While writing out the Month in a Box for April, I was reminded that the White Sox's reported broadcast move from NBC Sports Chicago to Stadium hadn't been properly announced, even though the Chicago Sun-Times said it could have been made official as early as two weeks ago.
There's apparently a good reason for that: According to The Athletic, the White Sox aren't shifting to Stadium after all.
Scott Powers and Mark Lazerus instead reported that the White Sox, Blackhawks and Bulls will be instead partnering with Standard Media Group to create a new television broadcast home:
Standard Media Group in partnership with the Chicago Blackhawks, Chicago Bulls and Chicago White Sox will be the new television broadcast home for all three teams beginning in October, according to an internal document obtained by The Athletic.
The media group is expected to make the network, which is unnamed, available across “multiple platforms,” including over-the-air and carriage agreements with cable and streaming providers.
It's a surprising twist for multiple reasons. Stadium had been a well-known asset in the White Sox's portfolio, with Silver Chalice Sports taking majority control of the multiplatform network a year ago, so it was reasonable to assume that the teams would shift their broadcast operations to Stadium's offices in the United Center once the NBC Sports Chicago deal expired.
By comparison, Standard Media Group has an extremely low profile. It says it's headquartered in Nashville "with operations in New York, Lincoln, Nebraska, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and Providence, Rhode Island," but for a news organization, it's jarringly scant on information. Its website bears a copyright date of 2021, its latest news article under "LATEST NEWS" is dated Nov. 11, 2022, and its contact page feels obligated to clarify that it has no connection to the Kenyan news organization Standard Group Plc.
Their physical presence is equally inscrutable. I took a drive across town to Standard Media's listed address pictured above, and while I circled the building several times to the potential confusion of a couple of large parties awaiting reservations at an adjacent Maggiano's, there was no signage indicating Standard Media's presence.
There was, however, a sign for Chairmans Foods, so perhaps Jerry Reinsdorf's next meal ticket is hiding in plain sight.
Perhaps Reinsdorf sees this as potential additional leverage in his quest to use the threat of a move to Nashville, as a potential cudgel in his quest for public stadium financing in Illinois. Running broadcast operations out of the United Center with the Blackhawks and Bulls would effectively tie them to the market. But that assumes that Nashville has the capacity and appetite to pay for a ballpark, and that Standard Media Group actually exists in some kind of tangible form. There isn't evidence of the former at the present, and the latter is surprisingly lacking as well.
