On the road (Where are the White Sox fans?)

 

When my family moved to western Illinois in the 1960s, I found that the friends I made were split in their baseball loyalties.

Many were fans of the St. Louis Cardinals.

Many were fans of the Chicago Cubs.

I had one friend who was a fan of the Chicago White Sox.

At the time, I wondered why Mike would choose to be a White Sox fan, when no one else was. But perhaps a better question would have been why no one else was.

The White Sox have been not very good for a very long time. After a World Series win in 1917, their next one was in 2005. On the other hand, the Cubs were worse, going more than a century between championship. Recently, the Cubs have definitely been better – at least they haven’t set a major league record for losses in a single season, as the White Sox did in 2024. But recent history doesn’t explain why Mike didn’t have any fellow Sox fans in the 1960s.

You can find lots of comments on the Web about why the Cubs are more popular than the White Sox, but one factor that’s often mentioned is the fact that the Cubs were broadcast on WGN, a “superstation” in the early days of cable TV in the 1970s and early 1980s. Again, though, that doesn’t explain my experience in the 1960s.

Another factor has to be the fact that while the Cubs have “charming” Wrigley Field (more on that when we get to Wrigley in a few days), the White Sox have Rate Field, a stadium on its fourth name since it opened in 1991. Although it was designed by HOK, the same architects who started the “retro-classic” design wave with Buffalo’s Sahlen Field in the 1980s, it was not in that style – instead, Baltimore’s Camden Yards, which opened the next year, starting the majors on that trend, so it was an instant dinosaur.

In Chicago, it doesn't seem like the Cubs are the only game in town. A Harris Poll in December 2023 found that 49% of Chicagoans identified as Cub fans, and 38% identified with the White Sox. That’s a significant difference, but not nearly the discrepancy that I found as a kid. Incidentally, that poll was taken a few months before the Sox embarked on what might be the worst season in major league baseball since the 1800s, so the numbers might be different now.

That poll also asked locals whether the city would be better or worse off if the White Sox moved to another city. The number who said Chicago would be worse off was just about identical with the number who identified as White Sox. Significantly, 18% said the city would be better off if the Sox moved. That’s pretty harsh, but some of those might be die-hard Cub fans.

When we rented a car from an Enterprise office billed as "South Loop" yesterday, the only other baseball cap in the facility besides mine was a White Sox cap on a customer, and Ivan, the young man who worked with us to find a working vehicle (long story, immaterial to this blog, but it wasn't Ivan's fault, and he was friendly, competent and diligent) is a former member of the White Sox grounds crew, so we got to discuss the ins and outs of rain delays from that perspective.

However, while the identification numbers in the Chicago area aren't that much stronger for the Cubs than the Sox, the Sox haven't outdrawn the Cubs in a season since 1992, the second year the current stadium was open. Last year, the difference was a factor of two. 

My sense is that, for whatever reason, the popularity of the White Sox doesn't extend beyond the suburbs at most, perhaps not even beyond the south edge of the city limits, while the Cubs are a national brand. 

One touch in Rate Field that I liked is the slightly larger than life-sized photos of important moments that are on the side of the pillars in the concourse. Like the Cubs, they don't have many World Series shots, although they have had some great players they can highlight. Unlike the Cubs, one of the pillars is taken up by a photo of Pope Leo XIV, a Chicagoan who grew up a White Sox fan. Maybe they'll be blessed with better success in the future.

Travel day:

Major league and AAA teams typically have one off-day per week. We've found that one of the keys for our longer trips, is to build in off-days. We typically build in more than one per week, since we don't stay in the same city as long as a major league (two days, vs. their typical three) or AAA (one vs. six) team does. 

In particular, if we've got a five and a half hour drive, as we did yesterday, going from Chicago to Columbus, we try not to plan on a game that evening. Instead, we went to a nice restaurant (Schmidt's Sausage Haus in the Germantown area, which we highly recommend) at the end of the drive, and did our laundry this morning. We do laundry frequently so that we can minimize the amount of clothes we have to pack, so that we don't have to check any bags on an airline. 

The other thing we try to do is make sure that we eat something other than ballpark food. Schmidt's counts (and we have leftover salad for lunch today), and we found a Trader Joe's in the Chicago Loop where we bought food for lunches for our days in Chicago. 

It works for us...