First off as far as White Sox fans caring about the North Side team...it's pretty hard to avoid when you are barraged on an hourly basis daily...more on that below.
Again it's much easier to paint with a big brush....yet I also don't disagree with you on the behavior of many of my fellow Sox fans. Personally? Much like politics I seldom mentioned any of my baseball thoughts on Facebook anymore for the various reasons you mention. I don't want to be that guy....and as a baseball fan I saw how the North Side team was "getting it's act together" and knew better than to poke the sleeping Cubbie. I still feel the same. Deserve more coverage? More than what....what they have already gotten for the past several decades? Please.
As far as understanding how/why a Sox fan would react the way they did in 2005...again not a fan of painting with broad strokes but a few thoughts.
I have been told my entire life that I rooted for the "wrong" team in town, that my team are losers...and that was in the same city/area that had the 'lovable losers" in the same town....hell we couldn't be the "better" losers. Real Sox fans that I know (and at this stage anyone still claiming to be a Real Sox fan well...God love ya) would never, ever embrace losing. We wanted to win...we never accepted our fate and didn't try to embrace/market losing into our DNA. How did the South Side fight/rebel against ownership when they put an inferior product on the field? We stopped paying to see them in person and that hasn't changed to this day.
I know my team won't draw as many fans. And I'm Ok with that and have accepted that fact a few decades ago. White Sox fans will go when the product is good and basically won't go when it's not good (I saw something very similar with the 2017 Bears last season....saw a ton of empty seats at home towards the second half of the season...so I guess Bears fans are now "bad" fans too like my fellow Sox fans?). I still go to Sox games in person, watch on TV always and try to get to as many as I can within reason. I can't as a fan do much more.
The North Side team has had every known possible advantage in my biased eyes for decades in this town....from fan attendance to TV revenue and way beyond... yet they have won just one world series in what well over 100 years? Again not hating whatsoever and if I'm not factual feel free to correct. If anything the World Series win in 2016 finally woke up our ownership and now we are in the middle of a very similar rebuild that the North Side had a few years back...so thanks for that North Siders.
The point being when you are told that you are inferior for decades....day in and day out....year in and year out....it builds and build. Somehow it needed to come out and it came out in 2005. Rightly or wrongly...the North Side fans took the brunt of the punches. Not from all Sox fans...but as you stated from more than enough.
Also when the North Side team won it all in 2016....I wasn't one of those "I'm rooting for both teams" fan. Again I wasn't raised that way and either have my kids been raised that way. You are either with us or against us...and I'm pretty sure most Sox fans feel the same. Yet I was (respectfully quietly) happy for the North Side team and especially the long suffering real fans.... I no question related to the many fans who had parents and grandparents who didn't see them win it all....because I had two parents who also didn't see the White Sox win a title (See we can relate a lot more than people think).
Also something that has been an issue with me for years...to say that the North Side team accepted and embraced it's lovable loser image would be an understatement in my own opinion. Again the fan based was steered and marketed the lovable loser tag like sheep by ownership....but again this was something I just could never get with or buy into whatsoever.
When you've been forced to live like David in the home town of Goliath...well...step into our shoes for a bit then talk to me. Not an excuse...just a reality. (It's ok though I like being the underdog).
Anyways....hope this at least tried to help explain a little bit about my team and us fans.
Can we talk again in say 2020? I like our chances to make some real noise more and more everyday...it's just going to take a bit longer.
I understand what you're saying here. You have mentioned some events from a few decades ago. Like accepting the fact the Cubs out draw the Sox at the gate. What you have failed to do is place the blame squarely where it belongs. It belongs to the Sox organization itself. Through the decades they have done a horrible job marketing this team. Horrible. The current ownership has also made several missteps.
Let's go all the way back to 1948 when WGN TV launched. They had a radio deal with the Cubs and then brought it to television. Could the Sox have done that? I really don't know the answer to that question or if they even tried. My hunch would be the latter. But, this was the seed to grow their fan base. When I was growing up in the 1960s there were two teams in town but there was one you could see on WGN TV every time they played...the Cubs. They had an excellent play-by-play man in Brickhouse and Arne Harris was way ahead of his time in the production of the games.
I can remember as a kid of 8 or 9 on several occasions going into one of the neighborhood bars on a summer afternoon to get a little bag of potato chips and a can of pop. The bartender would let me sit at the bar to watch the game while I ate the chips and drank the pop. (Imagine that happening now!) But there I was, sitting there next to guys who were having a few short drafts. That's a memory I'll always have. I rarely watched the Sox in those days because they weren't on very often. It's kind of funny I never became a Cub fan because I watched them all the time as a kid. So, think of all the other kids out there who were watching as I was. We simply weren't seeing the Sox very much so there wasn't much interest. Over the years I have met a lot of people in my age group who have told me they became Cub fans in the 60s because they were able to see them all the time. And you know that got passed down to their kids. The Sox had fans from the south side and the south suburbs. But the Cubs were getting fans from all over.
The Cubs were far more visible to me as a kid. The Sox weren't even close. That was another big step in the Cubs growing their fan base. Ray Rayner, Garfield Goose, Bozo and then the Cubs on WGN. How many people on this board have that memory? And how many people agree? Then when they finally got a good team on the field in 1969 the fan base grew more.
Then came the 1970s. Most people do not know the Sox were out drawing the Cubs in the mid 70s. I can remember going to an empty ballpark on the north side more than once in those days.
The 1980s is the decade that changed everything between the two clubs for good. And, to me, the biggest mistakes the Sox made, in a marketing sense, occurred in the 1980s. The best thing to happen to the Cubs organization in those days was when the Wrigley family sold the club to the Tribune Company in 1981. What's interesting is, it is also the same year Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn bought the Sox. But the differences between the two ownerships were as wide as wide can be.
WGN, which carried the Cubs, hired Harry Caray away from the Sox. Caray said he didn't like Reinsdorf and didn't trust him. Imagine that? Then WGN became a superstation and games could be viewed nationwide. Although some seeds were planted in the late 70s the station really took off in the 80s. Harry Caray and the Cubs became a household team everywhere, much like the Braves and TBS or the Mets and WOR. That alone is what really grew their fan base. Where were Reinsdorf and the Sox during all this? I'd like someone to answer that. This was a big mistake on their part.
The last BIG mistake Reinsdorf made came at the end of the 80s. He wanted a new ballpark. Of course tax payers paid for it. But the new park went up right across the street from the old one. Huge mistake I think. I was hoping they would move the location. I don't remember how that all went down and I am not going to bother researching it. If anyone thinks locations of the parks doesn't have anything to do with the difference in fan base they are kidding themselves. The Cub home games in the 80s became an entire neighborhood full day experience.
Fast-forward a couple decades and the Ricketts family buys the Cubs from the Tribune. I read in Forbes they paid around $700 million. What is the team worth now? Around $2.9 billion. From a marketing standpoint, what the Ricketts family has done is nothing short of genius. They know their fans and are taking advantage of the entire neighborhood to bring people in. And those people are coming in droves from all over the country and paying top dollar to see that team and to be a part of the entire experience that lasts all day. Throw in the building of a very good club and a WS championship in 2016 and it is pretty easy to predict no one on this earth today will live to see the Sox with a bigger fan base than the Cubs.
So, the bigger fan base creates more coverage. Much more.
