Springtime means baseball, and George Will has a new book, A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred. One of his arguments? The team has struggled in part because Wrigley was built and marketed as “a destination whose appeal was largely independent of its tenant’s won-loss record”:
The strategy wasn’t always foolproof — attendance dipped as the Cubs slogged through particularly wretched stretches — but by and large, Wrigley Field gave the team’s owners a comfy cushion of fan loyalty through thick and (mostly) thin. But Will’s provocative hypothesis, which over the course of this slender book’s 223 pages comes to seem indisputable, is that the ballpark is “part cause and part symptom of the Cubs’ dysfunctional performance.” If the Cubs ownership hadn’t been able to rely so heavily on the stadium’s enduring popularity with fans, Will argues, it might actually have been forced to field a winning team.
Joseph Epstein recaps that dysfunction:
The Cubs’ last World Series victory was 1908; its last appearance in a World Series was 1945. Since moving to Wrigley Field in 1916, the team’s winning percentage has been a dispiriting .488, its overall record 7,478 wins to 7,833 losses. The question is: Has the antique elegance of Wrigley Field been an enticement for the team’s owners to do nothing to improve the team, since the fans, allured by the field’s fading grandeur, come out in any case?
Larry Thornberry looks at the evidence Will provides:
The latest stats, dreamed up by a couple of quantitative sports guys named Tobias Moskowitz and Jon Wertheim, claim to demonstrate, with charts and graphs, that the attendance at Wrigley Field is less sensitive to the Cubs’ winning than is the case with any other team and any other ballpark.
I’ll spare you the boiler-plate, but the average “attendance sensitivity” in Major League Baseball is 1. The Yankees sensitivity is 0.9, meaning attendance tracks the pin-stripes’ won-lost percentage pretty closely. The Red Sox are also at 0.9. The Cubs are at 0.6, leading Moskowitz and Wertheim to label the Cubs “America’s Teflon team.” In fact, the pair finds the price of beer in the park tracks attendance better than the Cubs’ won-lost percentage.
Update from a reader:
Another problem with Wrigley is that due to the eccentric lake winds, it’s nearly impossible to establish a home-field advantage. Despite its reputation as a homerun-happy bandbox, when the winds blow in – as they regularly do, especially early in the season – Wrigley is really a pitcher’s park. So there’s no clear blueprint for a winning edge like there is at, say, Yankee Stadium (load up on lefty power to take advantage of the short porch in right) or the old Busch Stadium in St. Louis (where the Cardinals memorably stocked their outfield with gazelles to roam the cavernous gaps). Add to that the fact that all those day games really do mess up the players’ circadian rhythms and it’s no wonder the Curse of the Billy Goat has held so long …
Another:
OK, now you’re in my area of expertise; I reviewed Will’s book and four other 100th Anniversary-of-Wrigley for the Chicago Tribune this weekend.
The key fallacy in the idea that the appeal of Wrigley as an antique ballpark has led to the team’s lack of success is the simple fact that for its first 60 or 70 years, Wrigley was not an antique ballpark: it wasn’t even the oldest ballpark in Chicago until Comiskey Park (1910) was demolished in 1992. The spate of construction of dual-use concrete bowl stadia in the ‘60s and ‘70s (all of them except Oakland’s now demolished because they were bad for both football and baseball) led to the Wrigley/Fenway romanticism. It’s true that ownership promoted “fun at the friendly confines” rather than a winning team (because he didn’t have very many winning teams) but the Ye Olde Wrigley meme doesn’t begin till the 1980s. And since ’84, while the Cubs haven’t won a World Series, they have won 5 division titles and made one Wild Card appearance. They are not as bad as people think, and lately attendance has dropped as the quality of play has gotten worse since ’08.
As for Will, my take on his book:
George Will’s “A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at 100” belongs in the dining room. Not because his book is especially suited to formal meals, but because at every holiday dinner, there’s one cranky uncle or in-law who disagrees with everyone else about religion or politics. To keep the familial peace, you seek some conversational common ground and end up talking about baseball (unless of course, this cranky uncle is a Sox fan, in which case you talk about football). As a renowned conservative columnist and bow-tie fancier, Will fits this profile. …
In his narrative, Will re-creates the structure of a conversation at the ballpark. The ballpark’s lore provides the main thread, and Will adds to our knowledge of that history. (His take on the Elia rant, for instance, adds intriguing context from interviews with Keith Moreland.) But there’s time for digressions on Chicago history, the importance of beer in civilization, or the invention of Ladies Day, just as during a game, one will follow the action but chat about nearly anything else between pitches, at-bats and innings. Will’s conversational tone hits the sweet spot of just such a day’s talk.
But like the guy talking at the ballpark, Will sometimes gets things wrong. To cite one error, Will claims that one indignity contemporary Cubs fans will have to suffer is Greg Maddux in an Atlanta Braves cap on his Hall of Fame plaque in Cooperstown. Maddux chose to go into the Hall with no logo on his cap — he was more generous to Cubs fans than Will was when he assumed that three Cy Youngs and a World Series ring outweigh playing at Wrigley after coming up in the Cubs system. But as the old cliché goes, when you “assume” … no, never mind. Be generous to cranky Uncle George; put his book in the dining room.
(Photo by Flickr user atalou)
The Dish 