A Baseball Rant

I walked into a store this week wearing my Cubs cap.

Clerk: "Are you really a Cubs fan?"

Me: "I am."

Clerk (with sympathetic look): "I'm sorry."

Me: "It's OK. There's nothing I can do about it."


Such exchanges with strangers happen often enough that one would think I have some sort of physical disability or malformation that triggers an instinctive impulse toward pity.

Anyway, despite getting walked all over by the Texas Rangers, the Cubs have now done in the presently hapless White Sox twice in a row. I tuned into the end of today's game on WGN ("Superstation") while I ate my lunch. God, how I hate interleague play! It's an abomination. It's perverse. It's sick and twisted and totally wrong. It's the worst thing since the invention of the Designated Hitter rule and, before that, night games.

Am I a conservative, or what? At least I'm consistent!

Here's the thing: As much as I and most of the rest of the known universe associate WGN with the Cubs (seeing as how, for the time being still, they both have the same corporate owner), several White Sox games are also carried on that station. But they have different broadcast crews. When they play each other (may God forgive us all), the venue (either Wrigley Field or "new Comiskey"--don't get me started on corporate naming rights) determines the voices calling the game.

Now, being a "homer" in the broadcast booth--shameless rooting for the team that employs you--is a venerable tradition in Chicago. I came down with my case of Cub fandom during the Jack Brickhouse era, and, professionally competent as he was, he never disguised his loyalties. But these guys who call the Sox games on WGN--I didn't get their names--take it to a whole new level. It left a distinctively bad taste.

I know I'm a dinosaur. Growing up in Chicagoland, it was perfectly acceptable--yea, even the norm--to prefer one team over the other, but to feel benignly toward the one that commanded secondary affection. I preferred the Cubs, but wished the White Sox well, and knew who their players were, and was glad when they won. Now, with this brew straight from Hell called interleague play, a rivalry--even an animosity--has been created where none existed before, and where none need exist.

And so we get these two yahoos on WGN who use first-person plural pronouns to refer to the White Sox and talk trash on the Cubs every chance they get.

Interleague play sucks. Get rid of it.