Today’s column from the Kankakee Daily Journal and The (Ottawa, Ill.) Times …
Chicago Baseball: Win, Lose … and Draw?
The WISCH LIST
Sept. 11, 2010
The Bears open tomorrow. The Fighting Illini home opener is tonight. And next weekend, the Blackhawks already have a sell-out at the United Center … for a practice.
But here, baseball is still in season – even if the Cubs are done and the White Sox just barely hanging on. Last week, after dissecting 90 years of Chicago baseball attendance figures, I asked readers for explanations on why the Sox have served as the city’s Second Fiddle since the ’60s and even lost ground during the 2000s, a decade in which they won a World Series.
Their theories were many, and here are a few …
It’s the money
“Sox fans pay the fifth-highest ticket prices in all of baseball,” Jason Bauman writes. “Why? I don’t know. I believe the Cubs charge the second-highest prices behind Boston. What do the Red Sox and Cubs have in common? They have a tourist attraction for a ballpark …
“Thus, the Cubs and Red Sox can get away with charging people through the nose. The White Sox, not so much.”
It’s the math
“As a lifelong die-hard Sox fan, I have always been somewhat embarrassed and bewildered by the perpetual attendance problems on the South Side,” writes John (no-relation-to-Jason) Baumann.
“I think the reasons for the Cubs popularity are pretty simple. I’m only 26 years old, but from what I can gather it all started with the ’84 Cubs and Harry Carry arriving on the North Side, which established Wrigley as party central in Chicago …
“As for the reason the Sox have failed to draw in the past, I think a huge reason is that there simply just aren’t that many Sox fans. On top of that, most Sox fans live a good distance away from the Cell, as most old-school Sox fans long ago relocated to the South and West suburbs.
“I guarantee if the Sox played in Naperville or Tinley Park their attendance would surge. I might be wrong, but it seems like most Cubs fans are either young, single people who live near Wrigley, tourists from Iowa, or retirees, while the Sox cater more to families. That’s why the Sox draw extremely poorly on April, May, and September school nights.”
It’s television
“The biggest influence, I think, regarding Sox vs. Cubs attendance is WGN,” David Rigg writes. “The Sox also used to be broadcast on WGN until they moved to Ch. 32 in the ’70s, and then to the absolute television sewer of Ch. 44 where nobody watched them!
“Remember Sportsvision? That was another fiasco that lost TV fans. For $50 you bought a converter box to unscramble the TV signal from Ch. 44. Nobody watched. [The Sox] weren’t even televised at all in the early ’80s. You could only get them on radio until they had clinched in ’83, and TV broadcasts were renewed.
“They could only be seen on cable (still new to Chicago) or Ch. 32 until they returned to WGN in the early ’90s. But, they lost a generation of Chicago fans while the ‘Cubbies’ held the limelight. Cubs games broadcast for free on a superstation drew not only local fans’ attention, but tourists from far and wide, making Wrigley Field a destination and helping fill up the park no matter what’s happening on the field.”
It’s the location
And, finally, Dick Kazlausky writes, “My one regret, even today, is when the Sox decided to build a new Comiskey. I wonder how things would’ve changed if they built it right next door to Soldier Field, where you could hit a home run into Lake Michigan.
“If they had built an indoor stadium to the likes of Miller Park a stone’s throw from the Loop … Attendance problems? Hmm, I wonder …”