Even when there’s nothing going on in Chicago sports, there’s something going on.
It was never truer than during the all-out shutdown in the sports world that began in mid-March of last year and persisted here until Cubs and White Sox started arriving at their home ballparks at the tail end of June for “Spring Training 2.0.”
Still, we found things to write about. And on Saturdays, we continued to pack our Sports section like nobody else.
And now — unlikely as it might have seemed at one dark time or another — the Sun-Times has reached a milestone: our 100th Sports Saturday edition.
The weeks, stories and magazine-style cover images — starting with Ernie Banks and the ’69 Cubs in our debut edition on April 6, 2019 — have flown by in a delightful blur. Since then, every Chicago athlete who’s anybody has appeared on a Sports Saturday cover. And for those who haven’t, their time is coming.
Saturday was always supposed to be kind of a dead day in the sports news business. The best content was held for Sundays. Many newspapers still habitually keep Saturday editions on the pay-no-mind list, but we went full throttle the other way, didn’t we? It was a hell of a gamble, but it’s working.
Sports Saturday has been a game changer for the Sun-Times, driving newsstand sales, subscriptions and online traffic. Readers have, by all signs, enjoyed — and come to look forward to — it.
“How do you all do that every single week?” is a question we’re frequently asked.
The only answer: How could we not?
