(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Chicago Cubs / Graham Racher)
Sat 14 March 2026 1:00, UK
Eddie Vedder helped invent ‘the Seattle sound’, Tom Morello represented Rage Against the Machine in The Battle of Los Angeles, and Jack White is the spiritual mayor of Detroit, Michigan.
For various reasons, though, all three of them are fans of the hard-luck Major League Baseball team from the north side of the ‘Windy City’, the Chicago Cubs.
They’re not alone either. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins has been a diehard supporter of the ‘Cubbies’ his entire life, and the late, great rock producer Steve Albini attended many games at the club’s historic stadium, Wrigley Field, in his youth. Then there’s Dave Grohl, who isn’t a professed baseball enthusiast or a Chicagoan, but did attend the first, formative punk rock show of his life across the street from Wrigley at the Cubby Bear Lounge in 1983, and regularly came back to the area to stay with his Chicago-based cousin.
It’s quite within reason, then, to imagine a random day in Chicago’s Wrigleyville neighbourhood in the early 1980s, when a visiting, teenage Grohl easily could have crossed paths with young, pimply-faced versions of Corgan, Vedder, Morello, and Albini, a ridiculous convergence of influential ‘90s rock titans. This doesn’t even leave room for similarly-aged Cub fans John Cusack and Vince Vaughn, or elder statesman Bill Murray, who remained a regular supporter even during the height of his Ghostbusters fame.
So what, specifically, was the magnetic pull of the Cubs on the ‘90s alt-rocker’s mind?
Well, in a lot of cases, it was a simple matter of geography, as Vedder grew up in nearby Evanston, Illinois, and despite spending key periods of his life in San Diego and Seattle, never shed his childhood Cubs fandom. Morello, similarly, grew up in the Chicago suburb of Libertyville, while Albini moved to the area to attend Northwestern University in the 1970s, and never left; meanwhile, Jack White was a Detroit Tigers fan in his heart, but started attending games at Wrigley in the 2010s, admiring the atmosphere at the 100-year-old ballpark, also becoming a meme in 2014 after being photographed at a game, wearing a Cubs jersey and looking incredibly unhappy.
(Credits: Chicago Cubs)
Culturally, the Cubs have always had broad appeal outside of Chicago thanks to the draw of Wrigley Field’s unique atmosphere, the team’s inclusion in movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and the sob story of their 108-year championship drought, which gave them a reputation as cursed but lovable losers. When the Cubs finally won the World Series in 2016, lifelong fans like the Chicago-born Billy Corgan weren’t all that thrilled about the bandwagon fans that came out of the woodwork, especially the fairweather celebs who showed up to take part in the Wrigley tradition of singing ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ from the press box during the seventh inning.
“I don’t talk to other Cubs celebrities,” Corgan told the Chicago Tribune at the time, “In fact, I’m anti-Cubs celebrities. Although I know a few, other Cubs celebrities tend to show up when the playoffs are on. I don’t necessarily see them in June [the middle of the baseball season]. I might be a little biased being a Chicagoan year-round.”
Steve Albini, before his death in 2024, spoke in greater detail on the subject, including his theories on why baseball has more of a draw with certain artists than other American sports, telling the Jagged Time Lapse blog, “There seems to be more of an association with punk rockers, and people who are in alternative culture of all kinds, and baseball. There’s more of an affinity there than there is with other team sports…I think the detail in baseball, the fact that you can delve deeper and deeper into it, does mirror the music scene; you can find out what bands these guys used to be in and go look for their rare singles, etc”.
He also detailed the glory of watching a ballgame in the ’80s and ’90s at Wrigley due to how close one could sit to the field and the happy, glaring lack of “interior advertising and that sort of stuff”.
The brutally honest Albini was predictably less keen on the other, not-so-punky aspects of Chicago baseball culture, though, specifically, the “bro” vibe around Wrigleyville on a summer’s day, eloquently highlighting that he only loves the game and hates everything around it: “So the Cubs as an institution, as a tourist attraction, as a novelty, as an excuse for binge drinking, as a locus of all of the bro, white cap, cargo shorts, asshole, day-trading motherfuckers, like, as the focus of that? I hate everything about it”.