Quote:
Originally Posted by thoughtcriminal
I don't live there, although have visited many times, and I know that the Cubs get most of the love, but there's plenty for the Sox too.
|
The Cubs are the more popular team locally, but the imbalance isn't as pronounced as outsiders usually assume. That's mostly because the Cubs have a decent national following and were broadcast coast to coast on the old WGN cable superstation for a couple decades, while the sox are almost entirely a local team with an exclusively local following and are frequently ignored by national sports media. The impression is furthered by the fact that Sox fans generally will not show up to Comiskey unless there's a competitive team on the field, whereas cubs fans have a habit of piling into the Northside's largest beer garden regardless of where the cubs are in the standings.
But
strictly within the chicagoland market itself. things are fairly well-balanced, with an obvious (though FAR from absolute) north-south divide.
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%
cook county:
40%/
38%
porter county:
40%/
41%
lake county (IN):
39%/
43%
kankakee county:
37%/
45%
will county:
37%/
47%
source:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/24/upshot/facebook-baseball-map.html
the big one to pay attention to on the chart above is cook county. It has more people than the rest of those counties combined, and it's a pretty dead even split at
40% vs. 38%.
kenosha county is brewers country. once you cross the "cheddar curtain", majority allegiances switch over to wisconsin teams.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thoughtcriminal
But even when Chicago had 2 football teams, I don't know that the Cardinals ever had following that the Bears have had, which I guess is why they left.
|
They did not, the Cardinals were very much second fiddle to the Bears in Chicago, which was a huge factor in why they left in 1960. In the pre super-bowl era, the bears won 8 NFL championships between 1921 and 1963, and became the darlings of the city's football fans, while the Cardinals only won 2, back to back titles in '47 & '48, before sliding back into mediocrity and then skipping town down to St. Louis (who never truly loved them them either).
Quote:
Originally Posted by thoughtcriminal
But if the question is which *sport* is more popular, as opposed to just which *team* is more popular, there might be a case for baseball winning out in Chicago, if they pool the fans for both teams against the Bears.
|
That would be an interesting thing to study. My gut tells me the bears would still trump all, but that might just be an artifact of the fact that, of the three, only the bears can unite the whole city.
Prev
Linear Mode
