So he’s not happy with a 14 year old stadium. What an a-hole.
If you’re talking about the current stadium, it’s 33 years old. Still an a-hole.
Oh, shit, I misread the opening date. My bad.
I didn’t even know he was from New York.
He was born in Brooklyn and saw Jackie Robinson’s debut.
Oh, I bet if that happened the Cubs would just take over.
I’ve had Sox fans tell me that they would root for the Nashville Sox before they’d ever root for the Chicago Cubs. Of course, that might change over time.
I would expect the fans to follow the team, not the city, to be honest. No way current Sox fans root for the Cubs. Maybe eventually fandom would be consumed by the Cubs, but in a generation or two.
Those weren’t rumors, they were openly publicized and well documented fact. Only the threat to move to Tampa, and serious arm twisting by Governor Jim Thompson, succeeded in jamming funding for New Comiskey Park through the Illinois Legislature at the literal last minute in 1988 (actually three minutes beyond the last minute, if you want to get nitpicky.) If that vote had failed, the White Sox were gone.
Of course, if they had moved, they would have been stuck (in Tampa) with poor attendance in a poorly located ballpark that nobody likes–just as they have been in Chicago. Which would have served Reinsdorf right, I suppose.
Having watched the Senators move to Minnesota, and then the “new” Senators move to Texas, I can assure you, this doesn’t happen. Even without another team in town.
Brutal loss tonight for the White Sox.
They blew a 5-1 lead when the Cubs scored 4 in the bottom of the sixth and eventually went ahead, 7-6. Last chance for the White Sox in the top of the ninth when they got a walk with one out and the pinch runner stole second, only to get picked off. A strikeout ended the game.
12 losses in a row. They’re back on pace to win 40 games this year. Well, 39.8 to be exact.
This is the first season where even a crosstown series is uninteresting to me. Man, Sox vs Cubs used to be a big damn deal.
Interesting. I have counter examples in my wife’s family with a bunch of older Atlanta Braves fans via Milwaukee, but perhaps that is anamalous. I know if my Cubs moved for whatever reason, I sure as shit would not become a Sox fan; I’d follow them.
ETA: There is a YouGov poll on this, and it’s pretty much split down the middle, with 49% saying they’d follow the team, 37% unlikely, and 14% don’t know:
That really surprises me. I don’t know how you overcome the feeling of betrayal.
My great uncle’s mother whose parents came through Ellis Island and settled in Brooklyn was an avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan and Yankee hater, and she really understood baseball. When the Dodgers moved to L.A., she was devastated and felt so betrayed that she literally gave up watching baseball for the rest of her life.
Expansion to 32 teams has long been something they’ve been vaguely interested in, but you need owners and stadia. Sports leagues don’t expand the way an entrepreneur does, like some guy who owns eight Panera Bread joints and invests in opening another; they take huge sums of money from billionaires or consortiums to be allowed to join the club.
To go to 32 teams, you need two billionaires in open markets who are willing to hand MLB a billion dollars AND who get get MLB-level stadiums built. If those two things arose, MLB would expand tomorrow. Hell, they’d go to 34 or 36 teams if the billionaires presented themselves.
If the White Sox are scheming to move to Nashville and later a billionaire wanted to start another Chicago team, well, MLB would do it. Chicago can support two teams. Of course, New York could support 3. Maybe 4, if we’re expansive as to what constitutes “New York.” So could LA.
That was my father. He loved the Dodgers and they broke his heart. Even marrying a Yankees fan didn’t change that. He would take us to games but he didn’t have a team. In the 80s the Mets started to Pinterest him but then he died.
Heh. The Kansas City Athletics were in KC for 13 years, and posted an overall winning percentage of barely over .400. Charlie Finley, who owned the team for the last 7 years of that era, was shopping for a new location almost as soon as he bought the team. Average attendance was less than 700k in the Finley years, and when the team moved to Oakland after the 1967 season, nobody in Kansas City shed a tear.
The Royals came into existence just two years later, largely as a result of an anti-trust legislative threat by Missouri Senator Stuart Symington.
They just blew a 5-1 lead to lose 7-6 on a walk-off by Mike Tauchman.
I turned off the Cubs game when it was 5-1 thinking, surely, the Sox end their streak tonight. The Cubs just weren’t looking good, and the Sox were well outhitting the Cubs. I just checked the score a few minutes ago and had to make sure I wasn’t looking at Tuesday’s score by accident (both were 7-6 in favor of the Cubs.) Nope, the Sox blew it again.