A Rare Day in June

By: Peter Bernstein

It is observed that fans continue to come to Wrigley no matter how poorly the Cubs play. This fact is seen by White Sox fans as a sign of stupidity and by others, Dayn Perry for example on this site, as counterproductive. Why put a winner on the field when you can fill the seats anyhow? I’ll address both these issues.

First, regarding Sox fans. I’ve done a lot of statistical comparisons between the White Sox and Cubs. The Cubs lead in stolen base percentage; the White Sox lead in the other 20 key categories, 21 if you include their 22 more wins.

So, a case could be made that the Sox are very good and the Cubs are very bad. So why go to see a team that is very bad? Maybe because it’s fun; it’s fun to go to a game at Wrigley.

Sox fans, did you see Philip Seymour Hoffman’s excellent performance in Capote? Or did you opt instead for Will Ferrell’s Anchorman, a clearly inferior film that just might have been more fun. With all the fine dining in Chicago, a Sox fan would never stoop to a sloppy slab of ribs, or hear an out-of-tune bar band instead of a highly skilled Jazz quartet. Or maybe they would if they wanted to have some fun.

The fact is, the 2006 Cubs are the Anchorman, sloppy ribs, out-of-tune bar band of baseball. But such things can be worthwhile, in their own way.

I’ve learned that you can’t blame people for not being something they aren’t and so the Cubs can’t really be blamed for not hitting well, pitching consistently, or playing good defense. Lowered expectations have this advantage, however. It’s no longer possible to be disappointed in the Cubs’ play.

The Cubs are spending money, unwisely yes, but if nothing else, they are acting like a team that is trying to put a winner on the field. It’s likely they will do a salary dump soon after the All-Star break, but if so, revenues will suffer even more, especially if fans opt for four innings at the ballpark and the rest of their time elsewhere in Wrigleyville.

 And so, I decided to take in a little fun and see the Cubs-Brewers game on a Wednesday in late June. I was joined by 39,000 other fans, about a third of whom saw the game in absentia, which raises another point. It does matter whether the Cubs are good or bad.The tickets may still get sold, but many fans choose to stay home, and that represents between 10,000 to 15,000 wallets that were not at the game. Even at the conservative estimate that the average fan drops $20 on concessions, the Cubs lost out on around a quarter of million dollars on Wednesday. Extrapolated for an 81 game season — and it will only get worse — that’s about $20 million in lost revenue.

And that doesn’t even include the losses incurred by the ticket brokers, including the Cubs own Premium ticket broker operation. I guess there is something to this idea of karma after all. For the second year in a row, the speculators have lost their shirts. One word of advice: face value is too much to pay for a ticket.

Moreover, it’s not even the case that the Tribune Company is leveraging the fan’s loyalty into higher profits. The Cubs are not a low payroll team, though it’s hard to believe they would be much worse if they did pony up like the Royals, Bucs, or Marlins.

But the Cubs are spending money, unwisely yes, but if nothing else, they are acting like a team that is trying to put a winner on the field. It’s likely they will do a salary dump soon after the All-Star break, but if so, revenues will suffer even more, especially if fans opt for four innings at the ballpark and the rest of their time elsewhere in Wrigleyville.

I found the smallish crowd on Wednesday rather nostalgic. I remember the days when you could buy a grandstand ticket on game day and sit pretty much anywhere. The market has adjusted and a big drop in demand causes price to fall. Where else in Chicago can you get a couple of box seats for $50? Not on the South Side, that’s for sure.

In any case, the 25,000 or so fans at the park that day had some fun. They saw an excellent pitching performance by Carlos Marmol, a game-tying home run by Derrek Lee, and something as rare as a Juan Pierre homer: a home win in June.

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Peter Bernstein teaches Economics at DePaul University and is a regular contributor to the Chicago Sports Review. His essay on steroids in baseball is appearing in the NY Times magazine, Front Page. Reach him at pbernstein@rcfecon.com.

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