Nico Hoerner Admits What Cubs Fans Won’t About the White Sox
While some Cubs fans downplay the Crosstown rivalry, Nico Hoerner says games against the White Sox are more intense than matchups with the Cardinals.
Video Transcript
Sam Phelan here with the White Sox Roundtable.
Let's talk a little White Sox and Cubs.
And yes, we know that the Crosstown Classic has already passed.
The White Sox took that series.
But I think it's important to revisit this for my White Sox fans out there to remember some of the discourse.
Because one of the things I find most frustrating, most embarrassing, all of it, about the Crosstown Classic is the fact that Cubs fans like to pretend that this isn't a rivalry between the Cubs and White Sox.
We hear, "Oh, you know, we care about our division opponents.
We're not even worried about you."
But then sure enough, just as the White Sox are coming back into the spotlight, just as the White Sox are challenging the Cubs for being the best baseball team in Chicago, when the White Sox are beating the Cubs in the Crosstown Classic, you start to see their true feelings.
You start to see them coming after White Sox players trying to discredit them on the internet.
You see radio hosts in the city leading a Colson Montgomery versus Dansby Swanson discourse, an absolute laughable argument.
You see Pete Crow Armstrong, a Cubs player, getting into a verbal altercation with a White Sox fan.
It's all great.
It's all good for the rivalry, as long as you can admit that it's a rivalry.
Well, White Sox fans now have a trump card because Chicago Cubs second baseman Nico Horner recently was willing to admit what the Cubs fans haven't been, which is the fact that this is a rivalry and that it's a good one, by the way.
Horner, on a recent appearance on Six Seventy The Score, told Spiegel and Holmes that the rivalry with the White Sox is even more intense than Cubs-Cardinals.
So I don't want to hear any of this, "Oh, well, actually, I'm a Cubs fan.
We root for the Cubs.
We root for the White Sox too."
According to Horner, Great Field is louder, more hostile.
You can simply feel the rivalry more than you can when the Cubs play other NL Central teams.
For the fans, for the players, that's a testament to the nature of some same-city rivalry.
It's a credit to White Sox fans, who are some of the most loyal and notoriously electric when the on-field product is worthy of praise.
So don't let anybody tell you that this isn't a rivalry.
Even the Cubs players know it just means more when it's the Cubs against the White Sox, and Nico Horner is just the one willing to admit it.
