3/28/14, "
100 Years of Wrigley Field: Are the Chicago Cubs Horrible Because of the Ballpark?" Daily Beast, Luke Epplin
"
Wrigley Field, the dead-ball-era ballpark wedged into perhaps Chicago’s
hippest north-side neighborhood, turns 100 this April. With its
ivy-shrouded walls, manually operated scoreboard, and concrete-and-steel
edifice, it survives as a monument to architectural beauty and athletic
ineptitude. The Chicago Cubs, those loveable losers of the National
League, have called the friendly confines of Wrigley home for the past
98 years, and not once in that time have they won the World Series. For
as much as Wrigley Field has served as a blessing for this bumbling
franchise, it has also been, in some ways, its biggest curse.
The Cubs enter the upcoming baseball season 105 years removed from
their last World Series title. Their losing streak is unparalleled in
professional American sports. When the Cubs last won the World Series in
1908, Charlie Chaplin was still a vaudeville performer, the Titanic was
nothing but a blueprint, and no human had yet reached the North or
South Pole. The Cubs haven’t even played in a World Series since 1945,
which represents by far the longest interval between pennants in
baseball history. The Boston Red Sox, another team with a historic
stadium and devoted fan-base, made their futility seem tragic in a
Shakespearian sense. Before winning it all in 2004, the Red Sox survived
until the seventh game of the World Series on four separate occasions
during their lengthy championship drought, losing only by some agonizing
twist of fate. In contrast, the Cubs are the jester figure in a
Shakespearean comedy: able to steal a scene or two, but ultimately
yanked from the stage when it’s time for the leads to marry. They are
diverting but rarely consequential. Their failure is of the everyday
variety—accumulative and quietly disappointing.
It wasn’t always
this way. When they last won it all in 1908, the Cubs were baseball’s
dominant team. As Caitlin Murphy notes in her book
Crazy ’08,
between 1906 and 1910 the Cubs won a record 530 games, four pennants,
and two World Series, and garnered the highest five-year winning
percentage ever. The team’s supremacy was so ensconced that Frank
Chance, their salty manager/first baseman, once quipped, “Who ever heard
of the Cubs losing a game they had to have?” The franchise carried
itself with an arrogance that the New York Yankees would later adopt.
The
ballpark that the Cubs moved to in 1916 had been constructed two years
earlier on behalf of Charles Weeghman, a forward-thinking restaurateur
and owner of the Chicago Whales of the short-lived Federal League.
Somewhat cruelly, the Whales won the Federal League championship there
in 1915, making them the only home club to clinch a baseball title in
the park that eventually became known as Wrigley Field. Between 1916 and
1945, the Cubs would compete in five World Series in Wrigley, losing
all of them.
No professional team endures more than a century of futility on bad breaks alone, let alone ++
billy-goat curses or inopportune
fan interferences.
Such sustained mediocrity is indicative of an organizational strategy
that does not fully incentivize winning—or, at least, tolerates sub-.500
seasons. In his jaunty, informative new book,
A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred, columnist
George Will, a fervid Cubs fan, suggests that Wrigley Field, with its
idyllic backdrops and festive ambience, has partially enabled the Cubs
organization to cobble together middling teams through the decades with
reduced financial risk or fear of losing fans to the team’s south-side
counterpart, the White Sox. “It is not a good sign for fans,” Will
laments, “when their team’s venue is better known for the attractiveness
of its flora than for the excellence of the athletes who have played
there.”
The Cubs’ losing culture largely originated with Philip K. Wrigley,
an heir to the Wrigley chewing gum fortune who took over the team in
1932 upon his father’s death. As Will explains, P.K. Wrigley cared more
about enhancing the aesthetics of the ballpark than compiling the
ballplayers necessary to compete in the National League. In 1937 Wrigley
installed the iconic bleachers and, per the suggestion of Bill Veeck
(the future eccentric owner of the White Sox and Cleveland Indians, at
various times), festooned the outfield wall with ivy. (A further
experiment to plant elm trees beyond center field was mercifully cut
short.) “The idea is to get out in the open air, have a picnic,” Wrigley
said. “We mention that the things people like to do, to enjoy, are all
in the ballpark. We stress the green vines on the wall … You see, people
want to go to a park. We are aiming at people not interested in
baseball.” As Will succinctly puts it, Wrigley’s business model seemed
to be: “Serve cold beer in a pretty place and the score will not
matter.”
Happily, P.K. Wrigley’s business model proved successful.
I say happily because I should disclose my considerable bias. As a
southern Illinois native, I was raised a devoted St. Louis Cardinals fan
and an equally passionate Cubs despiser. The two sentiments usually
come bundled together, and cut both ways. In a column from 1990, Will
wrote: “Cardinals fans probably should be allowed to vote, and perhaps
even to enjoy most other civil rights, but Cardinals fans were (and
probably still are) insufferable.” Fair enough, and guilty as charged. I
have owned T-shirts that reference 1908, and take pride that baseball
is one of the few activities that St. Louis does better than Chicago. I
would interpret a World Series championship by the Cubs as a sign that
the end is near.
In an era when only six of 30 major league
baseball stadiums are more than 25 years old, the fact that Wrigley
Field has survived at all is a testament to the late owner’s efforts to
market the ballpark as an attraction worth visiting even if the home
team lingered in the cellar. By and large, Cubs fans bought into this
philosophy. Will recounts a study published by financial economist
Tobias J. Moskowitz and sports journalist Jon Wertheim in their book
Scorecasting
that calculated the link between home game attendance and season
performance in the major leagues.
Unsurprisingly, the authors discovered
that attendance at Cubs’ games is the “least sensitive to performance
in all of baseball”—that is, fans show up in droves regardless of the
team’s win-loss record. (It should be noted, however, that attendance
has fallen the last two seasons, when the team lost a franchise record
197 games. Even Cubs fans have limits.) Because of the reliable draw of
Wrigley Field, Cubs management at times has shown little urgency in
their century-long rebuilding efforts. What
does affect
attendance?
“Attendance at Wrigley Field is actually more sensitive to
beer prices—much more—than it is to the Cubs’ winning percentage,”
Moskowitz and Wertheim found.
Always slow to change—the ballpark
didn’t host its first night game until 1988—Wrigley Field finds itself
in flux on its centennial anniversary. Last season the Cubs ownership
announced an ambitious $500-million renovation plan that would install a
Jumbotron in left-center field, add new weight rooms and batting
tunnels, and increase concession areas and skyboxes. It’s a much-needed
makeover for a ballpark whose historic charm barely compensates for its
outdated facilities. Some of the ambience might be lost in the
renovations, but based on the Cubs’ first 100 years in Wrigley, this
might not be a bad thing for the team. The challenge for the
organization moving forward, according to Will, is “to preserve the
Wrigley Field of 1914 while making it suitable for the fans—and the
players, manager, and coaches—of 2014.”
But, as I said, I’m a Cardinals fan. So if the team’s ballpark has indeed played some role in the Cubs’
century of failure, I say: Long live Wrigley Field." via Lucianne
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