Didn't the Grimace nickname start here and then Mac used it on air?

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You know me like that.

From Boyd’s favorite columnist.

With Chicago sports talk withering, what is ‘The Score’ celebrating?

THERE IS A VAST BONEYARD of faded American corporations that shouldn’t schedule “anniversary celebrations.”
Blockbuster ... Pan Am ... Minnie Pearl’s Fried Chicken.
Which makes it all the more laughable Chicago’s very down WSCR-AM (670) is in the midst of some kind of yearlong “30th Anniversary Celebration.”
What are they celebrating?
Deflated ratings?
A whiz-poor swarm of low-budget on-air drones?
Flatulent, Hindenburg disaster-like management?
Distant echoes of the Bush administrations?
THE MOST RECENT NIELSEN AUDIO book listed “The Score” as No. 22 in the market.
The signal remains “Chicago’s sports leader” since DOA mom-and-plopper WMVP-AM (1000) crawled in at No. 25.
Turtle beats snail.
But those same radio Nielsens also heralded a number of major American cities where sports talk radio is robust and thriving.
Among them, rabid Boston, where WBZ-FM is No. 2 and WEEI-FM is No. 11.
Plus San Francisco (KNBR-AM, No. 4), Dallas/Fort Worth (KTCK-AM, No. 4) and Detroit (WXYT-FM, No. 4).
How about New York (WFAN, No. 10), Philadelphia (WIP-FM, No. and Washington, D.C. (WJFK-FM, No. 10)?
ALL COMPETITIVE, ALL ENGAGING, all so far from the must-flee sonic slop Chicago is chloroformed with on a daily basis.
“The Score” has had operational highlights. But almost all came more than 20 years ago.
The station signed on in 1992. Prior to that, Dan Jiggetts — the single most important hire in the history of WSCR — was signed to bring instant credibility and likability.
In 1995, Westinghouse bought the operation from Diamond Broadcasting. In 2000, WSCR finally arrived as a full-service, 24-hour signal at powerful AM-670 (tipped more than 18 months before in the sports & media space of The Sun-Times.)
And then its primary loft was over.
SINCE THEN?
In 2014, wily Jimmy de Castro helped hijack Cubs radio play-by-play rights from sinking WGN-AM (720). After one season on corporate sister WBBM-AM (780), “The Score” greeted Joe Maddon, Anthony Rizzo and other myth busters in time to air a World Series-winning year.
More recently, the station has slashed staff and budget. Cubs games now equal dead air. Internally, the lone saving register ring of AM-670 has been the significant influx of advertising revenue from legalized gaming concerns.
And that’s it.
IF THE STATION HAD TO depend upon its relevancy as an infotaining crossroads, it would have about as much standing as the gubernatorial hopes of Downstate who-he? Darren Bailey.
So they are “celebrating” a 30th anniversary at “The Score.”
Maybe Minnie Pearl can have Pan Am fly in the bones from Blockbuster.

• Jim O’Donnell’s Sports and Media column appears Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at jimodonnelldh@yahoo.com.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Great point about the popularity of Sports radio in other cities compared to Chicago.

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"I give you my word as a Biden"

Wow, even he is having a hard time writing like him.

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You know me like that.

During the Score's recent anniversary parties they pretty much admit there are no recent on-air best ofs or anything noteworthy. Just a big black hole of programming.

He cites Dan Jiggetts as their most important hire. He has zero credibility as a sports media critic.

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“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”- JD Vance
“My god, what an !diot.”- JD Vance tweet on Trump
“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy”- JD Vance

Wasn’t the point more that Jiggets was a known entity as a professional sports talker?

I thought he was making a point that Jiggets gave the station credibility in a way a hot dog vendor didn’t (even if the hot dog vendor was ultimately the better host).

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That's the way I took it as well.

Jiggs gave credibility as a former Bear, and as a host that tempered some of Mike's insanity as well.

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If you take out the part about him being the single most important hire in the history of the Score, then the sentence is accurate. Including that statement is simply wrong in any context.

In any case, I stand by my comment that JO has zero credibility. He has had a grudge against local Sportstalk radio from the beginning and has never let it go. His animosity leads me to believe that he saw the Sun Times ship sinking and badly wanted on board the radio lifeboat. There’s less bias in a Mariotti column on Jerry Reinsdorf.

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“Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.”- JD Vance
“My god, what an !diot.”- JD Vance tweet on Trump
“I’m a ‘Never Trump’ guy”- JD Vance

His point that the Score is floundering in the ratings whereas stations in other markets are thriving is valid, though. Perhaps the Score should explore the underlying reasons for the success of those stations in contrast to its own struggles.

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Wouldn’t you assume a task a program director/manager should do is analysis of competition and other markets? Maybe not if you have been coasting in the job securely for 25 years or whatever.

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Elections have consequences.

what does a "program director" do for 8 hours a day , 40 hours a week ?
i'm curious
like it seems like a job to basically just do nothing at and just take long lunches, drink at work, fuck secretarys, that kinda thing

In many respects Jiggetts did give the Score credibility in ways that North and McNeil did not.
Even though his style was rather vanilla and bland, it was obvious that he was hired to counterbalance the bomb throwing of Mike North. Something he was able to do and do well.

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Kinda what goofs like myself have been saying for years.

The station is currently putting out a product that targets a fairly small portion of the potential audience, for every self-professed "smart fan", that wants their "sports thoughts" filtered through a SJW/Woke lens where everyone must agree and the hosts all think/sound alike, there are 1,000 guys that just want to be entertained or hear honest takes on local teams.

Find it telling that they will regularly play/react to bits from NY hosts that are 1,000 percent more successful, you would think this would be embarrassing because it reveals that the station is so lame that it needs to steal bits from people that are actually doing entertaining sports talk radio in order to come up with content.

You see comedians are starting to put out tons of stuff ripping the current woke culture which is a harbinger of the end of the hapless woke/cancel culture. Seems that WSCR will be late in understanding the changing culture and will hang on to the already dated cultural fad known as wokeism, and as competitors move into the next phase the station will continue to chase a smaller and smaller listening audience unless someone comes in and totally revamps the station.

Yeah, he did not phrase this particularly well. Agreed...he has no credibility, but he is still 100% accurate that they have nothing to celebrate.

The popularity and relevancy of other sports radio markets says it all. The only other market I can personally speak to is Dallas KTCK-AM "The Ticket". 2016-18 I spent a lot of time in the area for work and listened daily. I don't think they have anything that WAS as good as Monsters or HFC, but they haven't resorted to "really smart radio / boring reporting" that we are stuck with today. I have always said, the real problem with the Score is their insistence on reporting versus entertaining. Have fun....laugh...it's been gone for years. I don't get the sense that the Dallas radio hosts are carrying water for the local teams. It's conversation and entertainment....a lot like what Mac described as the intent of the Afternoon Saloon, but no wanna-be failed comedians.

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I was listening to the Pivot podcast with Daniel Cormier yesterday. I'd been putting off listening to it since I'm not a UFC fan, but I laughed my ass off watching it. Which the Score stopped trying to do 20-25 years ago. Management has to be daft now. Just bring the funny. The transition at 2pm used to be can't miss radio every weekday. Funny as hell.

Especially the day that Tom Shaer tried to call in to try and blast North. Dumb idea.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

Chicago sports radio is as dead as it's parent company, which currently sits at a market cap of a paltry $87 million. Maybe if Larry gets another salary bump or a 4th job, he can buy out the parent company.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

Holmes: "Dan and Terry gave us permission to laugh again after 9/11".

What a fucking dumb ass and suck ass he is.

Yes, Larry. You're right. 3,000 people died that day. 300 + had to jump to their death. But Terry Boers and Dan Bernstein gave us permission to laugh again. If they didn't exist we wouldn't be laughing to this very day. Thank god for those two. Jesus Christ. What a stupid comment.

I hate Larry. He's such a phony.

bernstein brought the Score to its knees with his insistence on doing Very Serious Radio all the time.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

Back to the Program Director without the balls to stop that in its tracks. One week tops.

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Elections have consequences.

There was a time when B&b could have covered the Penn State story, for example, with Terry slipping in gay jokes and such. But when bernstein decided to become Faux Walter Cronkite, Terry just went along for the ride. There was no way to lighten the subject the way bernstein decided to approach it.

Now, maybe you feel that some things aren't funny. Okay, fine. But I wouldn't have looked to B&b for information on such things.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Tulsi, and Don

That was the beginning of the end for me. The station went from mostly light hearted, silly, and fun to trying being overly serious and judgmental. It was a big and important story, but the story was not local and not even pro sports. At most it should have a warranted a segment or two as news broke.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

After that the last straw was the Kane story. Serious yes but him, Terry and Julie painted themselves into such a corner so fast there was no way out so they threw good after bad. I still can here him yelling "you cannot or aren't allowed to say that" whenever anyone questioned the case.

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Elections have consequences.

That is what ended up driving me away from The Score. It's been so long since I listened that I only found out Leila was no longer fulltime at the station 3 months after she stepped down.

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“When I walked in this morning, and saw the flag was at half mast, I thought 'alright another bureaucrat ate it.'" - Ron Swanson

Mitch wants to be liked, be the boss and and be everyone's friend.

It's not possible to do all three.

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Ad revenue is probably fine. The sportsbooks are a bottomless well.

They got lucky.

It does seem that way, but we are in the first few years of legalized gaming, so eventually one would think that even the sportsbooks will start to look at ratings and wonder if the station trotting out hosts that are chasing away half or more of the potential listening audience.

It also seems the current group wants to target a very small sliver of the potential sportstalk radio audience. They may not like it, but for every hapless lefty wokester they seem to covet there are a thousand 40 plus dudes that have and will continue to have way more income than the group they seem to covet, at some point somebody will figure this out.

This will never happen at WSCR under the current group who all operate under the delusion that they are news/political commentators and not simply sports talk radio hosts, this affliction seems to have spread throughout the entire Chicago sports media. Even the incompetent Hubert Arkush feels the need to spend more time pushing the woke line than actually plugging his company, it's almost like an uncurable mental illness, like nobody will play with you anymore if you don't prove your down with the struggle every time your on the air.

It's not almost like, it is. Because they are way too far down this road to turn back. Society's goofs have doubled down so many times it's just pure faith now. Oops, did I say Faith? I did. With a capital F.