As a Cubs fan, I don’t really agree with this. The fandom here is pretty evenly split, I think, depending on where you are.
Here’s a map of it by zip code:
Even in Lakeview, the neighborhood where the Cubs play, the breakdown is 44% Cubs fans 28% Sox fans. My ZIP is 53% White Sox, 35% Cubs, 2% Red Sox (we have Red Sox fans in my neighborhood?) In the city proper, my guess is that it’s an even split, or even possibly slightly favorable for the White Sox. However, I can’t find numbers that address just the city itself. Once you include all the suburbs and exurbs, Cubs definitely pull ahead.
ETA: What’s interesting to me is that when you go to Eastern Iowa, about 10% of the fandom is also the White Sox.
The short-term issue is that if the Sox move out of Chicago it’ll be because some other city will be willing to build a new stadium while Chicago refused to do so. Another owner won’t come in and build their own, regardless of how big a market Chicago is. (In the long term, Chicago would likely relent and build Comisky 3.0.)
This is about ten years out of date, and it only shows a part of the Midwest (can’t access the whole map this way for some reason)…but it’s done by county. It shows Cook County with a plurality of Sox fans along with what looks like three other adjacent counties south of their ballpark. Get further out and it’s all Cubs.
My recollection of the full map, though, is that the Mets and A’s didn’t have a plurality in any county at all, including the ones they play in, and the Angels had just one county. So in the narrow sense of “how many counties does the team have a plurality of fans,” the Sox do better than some others. One data point, anyway.
I once had a conversation on the topic of popularity with a colleague who has been retired for several years now. He said that, in the old analog/regular TV days, the Cubs were televised on Chicago channel nine, which had a very large viewing public. In fact, it was sometimes referred to as “super station channel nine”. The White Sox, on the other hand were sparsely televised on a frequency known as “UHF”, which required a special antenna for reception and had, in comparison, a very small viewing public. Later on as the cable technology became increasingly prevalent, they were televised on something called, I believe, “Sports Channel”. It also had a limited viewership. The result was that the Cubs became far better known and followed outside of Chicago than the White Sox. How true this is I cannot say. If anyone wants to chime in, please do.
I mean, that’s exactly why I became a Cubs fan even locally here on the South Side back in the 80s, and what I meant when I said " I’m a Southside Cubs fan and have been all my life because of day baseball and WGN." As I had no one to guide my fandom, I got hooked on the Cubs because, during the summer especially, those games were on constantly and during the day, not potentially competing with any other games.
And, yes, the Cubs being a national fandom even back then was recognized at least partly due to WGN’s Superstation reach (Here’s an in-depth article on what a superstation is). White Sox games were a lot more difficult to get a hold of. It wasn’t so much you needed a special antenna to get UHF – even the cheap rabbit ear antennas with a little loop would work fine, but they did tend to be weaker signals. (We just had a big ol’ antenna in the attic, like many/most people had those days in the neighborhood.) It’s more that many weren’t broadcast on unscrambled channels, and you needed Sportsvision to watch them (pre-Sports Channel.) Sportsvision was founded in 1982 by Jerry Reinsdorf, Eddie Einhorn, and … lemme look this up … Fred Eychanar. Sox, Hawks, Sting, and Bulls games were broadcast on this channel. You needed a convertor box to watch the scrambled channel (similar to ON-TV at the time, if you have any memory of it. ON-TV was on channel 44, and Sportsvision was on channel 60. I believe 60 would carry normal, unscrambled programming when sports wasn’t happening, and they switched to Sportsvision when there was.) We didn’t have a convertor box for Sportsvision, thus I very rarely saw White Sox games on the television as a kid. I’d hear games on the AM-radios of neighbors sitting on their stoops in the summer, and the occasional weekend game on major network television, but that’s about it.
It simply wasn’t easy to watch a Sox game if you didn’t subscribe to pay TV or have cable. With the Cubs, every single game was on WGN back then. Every one. Didn’t cost you a dime to watch it; you didn’t need any extra convertor box or anything.
WGN was just everywhere and carried and broadcast every game. It was hard to avoid it. And whenever we travelled across the country on vacation, I could usually find WGN at the hotel to watch the game.
Digging a bit more, it seems that even with Sportvision, about 1/4 of White Sox games were broadcast on Channel 32. So it wasn’t quite as difficult to catch a Sox game as I may have implied, but it was a lot more difficult than with the Cubs and WGN, which broadcast every game for free (to my knowledge/memory.)
That nomenclature was because, from the late 1970s through the early 2000s, WGN’s TV programming – including their broadcasts of Cubs games – was both broadcast over-the-air in the Chicago market, and distributed via satellite nationally, appearing on many cable TV systems.
This allowed the Cubs to greatly broaden their fan base outside of Chicago, because wherever you lived, if you had WGN on your cable service, you could watch most (if not all) Cubs games.
What was the “superstation” satellite version of WGN became gradually uncoupled from the local WGN broadcast, and it’s now evolved into an entirely different cable channel, NewsNation.
Similarly, Atlanta’s WTBS became a satellite superstation at about the same time that WGN did – and they carried Braves games, as WTBS was owned by Braves owner Ted Turner. (And, like, WGN, the TBS satellite programming feed was eventually uncoupled from the local TV feed.)
Edit: apologies for being somewhat duplicative with @pulykamell 's post.
They lost 6-3 to the Twins last night, and got only 4 hits. They are at 3-21, and their team batting average slipped back down to .189, leaving them now as the only MLB hitting under the Mendoza Line (the A’s are at .202, and the Twins at .212, after getting 13 hits against Chicago last night).
Going back a little further: in the seventies, WGN did indeed broadcast ALMOST every Cubs game–they took a couple of road series off, not sure just why. It was VHF as noted, so all you had to contend with was the ghost image.
WFLD broadcast many fewer Sox games–I want to say maybe half? But the bigger issue was that the picture was so bad and so snowy on our little TV that I rarely even tried to see Sox games. UHF was just too frustrating to try to watch.
Which is weird, because with Sportvision in 1982 and a few years onwards, you have to get a decoder box and tune in to a UHF frequency anyway, Ch. 60.
We had an attic aerial, so never had any issues with VHF or UHF station from what I remember. We could even some days get Channel 56 from Gary and then I feel we could get some Milwaukee stations when the weather conditions were just right.
They are 15 games out of first place in April. I’m wondering what the record is in the modern divisional era. They have to at least be flirting with it.
