Poor Sox!

One of the chief engines behind the spleen of so many White Sox fans toward the Cubs is the fact that the Cubs routinely sell out every game, whereas the Sox have a hard time filling U.S. Cellular. The media in Chicago generally acknowledge the Sox pretty much as an afterthought, and until this year the national media hardly acknowledged them at all. Even as bad as the Cubs were this year, the Cubs outdrew the Sox by a substantial margin- and even the with the Sox being the defending world champions, the Cubs will almost certainly outdraw them again next year, especially if the North Siders make enough adjustments in their roster to make a credible run at the division. Quite understandably, it will drive Sox fans crazy.

The Sox are the Rodney Dangerfields of baseball. They just don't get no respect. Even winning the World Series didn't get them the recognition they rightly deserve. It seems that the recently concluded Series had the lowest TV ratings of any in history.

I might observe parenthetically that the three other lowest-rated Series ever were the 2000 intramural clash between the Mets and the Yankees (which nobody outside of New York really cared about), the 2002 "World Series" between the Giants and the Angels (the only one in history- for which everyone who loves the game should be grateful- featuring two wild card teams), and the 2003 anti-climax between the wild card Florida Marlins and the Yankees- probably the closest parallel to the Series of 2005, even though the 2005 Cardinals were a much better team than the 2003 Cubs.

If I weren't already aware of the low ratings for the 2003, I'd frankly be a little surprised. I would have thought the David and Goliath element of the Marlins vs. the Yankees would have generated more national interest than it apparently did. For that matter, I would have thought that a team which hadn't won the Series since 1917- the White Sox- would have been at least as much a sentimental attraction as the Red Sox, whose last world championship before 2004 had been in 1918, and which had at least been back to the Series twice since the Pale Hose last qualified in 1959. Perhaps it was the fact that it was Boston, rather than St. Louis, which was the wild card team last year which took away the onus.

In any event, with the exception of the New York "Subway Series" (which had its own, unrelated problems in generating national interest), do you notice the thing which these lowest-rated World Series in history all have in common?

Ratings for all World Series since 1968, btw, can be found here.

Anyway, as little love as I have for the White Sox, it's a shame that when they finally got their chance to shine- and before a national audience at that- even then, people weren't watching.

More fuel, I fear, for that South Side inferiority complex. A shame, too. It's not the fault of the Sox that they drew a wild card team. I have to think that a Series between baseball's two best teams- the Sox and the Cardinals- would have done much better, even if it would have been even harder for a Cub fan like me to watch.