Curious Hair wrote:
Well, do you have a guy, or is this just you as a White Sox fan hoping they don't suffer the embarrassment of getting knocked off their 50,000-watt perch, which one must admit is slightly gratuitous for a team whose fanbase doesn't even cover an entire metro? If Emmis got serious about their sports-on-FM thing and put the Sox on Q101, you'd pretty much reach everyone you need to reach within that signal, except for maybe needing affiliates in Kankakee or La Salle.
I can't speak with any authority on future plans, but I can say that I've heard the billing isn't so hot, which at the very least could make CBS rethink paying a rights fee. The Hawks and WGN have some sort of revenue-sharing agreement now, as opposed to WGN paying a rights fee (Score with Sox) or the Hawks buying the time (Score with Hawks). Maybe that's in their future. Straight-up rights fees are kind of a dying breed in play-by-play, which made the Score's initial plunge raise a few eyebrows.
Curious, I'm reminded of what the Bulls did a few years ago with the former 105.9 WCKG before they dropped FM Talk and "Fresh"-ened their format, prompting the Bulls to move their games back to ESPN Radio 1000 2 years ago. Now known legally as WCFS, the ratings haven't been much better and longtime Chicago radio programmer Bill Gamble was recently fired after programming both Fresh 105.9 and US 99.5, 2 of 670 The SCORE's sister stations in the CBS Radio family. CBS bosses want to do everything they can in efforts to jumpstart Fresh 105.9 in particular, and if ratings don't improve soon despite all the promos & billboards around Chicago since it launched a couple years ago, an "FM SCORE" might become a reality.