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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.