Get Used to It

Are baseball fans born or made?  With me, it was a little bit of both.  Well, a lot of one and some of the other, at least.

Baseball was the first sport that mattered to me, so that would probably be the “born” part.  Football followed baseball on the calendar and in my heart.  Gayle Sayers and Dick Butkus turned me into a Bears’ fan, but not on the same level as my rooting for J.C. Martin and Wayne Causey.  Equivalent talents?  In my heart, yes.

Now, as much as I would like to throttle White Sox ownership, I just can’t make myself jump on the Bears’ bandwagon.  If anything, all this preseason hype masquerading as coverage cements my baseball-first allegiance.  Just today, the Tribune poured another load of concrete in that direction.

Two of the three stories on the front page of today’s sports’ section were devoted to, wait for it, the Bears, as was all of the back page.  (I did not know and did not care that a two-way player who last played in 1934 is the 31st best player in team history.)  The page-one stories took up two full inside pages (ads excepted) while at least half of a third page was given over to coverage of other NFL teams.  Keep in mind the sports’ section is all of eight pages long.  Oh, and neither the Cubs’ nor Sox stories bothered with final scores, even though the Sox game in Detroit started at 6 PM our time.

The electronic version of the paper isn’t any better; the basic difference is reading the Bears’ stuff on a screen.  For what it’s worth, I’m not convinced Chicago is a Bears’ town to the exclusion of everything else, but the local media is another story.  It’s breathless coverage 24/7 when not carrying the McCaskeys’ water for what seems to be 364 days a year.

All of which helps make me a baseball fan first and foremost.