It pains me to report that no one seemed to know the whereabouts of the Crosstown Cup before Friday’s opener of the City Series at White Sox Park.
Craig Counsell, in his third year of managing the Cubs in the series, claimed ignorance that a trophy was even handed out to the winner. This year’s matchup, the first between two Chicago teams above .500 in a nonpandemic year since 2008, has been touted as a return to the good old days of the old Crosstown, when Cubs outfielder Brian McRae and Sox first baseman Frank Thomas argued in 1997 over which team’s fans were the drunkest.
The Cubs were 28-16 and in first-place in the National League Central, while the Sox were 22-21 and one game out of first in the American League Central.
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“I’ll be honest with you, the players don’t care about the standings when the game starts,” Counsell said.
But do they care about the trophy?
“You’re asking the wrong guy,” he said, joking that the trophy would be the head of a reporter.
Humor was never Counsell’s strong suit.
As most Chicago baseball fans know, the original Crosstown Cup in 2010 was sponsored by BP, an oil company that had an explosion and a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico before the City Series.
“We hope that in the coming years, the BP Crosstown Cup will be part of the social fabric of Chicago,” Sox marketing director Brooks Boyer said at the time.
Fans of both teams booed loudly at Wrigley Field when the BP Cup was introduced before the game. After that sponsorship mercifully ended, they later turned it into the Wintrust Crosstown Cup.
Winning teams have been known to leave the Cup on the field, or do unspeakable things to it. Suffice to say it did not become part of the social fabric of Chicago.
Counsell argued it should’ve been sponsored by a hot dog joint to make it more Chicago-esque, and then perhaps it could’ve become part of a great local tradition. The Wieners Circle Cup would’ve worked perfectly, with Poochie handing it out to the winner with some choice profanities for the losers.
The Cubs came into this series with a 77-75 all-time record, and as someone who has somehow covered every one of those 152 games since 1997, I honestly can say this feels more electric than the last few, which seemed to be running on AA batteries.
The weather was great with a game-time temperature of 74, the Sox were red-hot with a five-game winning streak and the games were being televised on The U, bringing Sox analyst Ozzie Guillen to a wider audience than he’s used to on Chicago Sports Network, also known as CHSN.
All three games will be televised on the U, a wise decision by the Sox to create a Munetaka Murakami buzz among fans who’ve ditched cable.
Guillen was the star of many of these City Series showdowns while managing the Sox, and CHSN created a short video for the series in which he visits a priest in a confessional booth and asks for forgiveness for saying “a lot of bad things about the other team and their home.”
The film splices in some mild Guillen insults about the Cubs, along with the famous clip of him kicking catcher Geovany Soto’s mask. It avoids some of his more memorable material about the Wrigley Field rats lifting weights or questioning Cubs fans’ intelligence for paying to watch bad baseball, but no reason to rile up Cubs fans too much.
The video ends with the priest telling Guillen “we got a guy,” meaning Pope Leo XIV, thus absolving him of any sins against the Cubs. It’s a clever video and harkens back to the original Crosstown marketing campaign of 1986, when it was an exhibition game, featuring managers Tony La Russa and Jim Frey as drawn by Mad Magazine caricaturist Mort Drucker.
“I can’t tell you how many fans come up to me and say, ‘No matter what you do, beat the Cubs,’” La Russa said afterward. “I ask them, ‘Wouldn’t you rather have us win the division?’ You’d be surprised at how many say no.”
That sentiment still exists on some parts of the South Side, where Cubs-hating is a religion. But for the most part, millennials and Gen Z Sox fans are much more interested in the team getting out of rebuild mode than simply beating the Cubs.
Creating Crosstown is a tradition that never ends, but the managers and players would not play along. WLS-Ch. 7 reporter Ryan Chiaverini did his best to try to get Will Venable to trash talk the Cubs, asking “how nice would it be for fans just to stick it to the Cubs?”
“We’re trying to win baseball games, you know,” Venable replied. “We certainly understand the meaning of this series for the community and these guys will play with everything they’ve got, like they do every night. But it’s one baseball game that we’re going to try to win tonight and we’re going to go from there.”
On the Venable-O-Meter, that rates a 7 on the excitement level.
On the other side of the ballpark, reporters tried in vain to get Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong to pretend the series meant anything to him more than any other series. He said his dad, a Chicago guy, never talked about Cubs-Sox when Pete was growing up.
“It was always Cubs-Cardinals,” he said.
PCA liked the idea of bringing the city together, admitting it sounded “kinda funky,” albeit not chic.
Does he hear Sox fans yelling at him in center?
“Everybody keeps asking me that,” he said. “No, nothing that sticks out really at all.”
Never mind.
Out on the field, Murakami, the new Sox slugger, and Cubs pitcher Shota Imanaga talked to each other in their native Japanese, while reporters were yelled at by Sox personnel in their native English to “stay off the grass.” A few dozen reporters chronicled their every move, even as they had no idea what the two were talking about.
Rest assured Murakami and Imanaga were not reprising the Brian McRae-Frank Thomas argument of the 1997 series over which team’s fans were the drunkest.
You just can’t beat the classics.
