No, ESPN and CBS, this is not Chicago’s first World Series in 71 years

The Chicago Cubs famously haven’t won the World Series since 1908 and haven’t even played in it since 1945, and a lot of media outlets have been discussing both that 108-year championship drought and 71-year appearance drought. However, it should be noted that those droughts are for the Cubs’ franchise, not the entire city of Chicago; the oft-overlooked White Sox play there too, and they appeared in the World Series in both 1959 and 2005, winning that latter year. Both ESPN’s @SportsCenter account and CBS’ national @CBSThisMorning account managed to miss that in tweets about the Cubs’ NL pennant win Saturday:

https://twitter.com/SportsCenter/status/790033987251175425

Interestingly enough, both those tweets are still up, and neither outlet appears to have issued a correction or apology. The @SportsCenter one is somewhat defensible if the “Chicago” is presumed to refer to the Cubs’ franchise rather than the city (as is frequently done with tweets about other teams, such as using “Dallas” for the Cowboys), but that’s at the very least confusing and problematic when it comes to a city that has two teams in the same sport, and it shouldn’t be done. The @CBSThisMorning tweet is just completely factually incorrect: Chicago saw the World Series in 2005, just at the-then U.S. Cellular Field (soon to be Guaranteed Rate Field) rather than Wrigley.

Yes, national media, the White Sox still play in Chicago, and you’ll look bad if you conveniently overlook that fact. ESPN and CBS’ pitfalls here may be instructive for others, though. Everyone writing the references to the Cubs’ drought sure to show up this week might want to keep in mind that  it’s a franchise drought, not a city-wide one.

[Hardball Talk]