Cubs and White Sox allowed to fill 20% of seats to start season (Mayor Lightfoot)

[greenjar_01]

Link to tweet

Lightfoot Tweet: Folks, we've significantly slowed the spread of COVID, getting our positivity rate down to 2.8%. And now, we can begin to safely welcome fans back to our baseball stands on opening day. Although we’re reopening, masking is still of utmost importance.

[CincyDem]

1. Wrigley with 20% of seats filled - sounds like the early 80's. They would have killed for 20%. n/t

[greenjar_01]

2. Sorry, had to...

Link to tweet

[CincyDem]

3. Oh hell yeah - and that's probably on "free ticket day" !!! lol.

But I take your point...not many folks in Cincinnati grew up in Chicago listening to Jack Brickhouse on WGN radio every afternoon. lol

[greenjar_01]

4. haha

[Eyeball_Kid]

12. Brickhouse didn't do Cubs radio. He did WGN-TV. But he moved to WGN radio for Bears games.

Vince Lloyd and Lou Boudreau did radio. Before Lloyd, it was Jack Quinlan. Quinlan was the best, but he got killed in an auto accident during one spring training season, from what I remember.

[dhill926]

15. the voices of my childhood...

still remember Quinlan's death...

[CincyDem]

18. I thought it was him but you're right - he was on WGN-TV.

Somewhere in the mid-60's we transitioned from radio to a 12" B&W TV on the kitchen counter - thought we died and went to heaven. Must have been the TV side I'm remember. Still - listening to a ballgame on radio with a great announcer (Scully, Carry, Brenneman Sr.)...I still think that's so much better than TV. The right word pictures add so much to the game.

Thanks for the update.

[Moostache]

13. As a child of the Chicagoland area from the late 70's and 80's...

I think the Cubs are heading for another draught of epic proportions.

First things first...As a child, I LOVED the Cubs...Dave Kingman, Bobby Mercer, Ivan DeJesus...those godawful baby blue pinstripe road unis...this was pre-'88 (no lights on Wrigley) and as a kid, my grandmother and I would watch the games on WGN (or listen on the radio in the yard) and despite the team being just god-awful year after year...I still remember those summers bygone fondly...

Then I got a little older, started playing ball myself and started wanting to watch the night games - which meant the White Sox and my dad! Dad has been a White Sox fan since the days of Minnie Miñoso and the '59 Sox (who lost the Series to the Dodgers). Dad hates 2 teams - the Yankees and the Cubs. His mother was my Cub-loving grandmother. They had a falling out over baseball decades earlier when my grandmother threw away my father's complete set of Topps 1951 baseball cards and some other assorted collectibles while "cleaning". That was the set with the unbelievably expensive Mickey Mantle rookie card - a vertitable gold mine by itself if in Mint condition (which to hear dad tell it, he had 2 or 3 of them in his collection, immaculate of course!)

Anyway, as I get older in the 70's my allegiance is split...but my dad's is definitely not. During this time, the All-Star Game was a much bigger deal than it has devolved into...people CARED who won and the players did too. There was a significant financial reward for the winning team (compared to their annual salaries at the time) and a lot of it had to do with no interleague play. For American League only or National League only fans, the All-Star game was maybe the only time to see their favorite players go against the opposing league. For me, it was heaven - White Sox AND Cubs players, night game, staying up past bedtime...one minor problem though...

In the 70s and early 80s, the National League had a winning streak against the American League that was reaching epic proportions. From Wikipedia:

The National League dominated from 1950 to 1987, going 33–8–1. This included a stretch from 1963 to 1982 when it won 19 of 20, including 11 in a row from 1972 to 1982. Since 1988, the American League has dominated, going 25–6–1, including a 13-game unbeaten streak (12–0–1) from 1997 to 2009.

So, as a 10-year old, all excited to see the game, I sat down with my dad in our basement to watch the game and had the temerity to openly root for the National League players...a literal cardinal sin in our household at that time! I was sent to bed early! CRUSHED...mad as hell...but then my dad started trying to make up for it (my mom laid into him pretty good about that incident!). He began to get tickets to White Sox games from a family friend who had worked for Charlie Finley as the groundskeeper for Old Comiskey Park. We would go to games on the Southside...park in godawful neighborhoods, walk to the game with dad, sit in the upper deck (which my brother and I thought was the coolest thing in the world...then in 1983, the 50th All-Star game was played at Comiskey Park, and although we did not get tickets, I remember the '83 White Sox and that season fondly.

The AL broke through, winning the game for the first time in forever (powered by Freddie Lynn's grand slam) and the game and the Sox came to mean everything to me. My dad was my little league and junior high school coach. We did drills and he threw me batting practice - at the time pitching machines and the like were just coming out. And from 1983, through my playing days (ended by an elbow injury that left me unable to pitch or throw like I once did) and all the way to 1994...the White Sox and baseball were the center of my spring, summer and sadly very infrequently fall.

In '94, just before I moved out of my parent's house, my dad had a pair of tickets to a game but he could not go and my brother was no longer interested. I took the pair of tickets and dragged the girl I was dating at the time to the park for an August game just ahead of ... THE STRIKE! I had seen baseball strikes before, many people had obviously...but that one, that one cut me like a rusty razor blade under the bottom lip. Not only did the season get suspended, then the playoffs and World Series cancelled, but the White Sox - for the first time since '83 and before that '59, had the best team in the AL. They had Frank Thomas at the absolute peak of his Hall of Fame career...they had Robin Ventura, Tim Raines, and some guy named Guillen. Their record was behind the hated Yankees overall, but they were looking like a serious threat to win Chicago a World Series for the first time in decades and were the best team I could recall seeing fielded.

I was crushed. Baseball has NEVER meant the same to me. Partly because of Michael Jordan and the Bulls filling that void quite nicely, but mainly because that strike really marked the end of my young adult phase of life and stands in my memory as such a milestone year. I had moved out on my own, left the Chicagoland area that had always been home and settled in St. Louis. After growing up a long suffering baseball fan who had not so much sniffed a World Series in my lifetime (some 46 combined seasons between the Cubs and Sox, I was now a settler in a royal baseball city, yet I have never enjoyed the game as much as I did from the days in my grandmother's yard, collecting apples to make a pie while listening to games on her radio left over from the war years (100% god's honest truth...literally baseball and apple pie - with vanilla ice cream!!!) through everything up to 1994, I had lived, breathed and died baseball.

One of my great regrets from an otherwise idyllic childhood is the loss of my throwing ability. I was not great...but I was an All-Star and played on a team that finished 1 game away from he Little League World Series in '83...but I loved the game in a way that I have rarely loved anything else. That was rudely stripped away from me in '94. I took a passing interest in the game after that...watched the home run record chase up close and personal between Sosa and McGwire here in St. Louis...even got nostalgic with my dad in 2005 when the White Sox delivered a gift I never thought I'd get - the ability to share that experience of a winning White Sox team in the World Series with my dad. But its never been the same.

Finally, after more than 107 years, the 2016 Cubs won a World Series and that seemed to forever close the book for me and baseball. I take my kids to Cardinals games and they enjoy the experience somewhat, but its different with them than it was for me...partly because my heart is not into it the way my grandmother and my dad were...partly because of the pace of the game against modern life....and partly because I am not a Cardinals fan by birth - which is another weird thing about St. Louis for another time.

But I have seen the Cubs squander a young core of talented players that are starting to leave and I am reminded of this happening over and over in my lifetime - the 70's Cubs were always awful, so too were the Sox...'83, '88, '93 and then '94...all memories now of a different time, a different game but two teams that are always the same - second city baseball, aptly named.

(Epilogue....since moving to St. Louis, I have seen the Cardinals in the playoffs more years than not, I have seen 4 World Series and 2 Wins in those...all in less than a 1/4 of the time watching Chicago-based major league teams flail and fail...the White Sox had a good season in the weirdly abbreviated COVID-19 2020 season and are favored to do very well again this year...once again with the Yankees as a major hurdle and with a familiar face in he dugout again - Tony LaRussa. Who knows, now as an aging man, more prone to wistful ruminations on time and memories...maybe this bizarre connection to 1983, Chicago and baseball will produce the kind of memories that I will share with my boys and girls and wife and dad. Stranger things have happened!

(But the Cubs are still going to find ways to return to their all-time title - the best team of next year, forever!)

[frazzled]

5. And 100% of that 20%

at Wrigley will be drunk and rowdy. At least that was our experience the few times we went upon returning to Chicago ... even when we got tickets in the so-called “family section.” That’s when my husband switched to being a Sox fan. He now takes our young granddaughters to games, and he doesn’t have to cover their eyes or ears. They love it for the hot dogs and ice cream.

[greenjar_01]

6. Guaranteed Rate is a better, modern ballpark, with better beer, quite frankly

Wrigley is pretty much what it always was. Everybody knows what they're getting for a Cubs home game. I bring my kids. It's fine. Watch where you step, is all.

[frazzled]

7. Except for the name. /nt

[greenjar_01]

8. They're both named for local companies

[frazzled]

11. At least Wrigley was a person

And we all chewed their gum as kids.

Guaranteed Rate isn’t even a good name for a mortgage lender. But go White Sox.

[greenjar_01]

14. Jonathan G. Rate disagrees with you

(All kidding aside, that's slim parsing for company-named parks, though! People often forget that Wrigley Field was in some ways the first company-named park!)

[ok_cpu]

9. I've never been to Guaranteed Rate, but

I'm a huge Cubs fan, my first trip to Wrigley was like a pilgrimage, and I'm 100% fine if I never go to another game there.

I'm lucky in that where I live I can see them in Cincy or Pittsburgh with relative ease. PNC is a gem of a ballpark. I'd much rather see a game there than Wrigley.

[greenjar_01]

10. It's definitely a thing

I love going to Wrigley, but I can literally walk if I want (it's a bit of a hike - train is better).

They've made a lot of improvements over the last five years, but you'll never have the viewing experience of the newer parks (PNC, the Rate, Citifield, etc., where there's no bad seat in the house). Some people hate the Wrigleyville scene, which is understandable. It's not everybody's speed, to be sure.

[CincyDem]

19. Went to school across the street from Comiskey Park.

Cut more than a few classes, especially for opening day. Bill Veeck was a real promoter in those days...execpt for Disco Sucks night. lol

Hard to imagine the Sox in a corporate named stadium...but I guess that's progress.

[tritsofme]

16. In most seasons you'd be lucky to get 20% on a beautiful Saturday afternoon at Sox Park!

[greenjar_01]

17. Really starts to trail off after August 1