It began with an epic argument between Cubs catcher Randy Hundley and umpire Satch Davidson, who’d ruled a Mets runner safe at home plate.
“I oughta bite your head off!” Hundley wailed.
“If you do,” Davidson shot back, “you’ll have more brains in your stomach than you have in your head!”
That was the opening anecdote — in a cover feature on the rise and fall of the 1969 Cubs — in the debut issue of the Sun-Times’ “Sports Saturday” edition, on April 6, 2019.
Since then, there have been 271 more “Sports Saturday” sections, each one wrapping around the rest of the paper — news, TV listings, comics and all — with football, basketball, baseball and other sports regularly adorning the front page and treasure troves of information inside. In all, that’s 272, or the career batting average as a Cub for 2016 World Series winner Anthony Rizzo, the games pitched as a Cub by terrific 1930s lefty Larry French and the career home runs swatted by 1984 Cubs killer Steve Garvey.
This “Sports Saturday” is the final one, ending a run of the best, thickest sports section Chicago has seen in a very long time. And if not every Saturday edition the last five-plus years was a home run, man, were there ever some memorable ones — especially when it came to the cover stories. Steve Stone the “psychic.” Mike Ditka the “wounded Bear.” Mark Giangreco’s banishment from ABC7. Candace Parker’s homecoming to Chicago. One last sold-out Blackhawks game before a pandemic shut it all down.
But the best, thickest sports section in town isn’t shutting anything down. Instead, we’re just moving things back a day. Or are we moving things up by six days?
“Sports Sunday” is headed your way, is the point — and we are fired up to make the change.
Beginning next week, the Sun-Times will bring you its biggest, brightest, boldest package of sports coverage every Sunday — this time in the form of a robust pullout section, a throwback, if you will, to how this newspaper did it in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. In fact, we’ll be beefing up our efforts with the entire Sunday paper, with more news, features, opinions, etc.
“The one day most people have time to really sit with the paper is Sunday, and we’re excited all this great work is coming at a time when people can do that,” said Chris De Luca, Deputy Managing Editor for Sports and Production. “And there still is that audience that treasures the Sunday paper.”
Back in 2019, the Sun-Times endeavored to do something hard and different — on the most challenging day of the week to publish a newspaper — at a time when some papers were eliminating their Saturday editions. “Print” isn’t a four-letter word and “Saturday” isn’t one, either, and we’d like to think we demonstrated that. “Sports Saturday” survived the pandemic and made its mark in Chicago. It was good stuff.
Every day will remain a big day for our Sports department, but Sundays will be extra-extra-large from here. Did we mention we’re fired up?
Thanks for reading.
