 "2015-10-17T16:37:18Z")
> [@Gordon\_Urquhart](#): > > 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. I’d concur with this - as others have - WGN broadcast 150+ Cubs games per year, every year, on basic cable. And it went out to pretty much the entire country. No better way to build a fan base than make it easy for them to watch the games all the damn time. My grandparents used to own a storm window factory on Lawrence near Ravenswood and my grandmother had the game on every single day. If it was blacked out for any reason she’d complain loudly and profanely about it. That’s the environment I was a small child in. Cubs uber alles, and all that. And dammit! Now I’ve got the Empire jingle in my head. ETA: In case you might be wondering why the Cubs and WGN were essentially sealed with wedded bliss? Who owned the Cubs? The Tribune Corporation. Who owned WGN? The Tribune Corporation. This is what we in the business world call awesome vertical integration. If the tribune could have bought Hamm’s beer it would have been perfect. ---
**Author:** ![Jim\_s\_Son](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19adc/32.png) [@Jim\_s\_Son](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jim_s_Son)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2015, 5:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cubs-vs-white-sox-fandom/734688/24 "2015-10-17T17:10:25Z")
One thing about Phil Wrigley when he owned the Cubs, he did things differently than other owners. He wouldn’t sell season tickets for two-thirds of Wrigley Field. He thought someone could decide of the day of the game to attend and get good seats for his family. He thought it was important for baseball to have a team in Los Angeles where he had a team so he allowed O’Malley to move the Dodgers. He thought televising games nationwide would hurt minor leagues so he tried to give his share of tv money to the minor leagues. He and Tom Yawkey were what were known as “Sportsmen”. Rich people who owned a sports team more as a civic responsibility, were often generous and friendly with their players. But prone to hire sycophants, be slow on things like integrating because “they weren’t their kind of people” and never really implementing the attitude that we are interested in winning championships ---
**Author:** ![Skywatcher](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/skywatcher/32/254_2.png) [@Skywatcher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skywatcher)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2015, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cubs-vs-white-sox-fandom/734688/25 "2015-10-17T17:29:20Z")
> [@Ulf\_the\_Unwashed](#): > > Part of it was absolutely TV. The Cubs were on channel 9. Yeah, you got ghosts, but you also got nearly every single game, and it was VHF so the picture quality wasn’t bad. The Sox were on 32 or 44, when they were on at all, and mostly you got snow if you tried to watch them. (The audio came through pretty clearly.) Back in the '70s, plenty of color TVs didn’t even have a UHF receiver. I was in Kankakee County then and any UHF watching in our house had to be on a little B&W. ---
**Author:** ![Ulf\_the\_Unwashed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/b4bc9f/32.png) [@Ulf\_the\_Unwashed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulf_the_Unwashed)\ **Post date:** [October 17, 2015, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cubs-vs-white-sox-fandom/734688/26 "2015-10-17T18:27:59Z")
> [@Skywatcher](#): > > Back in the '70s, plenty of color TVs didn’t even have a UHF receiver. I was in Kankakee County then and any UHF watching in our house had to be on a little B&W. Did not know that. We never had a color TV when I was growing up, so I guess it never came into play. Of course, getting nothing but snow on the UHF channels did tend to limit their usefulness, receivers or no… ---
**Author:** ![Jim\_s\_Son](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19adc/32.png) [@Jim\_s\_Son](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jim_s_Son)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2015, 2:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cubs-vs-white-sox-fandom/734688/27 "2015-10-18T02:05:54Z")
> [@NDP](#): > > True, but wasn’t old Comiskey Park also not held in high regard (or at least not as high regard as Wrigley)? ``` Old Comiskey was more of a pitcher's park. I wonder if there is something where hitter's parks become more beloved than pitcher's parks due to seats are closer to the field and fans prefer offense. It could be luck. The two that survive from a century ago, Wrigley and Fenway, are hitters parks. It would be interesting if they were duplicates of Comiskey and Braves Field. Ebbets field is far more remembered than the Polo Grounds (despite is 254' foul poles was neutral) but that could be many Brooklynites still feel they are a separate city as they were before 1897. ``` ---
**Author:** ![Thing\_Fish](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecb155/32.png) [@Thing\_Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing_Fish)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2015, 4:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cubs-vs-white-sox-fandom/734688/28 "2015-10-18T04:39:06Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > _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](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/04/17/baseball-post/f06b982d13298b7aabb3a37bee1e9d1d280e4c3b/maps/cubs-whitesox.png) 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYolR8B2ppI)? 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…) That’s very interesting. I knew that the WGN broadcasts were responsible for recruiting a generation of Cub fans across the country, but I didn’t realize they had such an advantage over the Sox even within the city itself. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cubs-vs-white-sox-fandom/734688.md?page=1)