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The State of the Sox...


Lip Man 1
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1 hour ago, southsider2k5 said:

It wasn't 40 years into the future though.  I know people are still salty about it, but they were/and are wrong.

The other thing people conveniently forget in their desire to bash Reinsdorf is that it wasn't a choice between pay TV and free TV at the time.  It was a choice between pay TV and virtually no TV.

The Sox weren't on shitty TV 44 because they wanted to be as far down the UHF dial as they could be, they were there because no one else wanted to broadcast Sox games.  When 44 went scrambled Pay TV movies, the Sox were screwed.  Veeck talked about it constantly his last year of ownership, and even signed a deal to move many Sox games to cable during the Debartolo courtship.  The Blackhawks were in the same boat for their road games and made the same move.

And of course the Tribune buying the Cubs for programming during the first year of the new Sox ownership sealed their relationship.  The real mistake was dumping channel 9 for 32 in the late sixties and ceding 9 to the Cubs full time.

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2 hours ago, South Side Fireworks Man said:

It was a dumb move at the time.  Nobody wanted to pay for a product that everyone else was offering free.  Plus, while WGN was a superstation and had a strong clear vhf signal in the Chicago area, Sportsvision required a special box with a separate antenna installed on your roof just to watch one station that only offered Sox games.

It would be like owning a gas station in 1982 and replacing all your pumps with charging stations because in 40 years people will have electric cars.  I guess that would be considered "ahead of it's time. "

Excellent analogy. 

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20 hours ago, ThirdGen said:

The other thing people conveniently forget in their desire to bash Reinsdorf is that it wasn't a choice between pay TV and free TV at the time.  It was a choice between pay TV and virtually no TV.

The Sox weren't on shitty TV 44 because they wanted to be as far down the UHF dial as they could be, they were there because no one else wanted to broadcast Sox games.  When 44 went scrambled Pay TV movies, the Sox were screwed.  Veeck talked about it constantly his last year of ownership, and even signed a deal hat to move many Sox games to cable during the Debartolo courtship.  The Blackhawks were in the same boat for their road games and made the same move.

And of course the Tribune buying the Cubs for programming during the first year of the new Sox ownership sealed their relationship.  The real mistake was dumping channel 9 for 32 in the late sixties and ceding 9 to the Cubs full time.

That move to UHF32 in 1968 was another move that led to Chicago eventually becoming a Cubs town. Very few homes and families had TVs that had UHF and here go the White Sox leaving WGN for a UHF station that no one could watch. Can't blame JR for that one but if he was the owner at the time, he probably would have made the same move. I've read that Jack Brickhouse just about begged the Sox to stay with WGN but to no avail.

Edited by The Mighty Mite
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4 hours ago, The Mighty Mite said:

That move to UHF32 in 1968 was another move that led to Chicago eventually becoming a Cubs town. Very few homes and families had TVs that had UHF and here go the White Sox leaving WGN for a UHF station that no one could watch. Can't blame JR for that one but if he was the owner at the time, he probably would have made the same move. I've read that Jack Brickhouse just about begged the Sox to stay with WGN but to no avail.

Most owners would have gone to Channel 32 in 1968. Channel 32 gave the White Sox $1 million dollars a year. Channel 9 wanted to keep the White Sox but only offered $350,000 a year. There were other factors involved also. The move to Channel 32 came at a bad time in White Sox history. The teams of 1968-1970 were 3 of the worse teams  in franchise history. Also, not too many White Sox fans liked TV announcer Jack Drees.

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24 minutes ago, WBWSF said:

Most owners would have gone to Channel 32 in 1968. Channel 32 gave the White Sox $1 million dollars a year. Channel 9 wanted to keep the White Sox but only offered $350,000 a year. There were other factors involved also. The move to Channel 32 came at a bad time in White Sox history. The teams of 1968-1970 were 3 of the worse teams  in franchise history. Also, not too many White Sox fans liked TV announcer Jack Drees.

I was going to mention those 3 years which was painful for me as I became a fan in 1952 and never experienced a losing season by a White Sox team.  The funny thing about it is that I was in Vietnam all of 1968 but still followed the Sox in the daily Stars and Stripes Newspaper. I remember one day when the Sox made the front page as they had a photo and caption of Hoyt Wilhelm breaking the record for most appearances by a pitcher.

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9 hours ago, The Mighty Mite said:

That move to UHF32 in 1968 was another move that led to Chicago eventually becoming a Cubs town. Very few homes and families had TVs that had UHF and here go the White Sox leaving WGN for a UHF station that no one could watch. Can't blame JR for that one but if he was the owner at the time, he probably would have made the same move. I've read that Jack Brickhouse just about begged the Sox to stay with WGN but to no avail.

Brickhouse had a meeting with Sox owner Art Allyn and one of the things he told him was he felt that at some point in time WGN's signal would be available not just in the Chicago area but across the Midwest.

In that regard Jack was a visionary. 

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19 hours ago, The Mighty Mite said:

That move to UHF32 in 1968 was another move that led to Chicago eventually becoming a Cubs town. Very few homes and families had TVs that had UHF and here go the White Sox leaving WGN for a UHF station that no one could watch. Can't blame JR for that one but if he was the owner at the time, he probably would have made the same move. I've read that Jack Brickhouse just about begged the Sox to stay with WGN but to no avail.

We had one TV in the house that could get UHF, and it was the best and newest (color and everything!). If someone else was using it, no Sox for me.

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10 hours ago, Lip Man 1 said:

Brickhouse had a meeting with Sox owner Art Allyn and one of the things he told him was he felt that at some point in time WGN's signal would be available not just in the Chicago area but across the Midwest.

In that regard Jack was a visionary. 

I met Jack once and asked him for an autograph and he spent thirty minutes talking Sox baseball with me (he was exclusively Cubs at that point). Wonderful man and he clearly never lost his love of the Sox.

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20 minutes ago, ThirdGen said:

I met Jack once and asked him for an autograph and he spent thirty minutes talking Sox baseball with me (he was exclusively Cubs at that point). Wonderful man and he clearly never lost his love of the Sox.

Brickhouse was the  man who made sure Veeck had enough money to buy the White Sox the second time. Brickhouse  introduced Veeck to a Chicago Business man who provided the extra money for Veeck to buy the White Sox. Brickhouse didn't want the White Sox to leave Chicago. Brickhouse always thought it was wrong that the Chicago Cardinals left Chicago for St. Louis. He didn't want the White Sox to leave also.

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23 hours ago, Lip Man 1 said:

By the way the driving force behind SportsVision wasn't JR...it was Eddie Einhorn.

Everybody seems to include the move to pay TV on their "reasons I hate JR" list, but yes, Einhorn was running the show when it came down to media rights as that was his strong background. I assume the move was also supported by JR. EE was way more visible than JR the first 5 years or so of their ownership IIRC.

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6 hours ago, ThirdGen said:

We had one TV in the house that could get UHF, and it was the best and newest (color and everything!). If someone else was using it, no Sox for me.

We were also one of the first homes on our block to have a UHF TV, I want to say it was 1965 right before I enlisted in the USAF. My Dad wasn't a baseball fan and no one knew the Sox would be on UHF in 1968, we just needed a new TV and my Dad was always up on the latest in electronics so our new 19 inch TV had UHF.

 

 

 

 

Edited by The Mighty Mite
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7 minutes ago, The Mighty Mite said:

We were also one of the first homes on our block to have a UHF TV, I want to say it was 1965 right before I enlisted in the USAF. My Dad wasn't a baseball fan and no one knew the Sox would be on UHF in 1968, we just needed a new TV and my Dad was always up on the latest in electronics so our new 19 inch TV had UHF.

 

 

 

 

The only UHF station in Chicago at the time was Ch. 26, where you could watch Bullfights and Professional Wrestling!

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6 minutes ago, The Grinder said:

An;other thing JR did to piss off Bill Veeck was saying "We are going to run a class organization" implying that Veeck didnt. IIRC Bill then went to cub games.

I swear JR is a one big PR gaffe 

JR could have learned from Bill Veeck! His loss.

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On 11/13/2022 at 11:49 AM, The Mighty Mite said:

That move to UHF32 in 1968 was another move that led to Chicago eventually becoming a Cubs town. Very few homes and families had TVs that had UHF and here go the White Sox leaving WGN for a UHF station that no one could watch. Can't blame JR for that one but if he was the owner at the time, he probably would have made the same move. I've read that Jack Brickhouse just about begged the Sox to stay with WGN but to no avail.

People had uhf but the reception was like watching from Mars. That's why Sox fans started wearing tin foil hats. 

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5 hours ago, The Grinder said:

An;other thing JR did to piss off Bill Veeck was saying "We are going to run a class organization" implying that Veeck didnt. IIRC Bill then went to cub games.

I swear JR is a one big PR gaffe 

JR never said that, Eddie Einhorn did. And when I interviewed Mike Veeck he said JR actually apologized to the Veeck family for that comment.

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I still wonder if the Sox will be in Chicago past this decade. 

Even though I think Grandpa Ricketts is a turd, the Cubs are actually run like a competent, large market team. 

The Sox are going to start bleeding fans whether to apathy or jumping ship. 

If I had a kid I wouldn't want them to be a Sox fan. 

Edited by Jack Parkman
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