White Sox Gaining Ground on the Cubs
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by user Fornelli
The Chicago Tribune has a story today about the results of a poll of Chicagoans and which teams they pay attention to.
No surprise, the White Sox are gaining a lot of ground. Of course, the Bears lead the charge in this city but that's because we've only got one football team.
Historically, a majority of Chicagoans have always chosen the Cubs over the Sox. This new survey shows the gap between the Cubs and the Sox has tightened considerably.
But this "revelation" is a little misleading.
If you live in this city you know the truth: there are just as many die-hard Sox fans as there are die-hard Cubs fans.
The difference? It's the casual fans that gravitate towards the Cubs. I'd say at least 75% of casual baseball fans in Chicago consider themselves Cubs fans.
But the thing about casual fans is they don't care that much and don't feel all that connected to one particular team. So, since the White Sox won the World Series a lot of that casual allegiance has switched direction to the South Side.
Then there are the morons who claim to "support all of Chicago." They root for both the Cubs and Sox. If there's one thing that Cubs fans and Sox fans can all agree on, it's that those people are spineless assholes. These are the same people who don't want to keep score in Little League games, cuz God forbid children learn the value of competing.
Pick a team and stick with it, Sally.
Now as a Sox fan you'd think I'd be happy that the Sox are gaining ground on the Cubs in the Prom King race that is Chicago baseball, but you'd be wrong.
I don't like it at all.
I LIKED being in the minority. There was a sense of being in on something special as a Sox fan in the past. Like you knew something that nobody else in the city did. While everybody was going to Wrigley Field and paying 40 bucks for bleacher seats (unless, of course, it was a game in which the Cubs sold their own tickets to their own scalpers across the street and marked the prices up even higher) to watch a bad team play bad baseball, Sox fans were paying the same price to sit in the first few rows to watch a contending team.
Everybody always talks about what a wonderful place Wrigley Field is. No it isn't. It's a dump - tiny, cramped and literally falling apart. Instead of spending money to fix the stadium though, all the Tribune company did was use that money to build more seats and put up screens to keep their own fans from watching from rooftops across the street.
Everything the White Sox were doing to US Cellular Field was to improve the experience for their fans, while the Cubs did everything in their power to make things worse for theirs.
Still the brainwashed masses (I don't include the die-hards in the brainwashed category) show up en masse everyday to give their entire paychecks just to see 3 hours of baseball and usually a Cubs loss. It's these people my friends and I would laugh about. Like lemmings following each other off of a cliff, they just had no idea what they were doing.
Now I wouldn't trade last season and our World Series championship for anything but I knew what the consequences would be.
No longer can my friends and I just decide to go down to US Cellular minutes before game time and get tickets anywhere we damn well please. Now, sold out games are becoming the norm, and what few tickets are available are in the last rows of the upper deck.
No longer can I go to the bathroom after the third out of an inning and be back in my seat before the pitcher is finished throwing his warm up pitches to begin the new inning.
There are people everywhere now, and the fact that most of them probably hadn't been to a Sox game in years, if ever, drives me insane.
Now, I feel compelled to watch my mouth cuz I'm usually surrounded by families of four with young children everywhere.
Of course, I also realize there are benefits to all this. Increased attendance means more revenue. Revenue that the White Sox will use to actually field a contending team for years to come. I also realize that those young children I now see at the games will grow up Sox fans, and not just the casual type either.
Make no mistake about it, I will adapt to the new situation at US Cellular Field and after a time, it won't even bother me anymore. I mean, I don't go to Sox games to be comfortable and make quick trips to the bathroom. I go to support my White Sox and I will continue to do that until I die. Everything that I'm going to lose from my experiences with the White Sox are the trivial, meaningless aspects of it all.
In spite of all that, it doesn't mean I'm not going to miss those days. I already do.
Date
Fri 08/04/06, 2:59 pm EST
