Sleeping with the Enemy

Thanks to the bankruptcy that claimed the parent company of radio station WLS early this month, the White Sox have themselves a new home on the AM dial.  Talk about trading mud for gold.  Pass through a viaduct or cross the Cook County line, and WLS basically disappeared.  Listen to anything on the station other than a ballgame, and you were left feeling all dirty in a Rush Limbaugh sort of way.  To jump from there to powerhouse WGN, well, that’s the gold standard of Chicago radio.  It’s also a little weird.

WGN last broadcast Sox games in 1943.  For just about any baseball fan in these parts, WGN was synonymous with the Cubs, which it carried from 1958-2014.  Trust me, a whole lot of Sox fans out there are going to tune in and half-expect to hear Jack Brickhouse or Ron Santo behind the mic.

In a lifeboat full of Sox fans, I doubt anyone would bother to make room for either Brickhouse or Santo.  Brickhouse pretended to be a Sox fan when he did games, and Santo pretended to be a South Sider in 1974, his last year as a ballplayer, but it was pretty easy to see through both acts.  The thing about Santo is he seems to have been scarred by his one season with the Sox.

He never talked about it directly, but his dislike of Chuck Tanner, the Sox manager, was pretty obvious.  When Tanner moved on to the Pirates, the disdain oozed out of Santo’s mouth anytime Tanner stuck his head out of the dugout.  My guess is Santo didn’t like the preferential treatment Tanner showed Sox slugger Dick Allen, but who knows?  Maybe Santo kept getting lost on his way to the ballpark.  Either way, Santo never had anything good to say about the other side of town.

So, I’ll do my best to tune out the ghosts while listening to Ed Farmer and Darin Jackson starting next week.  Hey!  Hey!  Oh, no.