by Chris Bodenner
A reader writes:
Finally, a Dish topic on which I can confidently call myself an expert: the Chicago Cubs. Prospero's wrong on two points. First, many fans do not "pick" the teams they support; those teams choose them. In my case it was a frigid April day in 1963. I was in first grade and it was parent-teacher day at school, so my uncle volunteered to take me and my siblings to Wrigley Field. At one point, the four of us stood alongside the brick wall down the right foul line, screaming Billy Williams' name over and over. Finally, and to shut us up perhaps, he tipped his cap at us. One, two, three strikes – I was hooked for life.
Prospero is also flat-out wrong when he says that there is "no real loss to avoid" for fans of a losing team and that Cub fans have "a safe space in which to lose."
Just six years after my first Cubs game, I watched the team collapse down the stretch and lose the pennant to the hated Mets. In 1984, it was the slow ground ball that somehow managed to elude Leon Durham's glove in San Diego. And, of course, 2003 and the infamous Bartman foul ball, when the Cubs were just a few outs from the World Series. When a losing team keeps taking its fans that close to the pinnacle, only to fall short, the loss is much, much more painful.
Another writes:
I think I pulled a muscle rolling my eyes at Prospero's post on the Chicago Cubs. I've been seeing a lot of discussion lately of "why the Cubs still have fans even though they always lose" – for instance, in Moskowitz & Wertheim's "Scorecasting". (Full disclosure: I'm a die hard Cubs fan.) But while I find the organization frequently frustrating and I do find myself rooting for a losing team more often than I would like, I have to point out that Prospero's is an inexcusably lazy analysis. Clearly, this question is fashionable because the Cubs happen to have been pretty terrible for a couple years now. But how silly would it have sounded just three years ago, when the Cubs were running away with a second consecutive division title and the best record in the National League?
In reality, the Cubs maintain their fan base not because they always lose but because they sometimes win. The "always lose" fallacy just comes from their not having appeared in a World Series in a century – which is notable, but doesn't even come close to meaning they field losing teams on a yearly basis.
It's also notable that similar things can be said of the pre-2004 Red Sox, another perennial "loser" that maintained a large and rabid fan base. This is very different than teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates (who haven't had a winning record since 1992) and the Kansas City Royals (who haven't been to the postseason since 1985). These are genuinely futile teams, and it would be puzzling if they maintained large fan bases and gaudy attendence figures.
But of course the Pirates and Royals are teams in small markets with tiny payrolls, so you might say it's not fair to compare them to the high-spending Cubs. All right, then let's compare the Cubs to the crosstown White Sox, or even to the New York Mets. In the last 30 years, both the Mets and White Sox have made fewer playoff appearances (5) than the Cubs (6). In the last decade alone, the Cubs have played October baseball in three years, while the White Sox have only done so twice – and the Mets only once.
None of this is to say that the Cubs are a better-run franchise (although, well, they probably are better-run than the Mets), nor is it to say that the Cubs have been more successful than those teams: they haven't. The obvious difference, of course, is that both the White Sox and Mets have won the World Series in living memory. But that just raises an obvious point: if Alex Gonzalez hadn't booted an easy double play or if Steve Bartman had kept his hands to himself, it's pretty likely we wouldn't be having this conversation.
The Dish 