The Chicago Cubs: Baseball Team or Marketing Exercise?
Kim du Toit
May 17, 2002
2:29 PM CDT
A couple have people have asked me why I refer to the Chicago Cubs as a Marketing Exercise rather than as a Baseball Team. Most of these people, of course, do not live in Chicago.
Let’s look at the record.
The hapless Cubs, in baseball terms, are a joke. They last won a World Series in 1908, when Teddy Roosevelt was President. Their annual win-loss average over the past fifty years is something like 70-92 (no, I’m not going to calculate the precise average--there are enough baseball geeks out there). This would make for a fine individual batting average (.432), but alas, it’s hopelessly inadequate for team success. The Cubs have only been to the playoffs about three or four times during that same period.
Yet Wrigley Field is filled to capacity almost every game; Cubs merchandise sells briskly; and when the team has performed its usual late-season slump, signaling yet another year of futility, the fans just say: “Next year!” ( as though the following year will be at all different to any of the previous ninety).
How do they do it? How does this paragon of mediocrity stay in business? Aha! In the latter question lies the answer. The Cubs not only stay in business, they are consistently one of the most profitable sports franchises around. Let’s look at the facts.
1. The Market. If you’re aiming for mediocrity, you need a large potential fan base. The Cubs wouldn’t last long in a smaller market like Kansas City, for example. Chicago is perfect--a sub-market of about four to five million people (the horrible and classless White Sox get the other half). Even having two teams is ideal--the pressure to Win One For The City is shared, and the Sox provide a convenient scapegoat. The South Side fan base is largely blue-collar, and their psychological need to win is greater. The Cubs, by appealing to a more affluent fan base, don’t need to.
2. The Location. Wrigley Field is located in the northern side of the city of Chicago, and is surrounded by genteel, low-rise walk-up apartments. Access is easy (unless you’re trying to drive there from out of town): the Addison Street “L” train stops literally at the gates of Wrigley, and both the 151 and 22 buses run right past the ground. Unlike most other grounds, where you park and walk across a soulless, county-sized parking lot to get to the gates, at Wrigley you get off the bus/train, and there you are. Even if you walk to Wrigley from your apartment (which I and many others do), the walk is along city streets filled with restaurants, bars, shops and delis.
3. The Stadium. Picturesque Wrigley Field is, without question, the loveliest ballpark in the United States. Its grass surface, ivy-covered walls, massive steel supports and diminutive size combine to create an old-fashioned, intimate atmosphere that is unrivaled in its nostalgia. The first thing you hear from any first-time visitor to Wrigley, even a loud and obnoxious Cardinals fan, is: ”Oh, man, this is how the game should be played.” Every new baseball stadium built since 1990 has attempted to re-create the atmosphere of Wrigley Field.
4. The Advertising. The Cubs are owned by the loathsome Tribune Corporation, which owns among other things, the horrible Chicago Tribune newspaper (in-house hacks to puff the team) and “Superstation” WGN-TV (which means that pretty much all games are televised, throughout the season). So the advertising is in place to support the team. That still doesn’t answer the question, however, because Marketing 101 tells us that nothing kills a bad product quicker than advertising.
5. The Voice. Every team needs a familiar voice in the commentary box, and the Cubs had one there. Did they ever. Harry Caray, beloved by fans, was easily the worst commentator in the history of the game, perhaps of any game. Harry confused players’ names, forgot which teams were playing, and his mispronunciations of Hispanic players’ names were the stuff of legend. I still think that Glenallen Hill, a solid hitter and fine fielder, was traded because in Harry’s words, “Glenallen Hill” became the slurred “Glennnalg’ll”. And speaking of slurring, Harry’s tangled pronouncements were epic in large part because the old guy was drunk by the fifth inning of every game. But it didn’t matter. The fans adored him for all that, or perhaps because of all that. His death, although not altogether unexpected, was a huge blow to the Marketing Department, because it takes years to get a replacement Voice. It’s not surprising that Harry has a statue outside Wrigley Field. It’s also not surprising that most baseball purists watched the game on WGN-TV, but preferred to listen to the game commentary on the radio (WGN AM720, also owned by the Tribune Corporation). But then again, baseball purism is not a feature of the typical Cubs fan.
6. The Product (I mean, the team). Actually, I do mean the product. The Tribune Corporation fields a team with one of the leanest salary budgets in the country. This doesn’t mean that they don’t pay good salaries--if you’re one of the Studs (a concept we’ll explore in a moment), you’ll be extremely well paid. But long ago, the Tribune worked out that in order to keep the Cubs fans happy, you don’t have to actually win a lot of games--you just have to make them interesting, and win about half. So they designed a remarkably efficient team model, which consists of the following components, which I call The Studs:
- 1 Superstar Pitcher. The Cubs have never had more than one great pitcher on their staff. They try to get a single Pitching Stud who is an absolute master, a Hall of Fame talent (Rick Sutcliffe in the 1980s, Greg Maddux in the 1990s, Kerry Wood in the 2000s). All three mentioned are and were, on their day, almost unbeatable. The appearance of Big Red (Sutcliffe) or Mad Dog (Maddux) on the mound has always been enough to fill the stadium. But the Tribune doesn’t need more good pitchers--with their bloated salaries--and they therefore load the rest of the pitching lineup with mediocre hurlers. If one of the other pitchers starts to get good, they promptly trade him away to another team. So, with one good pitcher, you’ve achieved fan interest in about 20% of the games, and he’ll yield about twenty wins. The Nameless Nonentities will provide, collectively, another twenty. But how do they fill the stadium the rest of the time, and get the other thirty-odd wins? Let’s look at the other Studs.
- 1 Superstar Home Run Hitter. Once again, the team needs a guy who can swing the Big Wood--home runs, especially at tiny Wrigley Field, are big crowd-pullers--and so, like with the Pitching Stud, the Cubs try to make sure that there is always one, and only one Hitting Stud (Andre Dawson and Sammy Sosa are classic examples). The Hitting Stud will get you another twenty-odd wins, which is a good thing, but most importantly, he will usually manage to make the games close, instead of a blow-out. (The remaining ten wins can be left to chance, and opponents’ ineptitude--the Montreal Expos alone can be counted on for five.) The very uncertainty of home run hitting means that a slump is rewarded with increasing fan interest (when will he break it?). When Sammy Sosa and St. Louis Cardinals Stud Mark McGwire had their epic run at Roger Maris’ single-season home run record in the late 1990s, the Tribune marketing executives had to have a post-orgasmic cigarette after each game.
- 1 Aryan. The Cubs are supported by White people. Unfortunately, most good baseball is played by people with names like Dominguez, Rodriguez and Martinez, and a team filled with -ez’s is not good, from a marketing perspective, when your consumers are mainly WASPy types. Ya gotta have a White boy in there, hence the appearance of guys like Ryne Sandberg and Mark Grace. When blond, good-looking Grace started boffing Janine Turner, the Aryan hottie from the TV show Northern Exposure, you could almost hear the accountants in the Tribune Towers applauding the added marquee value. The fact that both Sandberg and Grace were fine fielders and solid hitters allowed the Tribune to pay them well, because it’s actually cheaper to pay one superstar than three stereotypes. Also, if you can get an Aryan Stud pitcher (eg. Sutcliffe, Maddux and Wood), you get a twofer--which is perhaps why the Cubs have never tried to lure any of the several Hispanic Pitching Studs to Wrigley.
- 1 Superstar Fielder. This is the guy who can stop runs, throws the ball as hard as it can be hit by a bat, and who never makes a mistake. Peerless second-baseman Ryne Sandberg, an absolute shoo-in for the Hall of Fame, was the best example of the Fielding Stud. He was also the Aryan Stud for a long time, and being a quiet, well-mannered man with lots of class (a prerequisite for being an Aryan Stud, by the way), he was adored by all Cub fans. When it emerged that first-baseman Rafael Palmeiro was bonking Sandberg’s slutty (and later-discarded) wife, Palmeiro had to go, despite his excellence as a player. A moment’s thought will suffice to understand the marketing rationale--no way were the Cubs going to solve the problem by releasing the Aryan Stud for a guy called Rafael, even if he was hitting something like .324 at the time.
- 1 Hometown Hero. The Hometown Stud is not as important as the others, but is very desirable. Former third baseman Ron Santo is a beloved institution in Chicago. As proof we should note that Ron’s restaurant, an unremarkable chicken place out in the northwest Chicago ‘burbs, is still in business (where even Michael Jordan’s is no longer operating). Mark Grace once filled the Hometown Stud spot nicely--but when his salary grew to be too large, the Cubs promptly sold him off to the Rent-A-Championship Arizona Diamondbacks. Gracie’s fault was not that his play had slipped, but simply a case where the Cubs no longer needed him because they had Slammin’ Sammy and Kerry Wood, who were over-performing in their respective Stud roles.
So there you have it. A product that contains all the magic ingredients to please the fan base, a wonderful package to hold it, and all the advertising in the world to support it. Too bad the Cubs will never win another championship--but then again, they don’t have to; the fans don’t demand it, and excellence is too expensive, risky and unprofitable. The seats are filled each season, the in-house hacks won’t rail against the mediocrity; so why change a winning formula? Even the Cubs’ perennial loserdom has become part of the packaging: the Team Everybody Loves, and more especially, loves to play against.
It’s just a Marketing Exercise, folks.
