My Final Rant About Chicago Sports Network Until Next Autumn. Maybe.
With Spring Training underway -- and no easy way for most of Chicago to watch the White Sox -- CHSN is, once again, helping ruin a Windy City franchise's season.
LOOKS LIKE THE CHICAGO WHITE SOX picked up right where they left off last fall.
Nearly two weeks into Spring Training, the Pale Hose have the league’s worst record (2-7), worst run differential (-19), fourth-worst on-base percentage (.314), and eighth-worst slugging percentage (.369).
Oh, and their winning percentage is .222, lousier than last season’s .253 — which, if you’ll recall, was the worst in modern Major League Baseball history.
This is the first time in Chicago Sports Network’s brief, tumultuous history that potential subscribers are like, “I glad it’s really, really difficult to affordably or easily access this fan-hating platform.”
A brief recap: Chicago Sports Network launched at the beginning of the 2024-25 NBA and NHL campaigns, replacing the now-defunct NBC Sports Chicago, the previous long-time local television home of the Bulls, Blackhawks, and White Sox.
For reasons that have never been made clear — Masochism? Laziness? Greed? Incompetence? — Chicago Sports Network opened for business without a deal in place with by far the city’s biggest cable provider, Comcast/Xfinity, meaning Comcast/Xfinity-subscribing sports fans aren’t able to watch the aforementioned three teams without either:
Buying a digital antenna to pick up the free telecast — that is, if their living quarters are in a good physical location, as the reach is, at best, spotty.
Cancelling their Comcast/Xfinity and switching to DirecTV or one of a few smaller (pricey) streaming platforms.
Subscribing to CHCN’s app for either $29.00 (monthly, for one team one team) or $349.00 (yearly, all three teams).
To exactly nobody’s surprise, the endeavor has been an indisputable bust, with Bulls viewership down 63%, by far the most in the NBA, and the Blackhawks averaging a shocking 6,000 viewers a game.
And the Chicago Sun-Times reported last week that an overwhelming majority of fans haven’t watched a single Bulls or Hawks game in 2024-25.
So there’s that.
Axios Chicago doesn’t have high hopes for improvement, saying, “The White Sox may lose more than just a record amount of baseball games. They are in jeopardy of losing their fanbase, too.”
Needless to say, the layoffs at CSCN have begun:
(Full disclosure, when I first heard about Chicago Sports Network, I tried to land a full-time content gig with them. The fact that I didn’t get it has nothing to do with my public frustration with the company. And the fact that I didn’t get it also means I didn’t have to get axed less than a year after landing said gig.)
As of right now, there are no signs that either CHCN or Xfinity have any interest in ending the stalemate. Obviously it won’t get sussed out by the end of the 2024-25 NBA or NHL season — no great loss (#ChicagoWinterTeamsSuck) — but we have no evidence it’ll be resolved by tip-off/face-off of 2025-26.
Do Chicago fans have any recourse? Doesn’t look like it.
CHCN has been roasted on social media since day one, with no impact.
Viewership has gone into the crapper, with no impact.
The media has ridiculed the network for months, with no impact.
I think we’d all love to boycott Chicago Sports Network. But they’re already boycotting us.