WGN Sports

WGN Sports (originally known as WGN-TV Sports from 1948 to 1993) was the programming division of WGN-TV (channel 9), an independent television station (now a CW owned-and-operated station) located in Chicago, Illinois, United States—which is owned by the Nexstar Media Group—that was responsible for all sports broadcasts on the station, some of which were previously also broadcast on its former national superstation feed, WGN America (now news and entertainment channel NewsNation).

At various points between the station's founding in 1948 until 2019, WGN Sports produced telecasts from several of Chicago's major professional sports teams, most notably the Chicago Cubs (MLB), Chicago White Sox (MLB), Chicago Bulls (NBA) and Chicago Blackhawks (NHL). Since the inception of the sports programming unit, the station had produced ancillary pre-game and post-game shows for most of its sporting events, including The Lead-Off Man (pre-game) and The Tenth Inning (post-game) for its Cubs and White Sox baseball telecasts and BullsEye for its telecasts of Bulls basketball games. In addition to those shown over WGN-TV within the Chicago market, game telecasts produced by the station were also syndicated to television stations in other parts of Illinois as well as portions of Indiana and Iowa that are within the respective broadcast territories of the contracted teams.

WGN-TV wound down its broadcasts of team-based sports programming between March and September 2019, beginning with the conclusion of Bulls and Blackhawks game coverage that spring, as the four professional teams prepared to make their game telecasts cable-exclusive (with the Cubs planning to move their telecasts to Marquee Sports Network upon its launch on February 22, 2020, and the Bulls, Blackhawks and White Sox relegating their local television broadcasts to existing regional sports network partner NBC Sports Chicago beginning with the Bulls' 2019–20 preseason schedule), thereby ending the Chicago market's distinction as the only remaining American media market to regularly offer over-the-air telecasts of sporting events from NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball teams. Amidst this hiatus, in February 2020, Chicago Fire FC (MLS) announced a multi-year agreement with WGN-TV to transfer their over-the-air telecasts to the station beginning with its 2020 season, returning regular sporting events to the station after a seven-month lag. WGN-TV's final sports broadcast was the October 9 matchup between the Fire and the New England Revolution, as a result of Apple TV reaching an exclusive 10-year worldwide broadcast deal with MLS.

Throughout its history, WGN-TV has had a long-standing association with Chicago sports. The station has been noted for being one of a handful of commercial television stations in the United States—and, from the early 2000s until 2019, the only such station—to maintain a substantial schedule of locally originated telecasts from multiple major professional sports franchises. WGN is also among the few local television stations to have regularly carried events from teams in any of the five major sports leagues that have historically contracted their games for over-the-air broadcast well into the 21st century, even as professional sports franchises migrated most or all of their locally originated game telecasts to regional sports networks that require a subscription to a multichannel television provider (including cable, satellite, IPTV and fiber optic–based services) to receive, citing the hefty rights fees those services pay for the contractual rights that factor as major drivers of league and team revenue.

Each of the city's major professional sports franchises, along with several area collegiate teams, have had their games regularly televised over channel 9. The one exception is the Chicago Bears, who, like other NFL franchises, are bound by network broadcasting contracts by the National Football League for the most part, though most teams license some of their preseason games for regional over-the-air broadcast through in-house syndication units; although the Bears' cable-originated games have occasionally aired on WGN-TV by arrangement with ESPN under NFL provisions pertaining to national cable telecasts within a franchise's home market.

WGN-TV's respective relationships with Chicago's two Major League Baseball (MLB) franchises, the Chicago Cubs (of the National League) and the Chicago White Sox (of the American League), trace back to shortly before the station's inception in April 1948. Coverage of baseball games involving the Chicago Cubs has perhaps typified WGN-TV's programming identity, due to the popularity of the telecasts both locally and, as a superstation, throughout the Midwestern United States. On March 7 of that year, Channel 9 acquired the local television rights to broadcast all of the Cubs's daytime home games at Wrigley Field during the 1948 season, beginning with the team's April 23 game, in which the Cubs were set to play against the St. Louis Cardinals. (The Cubs would not hold nighttime games at Wrigley Field until August 1988, when it became the last MLB club to begin holding games after sunset.) The team's broadcast partnership with the Cubs owes itself to sister radio station WGN (720 AM)'s longtime role as the flagship of the team's radio network that dates to 1924 (when the Chicago Tribune acquired the station from Zenith-Edgewater Beach Broadcasting) and would last until 2014. The station aired its inaugural sports telecast on April 16, two weeks after WGN-TV signed on, involving an exhibition rivalry game between the Cubs and the White Sox (which the Sox won, 4-1).

WGN-TV shared the local telecast rights to the Cubs with WBKB-TV (channel 4, now CBS owned-and-operated station WBBM-TV on channel 2) until 1951, with Channel 9 gaining exclusive rights to the Cubs broadcasts starting in 1952. Jack Brickhouse, the longtime sports director—and later, vice president of sports programming—for the WGN television and radio stations, handled play-by-play announcing duties for the home games of both teams until 1967, and continued to call Cubs games until his retirement from broadcasting in 1981. Combining his relationships with both the Cubs and White Sox, Brickhouse called over 5,000 baseball games during his career, sharing the booth with announcers such as Milo Hamilton, Lou Boudreau, Vince Lloyd (who also served as a sports anchor for WGN-TV) and Lloyd Pettit (who also served as a WGN-TV news and sports anchor during the timeframe).

The station's relationship with the Cubs was further cemented on June 16, 1981, when the Tribune Company (renamed Tribune Media in August 2014 following the spin-off of its publishing division) purchased an 81% share in the franchise from William Wrigley III – who sold the franchise to alleviate himself of the large estate taxes that were accrued upon inheriting the team following the death of his parents – for $20.5 million. The sale was approved in a unanimous vote among the National League team owners on August 6 of that year. The purchase made Tribune the second operator of a superstation to own an MLB franchise (alongside Ted Turner, who owned the Atlanta Braves, which aired its games over his Atlanta independent WTBS) and one of three companies that owned television stations in the home markets of the teams they owned (along with Gene Autry, who then owned the California Angels and Los Angeles independent [and eventual WGN-TV sister station] KTLA in Los Angeles). (Detroit Tigers owner John Fetzer also owned television and radio stations in the Midwest during his ownership of the team from 1956 to 1983; however, none were based within the Detroit market.)