The Chicago Experience – Rooting for the White Sox and Cubs

I grew up rooting for the White Sox and Cubs. And I still do.

This offends many a Chicagoan. Sue me.

If you’ve got Chicago written across your jersey or sweater, I’m all in. Chicagoans are like that. Root, root, root for the home team. Only not with baseball. You’re supposed to pick a side and hate the other, but I never bought in.

Look, I earned the right. The Cubs only played day games at Wrigley Field when I was growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s. So, my daily summer schedule went something like this: watch the Cubs lose in the afternoon as I wolfed down some SpaghettiOs for lunch, go outside and get on the Big Wheel with the boys and ride up and down the block, come home, click on channel 32 WFLD to watch The Banana Splits (“Uh oh, Chongo!”) and The Brady Bunch and end the day by watching the Sox lose on channel 44 WSNS. I could barely see what was going on, as channel 44’s reception, before cable, was notoriously terrible. As were both teams.

That didn’t matter, as these were my guys. I always rooted for the middling players on the Sox and Cubs, as I thought I could make them better just on the strength of my will power. So, while I naturally idolized the Cubs’ home run king Dave Kingman and the Sox’ all-around star Chet Lemon, the guys I really backed were the ham and eggers: the Cubs’ Mike Vail, Mick Kelleher and Gene Clines and the Sox’ Junior Moore, Kevin Bell, Bill Nahorodny and Wayne Nordhagen.

Looking back, boy, were those teams awful, certainly never good at the same time. So, this year is an anomaly. If the regular season ended today, they’d both be in the playoffs! Hip hip hooray!

Imagine if they both made the World Series. Would this city go nuts. It would be the biggest sports story in this town’s history. Bigger than the ’85 Bears (And that’s saying a WHOLE lot. That’s worth repeating. A WHOLE LOT.), bigger than the last three Stanley Cups for the Hawks, bigger than the World Series champs, the 2005 Sox and 2016 Cubs.

If it did happen, here’s hoping the fans can behave themselves. When the two teams play each other, it’s not uncommon for fights to break out in the stands. It’s intense. So much so that it affects the players, too. Earlier this season, Cubs superstar Pete Crow-Armstrong, during the middle of a game against the Sox, lost his cool and suggested to a female Sox fan that she perform a sexual favor on him. Yikes. It went viral, his fine was hefty.

The obvious question is who would I root for if a crosstown series were to happen. My answer is … I don’t know. If the decision is based on which team’s games I attended as a youth, in a landslide, it’s the Sox.

I wrote about my experience going to Sox games at old Comiskey with my dad in my new book. We only went to Sox games when I was a kid because Wrigley Field was way on the other side of town. I grew up on the South Side, and Comiskey was only a 15-minute el ride away.

I would love for you to read the love affair I had in my youth with the Sox and their ballpark. I still dream about old Comiskey. I’m not making that up. Here’s the excerpt from my book about going to Sox games with the Old Man:

I loved the White Sox, so my mother would make him take me to old Comiskey Park once a year.

Couldn’t sleep the night before, in anticipation of the next day’s festivities. With rare exception, the White Sox were an atrocious team in my youth. Not 2024, record-breaking bad, but bad, hopelessly out of the division race and summer hadn’t even started. It didn’t matter; going to the game the next morning was always an event in my mind. We only went to the Sox games. We never went to Wrigley Field, but not out of some anti-Cub sentiment. (If you’re looking for a Cubs hater, keep it movin’. I’m the rarest of Chicagoans in that I’ve always rooted for both teams.) Wrigley was on the other side of town. Comiskey was a 12-minute train ride from 95^th and the Dan Ryan. 95^th was 5 minutes from our house on the far South Side.

My dad took me to day games almost exclusively. In hindsight, probably for these reasons: He wanted to be done with it and return home with enough time to himself, the nightly news and his drinks. The train ride to the 35^th Sox Park exit was joyous. In a tizzy, I couldn’t sit down, not with my entrance into this baseball palace so close to becoming a reality. No, I must stand and take it all in. Those enormous set of red lips on 85^th street, the Magikist rug cleaner’s icon that towered well above the expressway on the right. People selling socks and soap up and down the rail car, with passengers negotiating down the prices on the stolen goods. Rumbling past the projects that loomed on the right near 47th, the towering Robert Taylor Homes.

Next stop, heaven.

And there it was, emerging to our left, this concrete-and-steel, albeit crumbling, cathedral. Home of the Chicago White Sox, read the sign across the stadium facing the expressway.

You’d enter and there were colors everywhere. The bright yellow foul poles. The green seats, the red seats. The blue scoreboard with the orange 76 gas station emblem in the middle, underneath the blue Elgin clock. The freshly painted white foul lines.

The green grass.

Lots and lots and lots of green grass. It was so glorious this gorgeous sanctuary. It smelled like tap beer, hot dogs, freshly cut grass, piss and popcorn. This must be what heaven smells like, I thought, piss and popcorn. A man would be a fool not to want to be there.

We seated. Always down the right-field line, always looking directly into a steel beam. This was the late ‘70s, and these seats, the obstructed-view seats, the cheapest in the stadium, cost $3.50. Watching the flight of a ground ball to the outfield was interrupted by the beams unless you craned your neck around them. Everybody hated those seats.

I loved those seats.

Once seated, my dad would order me a hot dog, soda and popcorn. Once you’d eaten all the popcorn, its container could be used as a fake megaphone for which you could scream encouragement to your favorite player. I would always pick a different White Sox to root for that day – it could be Kevin Bell, it could be Junior Moore – and his success or failure would hinge, in my mind, on how passionately I exhorted him on.

“Don’t ask for anything else,” my dad warned sternly, handing me my lunch. I wouldn’t. I was set and in heaven.

I used to dream about old Comiskey once they tore it down. I really loved being there.

My dad really hated being there.

After all, these trips to the park were on his day off. And here he was spending it somewhere he didn’t want to be. He wasn’t misanthropic, but he didn’t have many friends and he was uncomfortable in crowds.

When a White Sox homered, the scoreboard would explode with fireworks, the first of its kind. As long as you returned to your seats, the Andy Frain ushers would let us kids run down from our general admissions seats to the seats partitioned off by gold railings – a boundary that distinguished the expensive seats from those that weren’t – to enjoy a much better view of the pyrotechnic celebration. It remains one of my greatest thrills. I’d return to my seat, thoroughly intoxicated by my surroundings, to find my dad thoroughly not, taking a drag from his Kool cigarette with his legs crossed stiffly the way he would, wearing his ankle cut tan leather boots that he must have worn for 20 years, not even looking on the field.

Uh oh. It was his I’m irritated pose.

“Alright,” he’d say, looking out at nothing, “it’s almost time to go. Gotta beat traffic.”

We’d leave in the fifth inning to hop an el train home. Even once when the great LaMarr Hoyt was matching pitch for pitch against the even greater Jim Palmer!

Yep, this was my experience going to Sox games with my dad. Wouldn’t change it for anything.