No Matter What?

As the Cubs’ season winds down without need for analysis, and the games themselves are playing rather predictably, my attention is turning to one of the esoteric questions facing baseball fans. I think the Cubs deserve as much or more admiration than most baseball teams, but they’re far from perfect on many levels. So: will I remain a Cubs fan, no matter what?

The bigger question of whether I’ll remain a baseball fan no matter what is easy: yes, I will. I can understand why the strike over a decade ago turned a lot of fans off, but as for me, as soon as there are professionals playing baseball at a professional level, I want to watch it. The game is just that interesting of its own merit, and that is the bottom layer of the onion. I can’t imagine a grudge so infected as to convince me to give up baseball. I think I would watch it if men I’d never heard of were playing the game well. There’s only so much time in the day, however, so we have to narrow our focus.

The Cubs are the team to which I give allegiance, and I have since I was old enough to remember. This is no small matter, but I suspect that there is the tiniest bit of wiggle room here, even if I hope that I never have to find out. It’s just that I can imagine circumstances that would turn me away from this team, most of which would feel like betrayal. For me though, I relate these possible reasons only indirectly to the ownership.

Already the Cubs have long stopped saving any guaranteed tickets for the day of the game. Cubs’ owners prior to the Tribune Company insisted that the box office hold bleacher seats until the day of the game so that any fan could watch if he was willing to put in the effort of coming early and waiting in line, which was usually unnecessary. No more. In college and right after I graduated, the team was bad enough that we could drive up and count on day-of-game tickets being available during the week. Not after 2003, though; now tickets for the season sell out the first weekend they’re available.

It remains for us to see whether the season will still sell out if the team becomes bad again, and hopefully we’ll never know. However, this year the Cubs went even further by diverting tickets for another Tribune company to resell at a profit before ever making them available to fans. This is a sleazy, underhanded racket; in other words, it’s Chicago politics. All of this makes the fans feel like an afterthought, which is to feel taken for granted, manipulated, and exploited.

Add to this the way that more games every year are taken from free TV, broadcast instead on cable. It’s more regard for profit, and less for the fans, who have to subscribe to a service that broadcasts Cubs games at a lesser quality. If there was cable radio, I don’t doubt that AM radio would go the way of broadcast TV. (We’ll see if satellite radio is prevalent enough to accomplish this.)

All of this is to say that the Cubs are far from a perfect, altruistic, fan-centric baseball team, although they are far from the worst. Should we reward the ownership for this? So why do we come back?

A predictable backlash is to assert that the ownership must only be concerned about the profit side of the team, and not winning. (Jay Mariotti readers are undoubtedly familiar with this argument, if you can call it that.) Really, though, evidence suggests that the ownership is trying to perform the balancing act between winning and making money that every team tries. If they were only concerned with winning, they would overspend on free agents. If they were only concerned with profits, they would be cheap -- and one can hardly call the contracts to some Cubs players and the Sammy Sosa buyout cheap. As always, it’s somewhere in-between, with the team generally giving contracts only at fair market value. I got the impression that they would have liked to have signed more people last off-season, but that they weren’t going to go so far as to pay more than the players were worth. (As for their willingness to stand behind guys like MacPhail and Hendry, I still see this as a positive thing. I’m not much in favor of short-term mindsets.)

As fans, it’s tempting to wish that ownership would run the team like a fan, with the bottom line playing second fiddle to the W column. Yet, a championship from such a team would be a little hollow, like a Yankees championship. There is still something noble about a team overcoming adversity to win, and spending money negates adversity.

On the other hand, a championship from a team that depended entirely on its own homegrown talent is all but impossible, because the window where enough young players have developed but before they become free agents is tiny. I can imagine a time that never existed when championship teams depended entirely on their ability to scout and develop players. Now that money irreversibly adds another dimension, it’s not possible to think this way. Scouting is useful, but only when blended with enough money to keep your free agents, and add a few along the way. The Cubs have been lacking in development, other than pitching I suppose, but in general, this blend of development and free agent signing has been their approach, and it’s probably the approach best suited in the near term to a fulfilling payoff when they have a winning season.

A balancing act is required, then, but I wonder whether either extreme would turn me off as a fan. If the Cubs went the way of the Expos (pre-Nationals), developing talent only to watch other teams buy it, I’d still be a fan, at least if the team was struggling to profit. If the Cubs went the way of the Yankees or Red Sox -- and some argue that they almost already are this way -- by using a squad built entirely of free agents, I’d still be a fan, albeit a fan with peculiar guilt. I wouldn’t like it in either case, but I’d still be a Cubs fan.

What matters more than any of this is that there is still the narrative of the Cubs. There is a story unfolding over every game, every season, every era, and I’m hooked. Free agents and Cubs lifers and rookies alike all form an attachment to the fans by becoming actors in their part of the narrative. We get to know them to varying lengths and degrees, and we can look back after a while and see how they fit into a bigger picture of the season, which in turn fits into a bigger picture yet. Players that spend enough time on a team together become inexorably tied to that time and place, that Cubs era, and those eras give the team its distinct character that we remember so fondly.

As for the players themselves, there are only two ways they could betray us: by not playing their best, either because they’re cheating or because they just aren’t trying. Cheating seems less likely, because a Black Sox scandal depended on underpaid players, and other types seem more impossible to pull off under such intense scrutiny. It’s the second attitude that could end up making me drop my allegiance.

You see, the narrative of the Cubs can handle any kind of ownership. Good ownership becomes part of the protagonist, and bad ownership becomes a villain for the team to overcome along with everything else. Either way it can be a good story, and so ownership could probably never directly incite me to abandon the Cubs. So, if you’re a fan because of the narrative of this team, the only thing that’s absolutely necessary is the integrity of the games themselves, the spirit of honest competition that demands us to root for one team over another in order to identify with and share in the experience of winning and losing.

That’s why I’m afraid that the current climate where only championships Matter (big M) will end up betraying everyday fans. The Cubs in 2005 seem lucky to have a group of guys committed to playing well even when their playoff hopes are dashed. Yet, I can imagine a season where this wasn’t true. That would be a betrayal to baseball, and to fans by extension because we all buy in to that bigger concept that baseball is grandiose, and worth our attention. A few seasons like this in a row, and I can imagine the team losing me for a while.

Maybe it’s just my perception, but it seems like a team with a lot of guys putting in lackadaisical effort is more likely these days than it used to be, and I can’t help but think that two factors -- money and a perception that anything less than a World Series is a disappointment -- are involved. In that sense, I feel fortunate to be a Cubs fan, since this team seems to have enough history and players with class to motivate them during low points. At least in the near term, they also look to be competitive most years, which helps.

It’s not to say that ownership should always get a free pass, or shouldn’t be held accountable for their reprehensible exploitation of fans’ loyalty. There’s no ethical reason for them to test the limits of our loyalty with ticket prices and scams, rather than reward it. It’s just that when you break it down, it’s not ownership we identify with. There is no catharsis in following their activities. The release only comes in the game itself. A smart set of owners will realize this, and while they might antagonize us in dozens of ways, they’ll still hire players committed to playing the game well no matter what. As long as those players always exist. For the Cubs, it's so far so good in that respect.