WGN America, the national feed of WGN-TV in Chicago, announced it will drop all sports programming. For anyone who grew up watching Cubs games (or White Sox or Bulls) games back in the eighties, this is a real end of an era. I got into baseball watching Harry Carey do Cubs games back then, and so did a lot of other kids who didn’t live in areas with an MLB team.
That’s kind of depressing. When I was a kid, the Chicago sports teams (especially the Cubs) pretty much defined that channel for me.
When I was growing up on the East Coast we had the games that NBC wanted you to see, the Phillies on WTAF, the Cubbies on WGN, the Braves on WTBS, and the Mets on WOR. Naturally, I was a Pirates fan. But I digress. Like pseudograph said, WGN was the Cubs. In the days before ESPN and the other big sports networks, the superstations were where you got your games. All that’s left is the Braves on TBS.
Yes, this is sad. But then again in recent years most of the games weren’t on WGN America anyway. So many moved to either Comcast or WCIU that those of us displaced Chicagoan didn’t get to see a lot of the games.
Thankfully my wife got me a subscription to MLB.tv for an early Father’s Day present this year. It’s wonderful!
I stopped watching WGN when they dropped Bozo & Garfield Goose.
I can’t believe anyone watches baseball on TV…
That being said, I do enjoy it on in the background for reasons I can’t explain.
WOW… well i guess it was coming. I grew up watching those crappy 70
s cubbie teams… Jack Brickhouse was my guy… with Lou Boudreau… As Lou use to say… "Here’s a tip for you Little leaguer’s… don’t look at a called third strike "
According to this, sports just wasn’t bringing in the advertising revenue: Get ready to say goodbye to sports on WGN America
Except for the Blackhawks, none of the local teams have been getting it done for quite some time. Maybe if they were winning….
The Braves haven’t been on WTBS for years. I’m another one who spent endless hours watching baseball on all the superstations back in the 1980s. Following baseball daily during summer breaks helped me keep my sanity while all my friends were off on vacations or at camp. But, I can see in these 1000 channel universe day that a baseball game 2000 miles away probably doesn’t bring in the ratings, especially with sky high rights fees. Baseball, wrestling, and old sitcoms used to be cheap programming that could fill hours of broadcasting time.
My mother the still die-hard Cubs fan (they lost me in the mid-00’s) in northwest Georgia will be heartbroken when she learns about this. 
They have Dish Network too, which means MLB Extra Innings won’t be an option for them next year either. Uh oh. I’m not going to mention this to her.
I don’t quite understand the reference to NBC. TBS was never an NBC affiliate.
So… two ignorances here. First: What the hell is even on WGN? ISTR seeing ads for them on phone booths and the like in NYC all the time, and they were all for various syndicated comedies. Do they produce any actual content?
Second: What exactly is the difference between being a “superstation” and a “basic cable channel?”
I think WGN America is trying to become more of a cable network which produces it’s own content such as the Salem show.
A superstation was stations like WGN-Chicago , WOR-New York, and WTBS-Atlanta. In the early days of cable, these stations were picked up by cable companies. The superstations had an audience of the entire US, just not their local market. Baseball, Wrestling, and reruns of sitcoms were the bulk of the programming.
I think he reference to NBC was referring to the “Game of the Week” on Saturday afternoons. It was usually a big market team, Yankees, Dodgers, etc.
Ahhh…I got it. So you could watch the Game of the Week OR watch the “local” team on the various SuperStation feeds. Makes complete sense. Thanks!
Superstations were regular broadcast stations that were broadcast by satellite all across the country. So the shows and commercials you saw in NYC/Chicago/Atlanta were seen across the country. In the early 90s, the superstations were essentially killed off by legal rules that said out of area broadcast stations had to be blacked out on cable systems if they aired the same programs as local stations. Those rules didn’t apply to cable networks. That’s why WOR New York stopped national broadcasting and why WTBS Atlanta became a cable network with no Atlanta content.
Prior to cable and the proliferation of sports networks with baseball contracts, NBC showed the “Game of the Week”. That was what you got.
Growing up I rarely saw my Buccos because in the mid-'80s they were a terrible team. ESPN had the MLB contrct by the time they had their resurgence in the early '90s.
The superstations gave us options. We got the Cubbies and whoever they were playing during the day (remember, Wrigley at that time had no lights), the Braves on WTBS, and the Phils on WTAF out of Philadelphia, which we inexplicably got all the way past Harrisburg.