Do I Spy a Seismic Shift?

 It sure wasn’t a headline I expected to see on day two of the Cubs Convention, but there it was yesterday, splashed across the front page of the Sun-Times’ expanded Saturday sports’ section: [White] Sox Town?  The accompanying story speculated that Chicago baseball loyalties could soon be shifting south of Madison Street.  Wait, there’s more: Cubs’ fans at the convention booed team chairman Tom Ricketts, twice, no less.

Ricketts got the strawberries both for showing his face at introductions and then for mentioning the Marquee Sports Network, the new and virtually exclusive home of all team broadcasts, that is, if your cable provider picks it up.  Mine doesn’t, and I don’t want it to.  Why?  Because if Comcast bites the bullet and subscribes to Marquee, it passes the cost on to me.  In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not a big Cubs’ fan.

Therein lies the evil genius of this particular enterprise—people who don’t care about the Cubs or don’t care about sports, for that matter, will be subsidizing the North Siders.  Talk about a racket.  In the ideal world, I would be able to sit down and pick each and every cable channel I wanted, a la carte, if you will; only cable companies don’t allow that, and the federal government is too chicken to make them.  So, I’m reduced to crossing my fingers in the hopes that Comcast doesn’t cave.  Fingers crossed.

However Marquee plays out, I’m more focused on the Sox, both past and present.  The present part is obvious; 2020 should be interesting, to say the least.  But the past is, too.  For openers, there’s that part of the past that involves new Sox starter Dallas Keuchel, who pitched for the Astros during the time of their cheating escapades.  What did Keuchel know about his teammates cheating, and when did he know it?  After all, cheating is a subject that has long drawn the interest of Sox pitchers.

A hundred years ago, there were Ed Cicotte and Lefty Williams, and now we have Jack McDowell.  An anchor for those pitching staffs of the early ’90s, McDowell this week went on talk radio in North Carolina to disclose a sign-stealing system set up by then-manager Tony LaRussa.  McDowell alleged that a blinking light in an outfield sign signaled Sox hitters what to expect, this after a camera had picked up the catcher’s sign.  The story might carry more weight if LaRussa had ever managed McDowell, which he didn’t.

And let’s not forget pitcher Al Worthington, who actually left the team after learning his new team positioned a spy in the centerfield scoreboard to alert Sox batters what the pitcher intended to throw.  Yup, the blinking light thing, again.  Worthington actually feared that participating in such a scheme could affect his chances of reaching the Good Place in the afterlife.  That didn’t appear to be a problem for the Astros.