thanks to the WGN super-station of decades past, the cubs
ABSOLUTELY have a profoundly larger fan base than the sox on a national level, by like several orders of magnitude.
i'm talking about
strictly within the chicagoland market itself. things are fairly well-balanced, with an obvious (though FAR from absolute) north-south divide.
again, the numbers don't lie:
CHICAGOLAND:
county ------
% cubs/
% sox
mchenry county:
52%/
28%
lake county (IL):
50%/
30%
kane county:
50%/
36%
kendall county:
46%/
39%
dupage county:
44%/
40%
grundy county:
41%/
39%
cook county:
40%/
38%
porter county:
40%/
41%
lake county (IN):
39%/
43%
kankakee county:
37%/
45%
will county:
37%/
47%
kenosha county is brewers country. once you cross the "cheddar curtain", majority allegiances switch over to wisconsin teams.
source:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...eball-map.html
the big one to pay attention to on the chart above is cook county.
cook county has more people than the rest of those counties combined, and it's a pretty dead even split at
40% vs. 38%.
it doesn't matter what your impressions are, if you had lived here for over 4 decades, with both white sox and cubs sides of your family stretching back to the days of your great-grandfathers*, you'd know.
(*) fun family baseball anecdote. in the old days, the whole northside/southside thing wasn't a thing yet, because the cubs played on the west side in those days, and the sox on the southside. my great grandfather lived on the northside, but LOVED baseball. he would occasionally tell the tale that he decided to become a cubs fan because he was once treated rudely by a ticket taker while attempting to attend a sox game. he swore the sox off from that moment on and forever more the entire maternal side of my family would be cubs fans to this very day.