Whimsy: September 2019 Archives

This is sad news.

It has been by far the longest TV partnership in baseball, but the number of Cubs games left to be broadcast on WGN TV is down to less than a half dozen. After 72 seasons, the last of them is almost over.

WGN broadcast its first Cubs game in 1948 and enjoyed exclusive rights to all but their nationally broadcast games until the 2015 season, when local networks ABC Chicago and Comcast's regional sports network - now known as NBC Chicago - were given rights to many Cubs games. WGN Radio had been the home of the Cubs since 1924, but the team moved radio stations in 2014....

A major part of the Cubs' broad appeal despite the long championship drought was that WGN carried the team's games nationally for many years. Fans growing up in all parts of the country could still tune in to see the Cubs. TV personalities like Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray became as synonymous with the team as Ernie Banks and Andre Dawson.

The Cubs built a national following starting in the 1970s because they were broadcast on WGN, a local independent station that was available across the midwest at a time when cable TV was in its infancy. WGN used microwave relay -- the same technology used at the time for long-distance telephone networks -- to transmit its signal to Community Antenna Television (CATV) systems. Each CATV system then retransmitted the WGN signal via coaxial cable to the homes of subscribers, along with the regional TV stations that could be received by the system's (you guessed it) community antenna, which was mounted high enough to pull in line-of-sight signals unavailable to roof-mounted antennas.

Mountain Home, Arkansas, was an early adopter of CATV because of the distance and mountainous terrain between the town and the nearest TV stations. Mountain Home's CATV system offered Springfield, Mo., and Little Rock network stations... and WGN. The Cubs, who played all of their home games in the sunshine back then -- no lights at Wrigley Field until 1988 -- were the only alternative to daytime soaps and game shows.

So the Cubs on WGN became my Grandma's daily soap opera. She would laugh her self silly at the ineptitude of the '70s Cubs. Jack Brickhouse was then the announcer for the Cubs, and Harry Caray was with the White Sox, which were also on WGN at that time. Watching the Cubs in the afternoon, when it was too hot to be outside, was part of the tradition of summer visits to Grandma and Grandpa's house.

Harry Caray and Jack Brickhouse are gone. They play Cubs games at night. Wrigleyville is an upscale neighborhood these days. The Cubs even won a World Series. And now the Cubs broadcasts are leaving WGN. Nothing gold can stay.