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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Sunday, August 26, 2012
With both of Chicago’s major league teams home over the weekend, a season-long — decades-long, for that matter — trend was on full display: at the box office, the White Sox, despite being a contending team, are no match for even a cellar-dwelling Cubs squad.
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1. charityslave is thinking about baseball Posted: August 27, 2012 at 01:19 AM (#4218906)No it is still the case.
They should move the White Sox somewhere safer - like Monterrey.
You can get to the stadium from the Green Line, but it's further away from the park and the line is less convenient for most people, and the line is going to be wildly overburdened next year. The Red Line issue means that there's no way in hell I'll be going to a Sox game after April. Coming home on the Green Line for me would mean waiting for a bus at night in the Washington Park neighborhood, which has a 51% poverty rate -- the Green Line station on 55th is in an area that's mainly deserted store fronts and vacant lots, and right by the bus stop there's a liquor store where the clerks sit behind bullet proof glass. So that's not happening. Maybe I'll go see them play in Detroit.
Personally, I lay a lot of the blame on aldermen who have fought tooth and nail against CPD's manpower redeployment plans... Of course, the alderman are simply protecting their own turf - and sure, I suppose it's inevitable that we'd see a rise in crime in otherwise 'safe' neighborhoods if more police are pulled from those districts to help out in other areas... but personally - as someone living in a (knock on wood) 'safe' area, I'm OK with that. We've got an epidemic in certain neighborhoods, and if it means I'm more likely to be mugged because patrols are being concentrated in areas that are all but warzones, then I'm willing to make that sacrifice.
Fernigal's got it right about the red line closing being a major factor for the White Sox attendance next year. From close reading of his post I think I might live close to Fernigal (howdy neighbor!). For me the green line is convenient and fine. I take it every day to/from work, leaving my car near the 43rd St. stop and getting back at all hours of the night if I'm doing something after work. I've had no problems despite seeing the occasional deal being made, as well as the occasional police sweep to move the dealers off of the blocks nearby. For the record, I've also seen deals being made right on some of Hyde Park's main drags. Oddly, I've yet to have anyone mutter an offer to me.
Chicago's a pretty segregated city. The violence is confined, as zonk says, to those areas where the drug economy is pretty much the only one going and the news gets out only when the innocent get caught in the crossfire. If I remember right back in the first decade of this century there was a serial killer preying on crack whores in Englewood. It merited very little media attention.
Fernigal - are you also a UChicago student?
No, but Mrs. McGunnigle is in the final throes of her PhD. I'm just a hanger-on.
Just for the sake of anecdote, my brother and his wife just moved out of the area this year (they bought a house in the burbs), and they were in walking distance of the park - west of the park, to be exact. His wife worked part time for the Sox and had no problems walking to and from the games.
Don't worry Mayor Kane has just hired Mona Fredericks to take care of this.
That makes three of us in the Hyde Park area? Probably more. (also a uchicago student here, but going to be living in London next year)
Four, if you count north Kenwood although I have no official affiliation with the UC. The first decade of this century saw a big boom in development along the lakefront north of Hyde Park and encompassing Bronzeville, but it's all east of MLK and the vast majority east of Cottage Grove.
I spent a few years working as a community organizer on the SE side and in the Lawndales back in the 90's. About the only shift that I've seen is that the heroin market has increased dramatically and there's a little less crack available. Woodlawn south and west of UC hegemony, Englewood, Washington Park, Eastside, South Chicago, Roseland, the Pullmans, Austin, the Lawndales, etc. all remain desperate.
The core baseball audience is the people who go to those three parks, and it's not very big. Each city has a different-size core, but it's much smaller than the number reflected by attendance figures, which include people who go for the mall, the bars, and other touristy, foofy reasons featured in mallparks other than those three.
Baseball qua baseball is simply nowhere near as popular as its imagined to be in some parts.
Are you an undergrad doing the British History, Lit, & Culture program? Probably not, because you say "next year" and that's just in the fall quarter. I ask because a friend of mine is teaching in it.
This is sadly true. Out-of-town friends who aren't baseball fans always want to go to a game at Wrigley when they come to visit. It has more to do with Ferris Bueller than with anything a Cubs player has ever done. I guess what's surprising isn't that the Cubs are outdrawing the Sox, but that the Sox are drawing so little compared to MLB as a whole. It's a decent park, not hard to get to, not incredibly expensive, in a huge metro area, they're winning, and they're 24th in attendance.
EDIT: Should've been more explicit: I don't think that one should explicitly link the Cell to the Trop. I've seen games in the Kingdome and in Olympic Stadium, and Tropicana Field is the worst ballpark I have ever been to, by a fairly hefty margin. You can go to the Cell and sit in the sun and look at the sky and a nice green field and drink decent beer and eat above-average ballpark food. This doesn't happen at the Trop.
Sadly no, I'm going for the whole year (London School of Economics yearlong program). I *do* think I have a friend in that program (I'm not sure - I'll ask her when I see her next), though.
Unlike practically every other stadium in MLB, their park isn't a destination for people who don't give a fig about baseball. They're not having a great year at the gate, but 1.8 or 1.9M -- roughly their current pace -- certainly isn't terrible. It's a lot better than Oakland or Tampa.
My first week moving here, knowing nothing about the city, i went to check out apartments on the far south side. Pulled over by 3 different cops in the first 20 minutes. Theres just no expectation that white people will be down there unless theyre buying drugs.
This is coming from someone who doesn't really have a lot of $$$ at this point, but I haven't been a fan of the new dynamic pricing system. I mean, I'm OK with it in theory, they just need to fine tune the pricing. It's great that you can get a field-level for $15 against the Royals on a Tuesday in May, but weekend games throughout the warm months are still a bit expensive IMO.
Recent attendance has been fine, they didn't draw anybody during the start of the season when the team was playing mediocre baseball.
I once walked through a residential area somewhere between 70th and 80th (I can't remember exactly where). I didn't attract any attention from the police like you did, but there was a car that drove by, slowed down after passing me, and waited at the next stoplight for me to walk by. It turned out to be a middle-aged African-American couple; they rolled down the window and asked me in a concerned voice whether I was lost. I told them I knew exactly where I was going - and I did - but that I appreciated it anyway. That made it pretty clear to me just how out of place I was, and I haven't walked around down there since.
Chatham? Aka the black Copland, white Copland being Beverly. I maintain that Lem's on 75th makes the best ribs in the city. And I pity the north siders who aren't familiar with the glory that is Harold's.
It's just a (spatially) larger version of something that's entirely typical of the Midwest, unfortunately. This claims that the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th most segregated cities in the US are in the Midwest. You can measure it in other ways, but most any measure you come up with will have Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Indianapolis as among the most segregated large places in America.
I know; this website is Exhibit A in the evidentiary record!
Boston provincialism feels much more like regional provincialism on top of the local provincialism, while Chicago doesn't have the regional provincialism so much. I mean, New England is a backwater (in a good way), and everyone there knows it. Some hate it, some love it, but it is. Chicago is very much a third wheel in American culture, but it's not a backwater. It's just not New York or Los Angeles.
True enough, although I know a few cops/firefighters in Beverly proper. I'm guilty of conflating the two neighborhoods, much as everyone calls where I live Hyde Park. It isn't! It's Kenwood, and not the fancy pants Obama part of Kenwood neither!
Harold's has spread out, though -- there are locations way up north now, too... but yeah - for the longest time, a good 5-7 years after settling on the north side, I was absolutely certain you'd fall off the face of the earth if you ventured south of Division and I was pretty sure you were best off staying north of North Ave, if not Fullerton.
The turning point for me - not that I make the hike south all that often - was a friend teaching at a southside school years back. I accompanied her to a wedding for one of her fellow teachers where I think we were the only two white folks in attendance, but we really hit it off with one of the couples we were sitting with (so much so that we hit the riverboats until dawn immediately after the reception). We did a fair number of 'north-south' exchanges the following summer and used to amuse ourselves (but no one else!) to no end by explaining at both ends of town that we were paired together by a Chicago summer BBQ desegregation pilot program. I'd say the combination of nervous laughter and self-righteous indignation was at about the same ratio on both sides of town, perhaps with a bit more self-righteous indignation on the north, nervous laughter on the south.
Sadly, he and his then-girlfriend/now-wife really did move off the face of the earth -- also known as the 'suburbs'.
I can't speak to whether the CTA provides game-day specific shuttles or plans to -- but normally, when they close an El station for an extended period, they do tend to provide bus service that more or less mimics the stops in between closed stations.... I would assume they would plan on the same here, though, I'm less familiar with the surface street situation around these closed stops.
Still - the red line is the primary artery to the entire network, really, so I have to imagine shuttles will be plentiful.
Nice story!
Living in Uptown had its up and down moments, but one of the highlights was definitely Harold's.
The plan (as I understand it) is that there will be shuttles from all of the closed Red Line stops to the closest Green Line stop, with everyone from 55th Street and points south being bused to the Garfield (55th St) Green Line station. Presumably this will still be the plan on game days; the walk from the 35th Bronzeville/IIT Green Line station to the Cell is half a mile.
The problem is that on an average day there are 37,500 people getting on a Red Line train at one of the stations from 55th on south, while there are 1,300 people getting on the Green Line at Garfield. Some of those 37,500 won't travel or will come up with some other way of getting where they want to go, but they're going to be stuffing a ton of people into a station designed for a fraction of that number. Garfield is my station, so I know -- it's podunk. The other issue is that there is no way to run shuttle buses efficiently and quickly.
There will be ways to get to US Cellular via transit, it's just that it's going to take a lot longer and be a lot less pleasant.
As for non-White Sox travel, I wonder if there will be a lot more people heading over to/from Gresham on a daily basis rather than dealing with the Red Line shuttles.
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