IN BLOODY, GRISLY CHICAGO, EVEN THE WHITE SOX REDEFINE THE HIT-AND-RUN

An American murder capital needs the connective tissue of sports, now more than ever, yet every major local team remains a loser — and a simple walk to the ballpark can be a life-and-death horror

     Why does the red barn on North Stockton Drive look familiar? Oh, that was a happy landmark on our way to the zoo when my daughters were young, but now it’s just another crime scene. Lincoln Park was safer then, and so was Michigan Avenue, and so was the lakefront bicycle path, and so was much of the urban complex always described majestically as “the City of Chicago” by none other than Michael Jordan.

     Today, no capital letters are necessary. The hub of the heartland, the core of flyover country, the place that inspired Barack Obama and celebrated the ’85 Bears and the Bulls dynasty — it’s now the American city most identified with the tragedy, blood and despair of gun violence. Chicago is a hellhole, too far gone to be helped by the three most previous mayors or the new mayor, Brandon Johnson, who spoke helplessly after a holiday weekend carnage that killed at least 13 people and wounded 62 others in four mass shootings. That doesn’t include a mass shooting in the suburb of Willowbrook, where one man was killed and 22 others were wounded at a Juneteenth party.

     “Here is what we need to remind ourselves,” Johnson said. “If we’re going to get ourselves out of this rut, it’s going to take all of us. ... Everybody knows if your only strategy is policing — that is the old way of doing things and that has not worked.”

     Nothing works. The Fourth of July is coming, only weeks after a Memorial Day weekend when 59 were shot and 11 killed. If you’re going to the Lincoln Park Zoo, duck. Five people were shot, including a teen girl who was struck in the buttocks and taken to the hospital, during an argument near the glorious red barn of better days.

     I write this because I know what can connect Chicago, if not unify or heal it. Sports is the common denominator — whether you live north or south or west, in the city or in suburbia — yet the local teams, as usual, are doing nothing to ease the pain. Other than Oakland, which loses franchises but at least won’t have to suffer their futility, there is no market where sports is a bigger blight. That is a particular problem when millions view the Bears, Cubs, White Sox, Bulls and Blackhawks as family members in an ongoing generational hand-me-down, in a metropolis where too many people grow up and never leave.

     It’s a city where fans can’t even attend a baseball game without a hit-and-run driver possibly running them down. Imagine being the two men and two women walking into a White Sox game, about a bunt single from the entrance to whatever they’re calling the stadium these days, and looking up on West 35th Street to see a silver sedan speeding toward you. All four fans were hit, injured and hospitalized — ages ranging from 24 to 64 — and the oldest was thrown onto the car and partially slid through its sunroof, forcing him to cling to the vehicle as it fled down the Dan Ryan Expressway, where it crashed near 46th Street. The ages of the four people in the getaway car: 20 to 25. Back at the scene of the collision, a fire truck washed blood off the sidewalk.

     More blood, in a city that spills too much.

     The team’s owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, should drop to his knees in prayer that no one has died, with two fans in critical condition Tuesday night — the man who went through the sunroof and a woman — while the two other pedestrians were in serious condition. But Our Favorite Chairman, in the unfathomable event he ever would show his face, is more likely to blame the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority, which owns Guaranteed Rate Field about 35 years after Reinsdorf leveraged a threatened move to Florida into a taxpayer-subsidized ballmall. It figures a hit-and-run would happen outside this owner’s stadium in this city. Between a team that has won only one World Series since throwing one in 1919, and a ballpark that quickly became obsolete during an innovative building boom, nothing ever has been cool about attending a game on the South Side. Now, you have the threat of tumbling into a sunroof and losing your life in a freeway chase. The driver of the collision car and three passengers were apprehended and in custody at a hospital. Said the team in a statement: “Our hearts go out to the four fans who were injured this evening, their families and friends, as well as the fans who witnessed the incident on their way to a baseball game.”

     Hearts? Who knew Reinsdorf cared about the dwindling number of fans who keep putting money in his pocket, despite only one championship reward in his 43 years of ownership?

     What baseball always will offer, above all other sports, is the magic of the ballpark adventure. I’ve been going lately — to Dodger Stadium, though not when a senselessly executed Pride Night devolved into a standoff between Catholics and nuns in drag — because the games are appreciably shorter and my secret seat section remains undiscovered. Not once have I felt endangered upon entering the perimeter off Vin Scully Avenue. Come to think of it, few major-league stadiums ever would play loose with the safety quotient of paying customers entering the grounds. Reinsdorf’s park is the one place I’ve always felt anxious — and I’ve been to all but a few of them in American sports. It’s not because a nail was driven into my car tire in a parking lot, not far from the hit-and-run. And it’s not because I was threatened by players and called an anti-Semite by Reinsdorf. And it’s not because I wrote about a critical local radio host who was beaten outside a nearby bar and wasn’t helped by the team.

     A media person deals with collateral b.s. Fans should not be subjected to vehicular danger at the intersection of 35th and Shields Avenue. The Cubs used to have a crowding issue outside Wrigley Field, its marquee entrance pressed against the corner of Clark Street and Sheffield Avenue, before closing off streets. A White Sox season-ticket holder, Jim O’Malley, said he wasn’t surprised by the frightening collision, telling my old newspaper, the Sun-Times, “They should not have car traffic on 35th.” As he and his wife were navigating the street, she noticed how “the crossing guards were doing a poor job. We’ve always talked about how crossing here is always a bit of a challenge.”

     All of which happened in what might be Chicago’s most maddening baseball season of all, which is some statement. Though two teams conveniently reside in Central divisions that otherwise include smaller Midwest markets, the Cubs and White Sox continue to waste larger resource pools and find themselves in shameful predicaments. They’re left to hope the fluky Cincinnati Reds — whose active payroll is $50.3 million, with an extra $3.6 million going to long-retired Ken Griffey Jr. — and bland Minnesota Twins lose just enough and allow them to sneak into the postseason with (would you believe?) losing records. If MLB commissioner Rob Manfred can install a pitch clock and purge infield shifts, he surely can recognize the sham of .500-or-worse division winners in leagues where several non-playoff teams would have better records. We’re changing the rules now. Be prepared to ban unworthy division winners from the playoffs.

     Besides, that would make it easier for Reinsdorf to tip-toe through his preferred midseason escape hatch. Now that it’s apparent he won’t be winning another World Series before his 88th birthday, or ever again, the owner would love to surrender and become a seller at the upcoming trade deadline. He once gave up on a season when a much better Sox team was only 3.5 games back in late July, so why would he stick by a 32-43 sleepwalker that is 4.5 games out of first place only because the Twins are 36-38? Even the beleaguered general manager, Rick Hahn, acknowledges a years-long rebuild is failing and might require a slew of trades involving fading centerpieces such as Tim Anderson and Lucas Giolito. “We have been digging ourselves out of a hole for a while now. It’s a little tough to have that edge when you are swimming upstream,” Hahn said.

     White Flag Trade, meet Blue Light Special.

     At least the 35-38 Cubs are constructing a mildly optimistic future, sort of, opposed to the Sox’s dismal present and fruitless past. The lowly Blackhawks have a modicum of hope, in the name of phenom Connor Bedard, who will be theirs with the top pick in the NHL draft. The Bulls continue to drown in Reinsdorfian no-man’s land, punished mostly with misery since the Jordan dynasty was dismantled, without a single pick in Thursday’s NBA draft.

     Then you have the Bears — the city’s universal team, and its perennial heartbreakers. There is only one constant headache more brutal than traffic — stadium politics — and with a new mayor in the middle, the McCaskeys and their new henchman, former Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren, are pitting Chicago versus northwest suburban Arlington Heights in the political game. At this point, with one championship and not much else in the 57-year Super Bowl era, people don’t care if the Bears play in a sandlot in Joliet.

     If nothing else, they can tout a quarterback as a potential savior, though no one knows if Justin Fields is more than a track star in a city that never has showcased a great QB. The Bears would be ideal subjects for the HBO series, “Hard Knocks,” which highlights an NFL team and identifies story lines. I watch the show. A lot of people do. It gives the McCaskeys a chance to be nationally relevant, for a change, rather than McCursed.

      But the Bears, like a stunning number of other NFL teams, are afraid of transparency. “We feel there are a number of teams that have compelling stories to tell on ‘Hard Knocks’ — 31 others,” said chairman George McCaskey, always on the run, just like Fields.

     When I was in Chicago, George was the ticket manager while his mother, Virginia, was firing another son, Michael. The Bears don’t have to sell tickets, so they could afford to demote George to chairman. Ass backwards?

     That’s Chicago, the only place on Earth where sports teams make people feel worse than they already do.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.