A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (15 page)

So the Cubs would seem to be, if anything, slightly
less
unlucky than the average MLB team. The unsurprising conclusion is that in this sport of the long season, in which 162 games reduce the role of randomness, a.k.a. luck, the Cubs’ failures are explained by lack of talent. Hence the interesting question is why the Cubs’ management has consistently put inferior teams on the field, which brings us to the concept central to all economic reasoning: incentives.

All professional sports teams have monetary reasons for wanting to excel. But some have weaker incentives than others. For almost all teams, the interests of the fans and of the owners are congruent. But, as we shall see, there are differences, especially for one team.

Fans want victories because winning is fun and fun is the point of being a fan. Owners want victories because they want fans to make the turnstiles spin and buy beers to wash down the hot dogs, and to listen to and watch the teams’ broadcasts. So Moskowitz and Wertheim ask an obvious question: How is attendance at home games related to the home team’s on-field success? This is their answer:

Calculating the response of home game attendance to season performance for every MLB
team over the last century, we get a measure of how sensitive fans are to team success. If this number equals one, it means that when a team wins 10 percent more games, attendance rises by 10 percent—in other words, one for one. Greater than one means attendance rises by more than 10 percent (fans are more sensitive to performance), and less than one means fans are not as sensitive to performance, creating fewer incentives to win.

Do you see where this is heading?

Cubs attendance “is the least sensitive to performance in all of baseball.” The Yankees’ attendance sensitivity is 0.9, “meaning that attendance moves almost one for one with winning percentage.” Red Sox attendance sensitivity also is 0.9, which must have
something
to do with why these two teams have done so much winning. The sensitivity of Cubs attendance per game to winning percentage is only 0.6, much less than one. “The league average is one,” write Moskowitz and Wertheim. So “the Cubs are America’s Teflon team,” which must have
something
to do with why they have done so much losing.

Comparing Cubs and White Sox season attendance numbers from 1998 through 2009, Moskowitz and Wertheim found that Cubs attendance varied between 82 percent and 99 percent of Wrigley Field’s capacity. White Sox attendance was 37 percent of their home field’s capacity in 1999 and 90 percent of capacity in 2006, the year after the team won the World Series. In 2006, the Cubs finished last
and averaged 94 percent of Wrigley Field’s capacity. And the 165,801 more fans the Cubs drew into Wrigley than the White Sox attracted to U.S. Cellular Field do not include the many thousands of fans who purchased seats on the rooftops across from Wrigley on Waveland and Sheffield Avenues.

In the 2013 season, the one hundredth played at Wrigley Field, the home team did something never done in any of the previous ninety-nine: It lost fifty home games. The previous record was forty-nine, set in 1971. In 2013, Cubs attendance declined, as it has done in every season since 2008, when the Cubs won the National League Central and drew a franchise-record 3.3 million. But in 2013, even while setting a record for Friendly Confines futility, the team drew about seven hundred
more
fans per game than did the 1998 team that played in the postseason as winner of the National League wild card.

You can say this for Cub fans: They are not front-runners. You can say this against them: They are incorrigible. In 2002, the Cubs lost 13 percent more games than in 2001, but attendance
increased
1 percent. Nothing new there. In 1999, the Cubs lost 14 percent more games than in 1998—and attendance increased 7 percent. Attendance rates at Wrigley are, write Moskowitz and Wertheim, “as steady as a surgeon’s hands.” But what is healthy in surgery is unhealthy in baseball.

In baseball, the difference between excellence and mediocrity is usually not the blockbuster signing of this or that free agent. Rather, it is the cumulative effect of
management’s attention to scouting, player development, and so on—which requires time, effort, and, always, money. Because Cub fans fill so many seats no matter what is happening on the field, there is a reduced incentive to pay the expense of organizational excellence.

It was in 1932 that
Harpers Magazine
quoted P. K. Wrigley on giving the fans a reason other than good baseball for going to the ballpark: “The fun … the sunshine, the relaxation. Our idea is to get the public to go see a ball game, win or lose.” Again, there is a lot of losing in baseball, even for the best teams. If you can’t bear losing, find another sport. And if you do not much mind losing, or if you actually rather enjoy it, you should feel right at home in Wrigley Field. With an acerbic terseness perhaps born of frustration, Moskowitz and Wertheim say, “There is equity in futility.” That is, the Cubs may have had a perverse financial incentive to cultivate the image of “lovable losers.” And speaking of incentives and, as any baseball person must, of beer, they also say, “Attendance at Wrigley Field is actually more sensitive to beer prices—much more—than it is to the Cubs’ winning percentage.”

Moskowitz and Wertheim studied Wrigley Field beer prices, adjusted for inflation, between 1984 and 2009 and concluded that attendance was
four times
more sensitive to beer prices than to the team’s won-lost record. They do not make clear exactly how they come to that conclusion, but they do offer this tantalizing data: Over the two decades beginning in 1990, while the Cubs were compiling a 48.6 winning percentage, the team’s management increased
ticket prices 67 percent, far above the MLB average of 44.7 percent. By 2009, Cubs ticket prices (average: $48) were the third highest in all of baseball, behind only those of the Red Sox, in the smallest major league park, Fenway ($50), and the Yankees, in the ostentatious new Yankee Stadium ($73). Demand for Cubs tickets remained remarkably inelastic. But the team knew better than to tamper with beer prices, which remained the third lowest in the major leagues. “Only the small-market Pittsburgh Pirates (at $4.75 a beer) and the medium-market Arizona Diamondbacks (at $4.00) had cheaper beer—and their average ticket prices were $15.39 and $14.31, respectively.” “Cub fans,” Moskowitz and Wertheim conclude, “will tolerate bad baseball
and
high ticket prices but draw the line at bad baseball and expensive beer.”

If you stand in the middle of the intersection of Clark and Addison Streets and slowly turn in a circle, your gaze will fall on a lot of places, including the ballpark, for drinking beer. Of course, Wrigley Field, unlike the various bars and restaurants and rooftops, is not
for
drinking beer. And yet …

If you believe, as baseball fans are inclined to, that the point of the Big Bang was to set in motion the process—the universe, et cetera—that led to baseball, you should believe
that beer was part of the Plan from the start. Beer, it seems, has been crucial to the flourishing of civilization, and the connection between beer and baseball, two of civilization’s better products, has been close and longstanding. Indeed, a case can be made that civilization is a result of, and flourished because of, beer.

For three million years, give or take a bunch, human beings went about the business of evolving from lower primates, and they did so without the assistance and comfort of alcohol. About one hundred thousand years ago they were more or less recognizably human, but they had not yet developed agriculture, so they had to keep moving around to find food.
Then, according to the Discovery Channel program
How Beer Saved the World
, they began—by a happy accident, and even before mankind started baking bread—brewing beer. Humans were nomads, hunter-gatherers who occasionally gathered barley that was growing in the wild. One day, when some of these people were off on extended hunting-and-gathering treks, rain fell on barley they had stored in clay pots. The rain made the barley soggy, which was bad. But it also, with the help of natural sugars and other ingredients in the grain, and also airborne yeasts, started the process of fermentation, which was very good indeed. Eventually, homeward the hunters and gatherers made their weary way, and, being understandably thirsty from their exertions, they took a sip of the resulting fluid in the jars. Thus did humanity’s era of sobriety come to an end.

One sip led to others, and to the desire for more beer,
which required more barley, which required systematic agriculture. So humanity vowed to put aside its nomadic ways, to develop the plow, and irrigation, and the wheel, so there could be carts to get surplus barley to markets. While they were at it, they developed writing to record commercial transactions, mathematics to make possible land sales and business computations, and, eventually, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and farm subsidies—all to keep the beer flowing.

An inscription on an ancient Egyptian tomb says that one thousand jugs of beer is about the right provision for the afterlife. The toiling masses who built the pyramids were paid in beer chits—a sort of early version of debit cards—and drank about a gallon of beer a day. It was what moderns disdainfully call near beer, only 3 percent alcohol. But it was nutritious enough to enable the toilers to pile up all that stone.

Beer was not only a stable food and a kind of currency, it was also a medicine. Traces of the antibiotic tetracycline, which was invented (or so we thought) in 1952, were found by puzzled archaeologists in the mummified bones of ancient Egyptians. Long before Alexander Fleming won the 1945 Nobel Prize for medicine as a result of his contribution to the development of penicillin, tetracycline was a health-enhancing residue of beer.

Beer also rescued the Middle Ages from a scourge and killer: water. Living centuries before the discovery of the germ theory of disease, people drank pond water fouled by human sewage, defecating ducks, waste from tanneries,
butchers’ offal, and other insalubrious ingredients. Brewing, however, removed many of the microorganisms that made people sick. It was, therefore, probably good that people then drank three hundred quarts of beer a year, which is six times today’s consumption by American adults.

“The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself.” So wrote Steven Johnson in
The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
. In his account of the cholera epidemic of 1854, Johnson explains that the beginning of civilization occurred with the formation of settled communities, and mass settlements also brought the beginnings of waterborne diseases, often from the settlements’ human wastes, especially feces. “For much of human history,” writes Johnson, “the solution to the chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol.”

Alcohol has antibacterial properties that in early human settlements were more beneficial than the risks of alcohol were baneful. As Johnson says, “Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties.” Alcohol is addictive and, consumed immoderately, is a potentially lethal poison. People who drink lots of it—who can “hold their liquor,” as the saying goes—are apt to be those whose bodies, thanks to some genes on chromosome 4 in human DNA, are especially able to produce particular enzymes. Among the early agrarians who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and dwelled together in settlements, those who lacked this genetic
advantage were doomed by a Darwinian selection that favored those who could drink more. Here is Johnson on those who died young and childless, either from alcohol’s ravages or from waterborne diseases:

Over generations, the gene pool of the first farmers became increasingly dominated by individuals who could drink beer on a regular basis. Most of the world’s population today is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.

Well. If beer is, strictly speaking, a health food, then Wrigley Field, which has been called the world’s largest outdoor singles bar, is actually also a health club, of sorts.

It has been accurately said that the United States is the only nation founded on a good idea: the pursuit of happiness, of which baseball is an important ingredient. But there also is a sense in which America was founded on beer. Within two years of the 1607 founding of Jamestown, Virginia, leaders of that settlement wrote to London, asking that a brewer be sent out because “water drinkers”—the phrase drips disdain—were no basis for a colony. Which was true, but for reasons they could not have then known, not understanding about germs. The
Mayflower
put passengers ashore in what would become Massachusetts, although its captain had been searching for a landing much farther south; the problem, according to William
Bradford’s journals, lay in “our victuals being much spent, especially beer.” While Thomas Jefferson was brewing beer at Monticello, his boon companion James Madison diluted his limited government convictions enough to consider advocating the establishment of a national brewery to provide a wholesome alternative to whiskey. It almost seems that Manifest Destiny pointed toward Wrigleyville.