America wrote:
It's actually the Cubs who have a grim long-term future.
The city is hot again, it's where people want to live. Aside from the immediate vicinity of bigfan the Sox own the city. They own all of Cook Co, which 20 years from now nobody will want to live outside of. The Cubs own Iowa, Indiana and the collar counties/downstate (to me these two are identical); a giant pile of "who-the-fuck-cares".
What keeps the Cubs chugging is a tourist trap ballpark and a Red Sox-ian mythos that appeals to white people. Erasing all that with a tone deaf owner who wants to corporatize the franchise (THE WHOLE APPEAL WAS THE LACK OF TACKY CORPORATE SHIT REMEMBER) will kill the Cubs.
This city has changed sides before, and will again. Writing's on the wall. What few actual Cubs fans remain will throw in the towel when the plan fails (as it obviously will).
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle on this. While the city has "changed sides" in the past, I think we're pretty much crystallized at Cubs > Sox. That doesn't mean there's a 10:1 ratio of Cubs fans to Sox fans, which is simply fantastic bullshit, nor that the Sox have to move to godforsaken San Antonio, but the Sox are pretty well entrenched as the second team now. They couldn't capitalize on their run of competent seasons in the '90s, they couldn't capitalize on the Cubs tanking a few years ago, and they couldn't even capitalize on winning the damn World Series. Years of stubborn and aloof marketing against John McDonough's wizardry with the Cubs ruined them, and now McDonough is doing it to them again with the Blackhawks in the battle for the city's #4 team.
Nevertheless, the ceiling for operating a team in Chicago is always going to be higher than it would be in [insert ~2.5MM-population metro here]. We're talking about a major world city here. It's the same argument people have made for the Rays being better off at the Meadowlands as a third New York team than having Tampa Bay to themselves and doing fuck-all with it, which will never happen, but is not without merit. There's no reason why the population and corporate base can't support two baseball teams, other than "the owner of the White Sox is a creepy old jock-sniffer who does things his own way." And even that will have to change because he'll have to die eventually.
Saying that no one will want to live outside of Cook County in twenty years isn't a prediction I'm comfortable making, because there will always be Scoreheads, but the rapid development of the South Loop, West Town, and other non-north-side neighborhoods is something that could easily have long-term benefits for the White Sox should they choose to capitalize on it. Likewise, I don't think the Cubs have a grim long-term future,
per se, just one that's somehow greedier and more soulless than when they were owned by a publicly traded media conglomerate that used them as a TV show.
If anything poses a fatal threat to the Sox, it's not the Cubs, it's a precipitous drop in interest in baseball, which obviously will take down both teams.
Anyway, fuck the Chicago White Sox, long live the Chicago White Sox.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.