As the Cubs continue their push to end the club’s 107-year championship drought in the National League Division Series against the St Louis Cardinals, not everyone in Chicago is on board. Far from it.
One popular bar on Chicago’s South Side, traditionally the domain of White Sox fans, is offering a free beer for every home run surrendered by the Cubs during the best-of-five series, which begins Friday in St Louis.
McNally’s touted the promotion on its marquee on Thursday, DNAinfo Chicago reported. It also appears on the bar’s Facebook page.
Prior to the introduction of inter-league play in 1997, the only competitive meeting between the National League’s Cubs and American League’s White Sox took place in the 1906 World Series. Yet while the Windy City clubs don’t jockey with one another for position in the standings, a deeper rivalry embodying age-old elements of class conflict persists.
The White Sox, ostensible team of the city’s blue-collar rank and file, traditionally denigrate Cubs fans as effete yuppies enamored with the atmosphere of Wrigley Field, the team’s picturesque, 101-year-old ballpark, and more interested in the idea of baseball than baseball itself. Supporters of the North Side club by and large dismiss said identity politics as trivial and the White Sox as afterthought or, worse, hipster alternative.
The Cubs, baseball’s most snake-bitten franchise, are looking to win their first pennant since 1945 and first World Series since 1908.
Buoyed by the stellar pitching of Jake Arrieta, they won 97 games and defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates in Wednesday’s NL wild-card game to book an NLDS meeting against their divisional arch-rivals.
Arrieta, who finished the regular season with a record of 22-9 and an earned run average of 1.77, has been lights out since the All-Star break. The right-hander’s second-half ERA of 0.75 is second to none in major league history.
However, the Cy Young Award candidate will be unavailable to start until Monday’s Game 3 at Wrigley Field, a detail shrewdly referenced Thursday on the other side of the McNally’s marquee: ‘CUB FANS WHOS [sic] GONNA PITCH NOW?’
