An interesting picture has been painted in the wake of A.J. Burnett’s honest response to a Chicago newspaperman’s questions: that Chicago is to baseball what the Blizzard is to Dairy Queen and Toronto is nothing more than a hockey-crazed, foreign city that occasionally tolerates the pastime.
This, of course, is incorrect.
For 100 years the Chicago Cubs have been a hopeless franchise. Inexplicably, this makes them insanely popular. Adding to their allure is the game-day environment that makes Wrigley Field and the surrounding neighbourhood like a frat house during homecoming.
From pints at Murphy’s beforehand to dancing at the Cubby Bear soon after, the game itself is occasionally an afterthought. This lends to local ignorance as many who leave the bleachers after each game don’t actually know who won.
Everyone loves a loser, and the Cubs are losers the same way Rocco Mediate is a loser – they never win the big one, but it’s a whole lot of fun trying.
As popular as they may be now, the Cubs are like any other team in baseball; when they’re losing, tickets aren’t hard to find.
To the south reside the White Sox, a team that's actually won something lately. Still, it seems the love affair with the '05 club fizzled quickly, which makes it impossible to lay down the tag "baseball town" on Chicago. Like the Cubs, the White Sox are a first-place team, but seats at U.S. Cellular Field are easily accessible.
Vernon Wells once suggested he knew more about hockey than the average big leaguer because the Jays could win a walk-off thriller against the Yankees, yet the nightly highlight shows would still make him sit through 20 minutes of hockey talk before a mention of the ball game (this in a city that barely supports major junior hockey and has a professional team that hasn’t won anything in 40 years). Toronto is hardly puck-silly, and those who don’t think the Blue Jays are capable of owning (or, at least, co-owning) the place have forgotten how valuable an upper deck seat used to be.
But it will take first place in September to get 50,000 back on a nightly basis.
That’s my take. What’s yours?
