After 51 Years, MLBaseball Ends Long Run On WGN-9

From his unique perch as the only person to have not only played for both the White Sox and Cubs but broadcast their games on radio and TV, Steve Stone lent special perspective to the end of pro baseball Saturday night on WGN-9. reports The Chicago Tribune.

Stone’s now a Sox analyst but made his WGN announcing debut with the Cubs in 1983.

“It’s almost surreal to realize that there will be no more baseball, no more televised sports on WGN,” Stone said early in the nightcap of the Sox doubleheader against the visiting Tigers, the final Major League Baseball telecast on the station. “It’s something that’s hard to grasp, actually.”

The Sox have had games on WGN for 51 seasons and, like the Cubs, made their debut on the station in 1948.

Steve Stone

The Cubs plan to put all the games they control on Marquee Sports Network, a channel they’re set to launch next year with Sinclair Broadcast Network.

The Sox, with the Bulls and Blackhawks, are taking games off WGN and putting as much of their schedule as they can on NBC Sports Chicago, which begins its post-Cubs iteration Tuesday.

“WGN will go on, they just won’t do baseball anymore,” Stone said.

Stone lauded free over-the-air broadcast TV and an era on it in Chicago that’s ending with WGN’s final baseball broadcasts.

“It’s just been a wonderful run,” he said. “There was a certain dependability. It was always there. … Regardless of what came along on cable, regardless of what came along streaming, regardless of what the newest innovations were, you could turn on the dial and Ch. 9, WGN, it was there, showing sports. It was showing baseball from both sides of town.”

As for radio, On June 5, 2014, the Chicago Cubs announced that radio broadcasts of its games would move from WGN to WBBM for the 2015 season under a seven-year deal. The deal ended the team's 90-year association with WGN.

On February 14, 2018, WGN Radio was named the new flagship station of the Chicago White Sox, who were left without a station after Cumulus Media voided their contract to air on WLS as part of their Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. The agreement is for three years.