Even though I was in Detroit, and the Cubs were not, it was still “root, root, root for the CUBBIES…”. Why was I even here?
My good friend and brother-in-law is a Padres fan, and as we’re in Central Indiana, he has to take advantage of whenever he’s able to see them at a stadium within a reasonable drive of home. Obviously it’s best when they’re visiting Wrigley, but sometimes calendars don’t align.
It’s also kinda funny how we’ve corrupted each other’s kids a bit. My niece/his daughter lives in Chicago now and we’ll be visiting her for a Cubs game soon, while my son/his nephew claims to still be a Cubs fan, but was wearing a sweat-stained brown Padres cap – the one he’s been wearing non-stop all summer – this past weekend in Detroit.
It’s tough to blame him. The nirvana of the 2016 World Series was just after he turned seven, half his lifetime ago. He remembers them shipping off Baez (who we got to see in Detroit) and Bryant and Rizzo and the rest of the squad in the years since*. Cubs ownership launched Marquee Network, and made it so that you could only watch it on cable or on streaming services as expensive as cable. For a variety of reasons**, Marquee isn’t available to him. The games he gets to see are national games on ESPN or Apple TV. And while the spending on big names hasn’t necessarily translated to wins for the Padres, it seemingly has increased the frequency with which the Padres are featured in those games as compared to the Cubs. He doesn’t have the luxury of every single game being broadcast by WGN like I did at his age. Really short-sighted by the Cubs in particular, and MLB in general.
I mean, I guess it’s not the Cardinals with whom he shares his fandom with, right? At least it’s another historically hard-luck NL squad.
*I will give Jed Hoyer credit; you could argue that every one of those guys who left the Cubs and ended up signing contracts with other teams have been overpaid in terms of bWAR vs. money spent by their new clubs.
**I find MLB’s TV landscape is at best adversarial to fans, and the Cubs in particular are atrocious about this. Maybe I’d shell out the extra money if the front office was trying to win and stopped pretending their ownership is broke. Central Indiana is covered by 4-5 different local team blackouts, so even if the Cubs are playing away, there’s a good chance I couldn’t watch their games on Regional Sports Networks anyway. Screw Sinclair.