Wrigley Field, Chicago (Are the Cubs unlucky?)

 

 

 

How unlucky are the Chicago Cubs?

Even casual baseball fans know that the Chicago Cubs went a long time between winning World Series. Most Chicago fans probably know that “a long time” means that after a 1908 win, their next one was 108 years later, in 2016.

About 60 years into that streak, I remember reading an item in my local newspaper, the Macomb Daily Journal (the Cubs and Cardinals were the two teams  that most kids in Macomb followed), which quoted some mathematician who had calculated that the odds against a streak that long were so high that the Cubs must be remarkably unlucky.

Even as a teenager, without having had any courses in statistics, I could see flaw in that reasoning.

But first, here’s how the calculation works. Right now, there are 30 teams in MLB. One will win the World Series, so that means you have a 1 in 30 chance of winning the World Series this year. That also means that you have a 29 in 30 chance (96.7%) of NOT winning the Series. To figure out the chances of going two years in a row without winning, you multiply the chances of each year (each 96.7%) together. For 108 years, you multiply 108 numbers together. It’s not 96.7% each time, because the chances were different when there were different numbers of teams – there were only 16 MLB teams for the first 53 years of the Cubs’ streak. Doing that calculation with pencil and paper in the late 1960s would have been a challenge. With a spreadsheet on a computer, it’s not so hard, although you do have to figure out how many teams were playing each year (and whether there was a World Series – there wasn’t in 1995 because of a strike). Putting it all together, you get a 0.4% chance (about 1 in 250) that a team would put together a streak like the Cubs’. There are only 30 teams in the league, so that seems like an incredible coincidence, like the Cubs must really have been remarkably unlucky.

I disagree that they were remarkably unlucky, at least in the sense that calculation suggests. The results of any calculation are only as good as the assumptions. While it is true that one team in 30 will win the World Series this year, it is not at all true that every team has a one in 30 chance.

I would argue that the Los Angeles Dodgers, who have won the last two World Series, have a far better chance of winning the next one than do either the Colorado Rockies or the Chicago White Sox, who have each finished last in their division each of the last two years. In other words, the Rockies and White Sox don’t each have a 3.3% chance of winning the World Series. I think it’s quite a bit lower, although I don’t know whether it’s really 2% or 1% or 0.1%, and I don’t know how to calculate what their chances really are. To calculate how many championships the Cubs should have won in that period, you’d have to know what their chances really were each year. And I suspect that their chances of winning were well below average most of that time (more on that below).

I’d argue that a better way to look at that situation is to say that the fact that the Cubs put together a such an impressive streak of ineptitude suggests that their chances of winning must have been well below league average a lot of the time. In other words, their management must have consistently put below-average teams on the field, decade after decade. The numbers back that up - there are other reasons to think that besides the lack of World Series wins.

For the first third of the Cubs’ stretch, they fielded competitive teams. In fact, they reached the World Series six times between 1908 and 1945. Once you make the World Series, it’s probably close to a 50-50 chance, so losing six in a row is bad luck. But Brooklyn lost seven in a row during the Cubs’ streak, so you can’t argue the Cubs are the unluckiest team.

After losing the 1945 World Series, the Cubs went terrible. From  1947 through 1966, they finished in the bottom half of the National League every single season, the longest stretch in Major League history. In another 20-year stretch, from 1973 through 1992, they only won more games than they lost during the regular season twice (1984 and 1989). Actually, I'd argue that they were quite lucky during that stretch, because the two times that they won more than they lost, they made the playoffs each time. In that era of four-team playoffs, only about a third or a quarter of the teams with winning records made the playoffs.

But then they hired Theo Epstein as the team president before the 2012 season, and I suspected (correctly, as it turns out) that the Cubs’ amazing streak would soon come to a close. Epstein had been the general manager of the Boston Red Sox when they ended the second longest no-World-Series-wins streak in American League history after only 86 years, winning in 2004. Within four years of Epstein's arrival, the Cubs had won a World Series. Epstein’s gone now, and the Cubs have gone nine years without winning, but they are spending money like a big-market team, and I suspect that they’re going to be in a situation where, year-in and year-out, they will have at least as good a chance as the Mets or Angels, if not the Yankees or Dodgers.

Incidentally, that 108-year stretch between championships is longer than any other team in any of the seven biggest North American professional sports leagues. That statistic comes with an asterisk, however. The National Hockey League, which completed its 108^th season with last season’s Stanley Cup finals, is the only one of those leagues that has even played 108 seasons, and the NHL just finished its 108^th last summer. The National Football League was founded in 1922, so there have been104 seasons, but the National Basketball Associations (1940s), Canadian Football League (1950s), and Major League Soccer (1990s), the Womens’ NBA (also in the 1990s) and the National Women’s Soccer League (2010s) are all less than 80 years old. So really, the Cubs have the longest stretch in MLB and none of the other leagues has anyone within decades of them.

Of course, once I put together the spreadsheet to do the calculations for the Cubs, I couldn’t resist apply it to other hapless teams. The four most impressive are the four longest, which all come from baseball, which has the longest history.

Sport	Team	Years	Chances (%)
Baseball	Cubs	1908-2016	0.3
Baseball	Phillies	1903-1980	1.0
Baseball	White Sox	1917-2005	1.1
Baseball	Red Sox	1918-2004	1.2
Football	Cardinals	1948-present	2.8
Hockey	Maple Leafs	1964-present	4.4

 

It’s interesting that three of the five most impressive streaks started in Chicago (the football Cardinals’ last championship came when they shared a stadium with the White Sox, and they played in Wrigley for many years).

Also, you can apply the same technique to futility streaks other than winning the championship, like making the World Series (or Super Bowl or Stanley Cup finals) or making the playoffs, or finishing in the top half of the league or division. But the easier the target (50% of the teams finish in the top half of the league, while only one wins the championship), the more obvious it becomes that it’s a flawed calculation. I won’t claim to have calculated every significant streak of those listed, but the lowest “odds” I’ve found are those against the Cubs’ 20-year streak in the lower division, which come out as less than one in a million. Not surprisingly, the Cubs’ 70-year streak of avoiding the World Series (1946 through 2015) is the most spectacular in the category of not playing in the finals as well.

So were the Cubs amazingly unlucky for that 108-year stretch? No, but their fans were, being saddled with the management, and hence teams, that they got.

The game: Chicago Cubs 8, Arizona Diamondbacks 4 

The star of the game was clearly Cub first baseman Michael Busch. The single most decisive play of the game came in the 5th inning. The Cubs had the bases loaded, one out, a 3-2 lead, and Busch at the plate. He tripled, to clear the bases, making it instantly a 6-2 game. The score never got any closer. Earlier, he had doubled and scored one of the Cubs' early runs; later, with a runner on third and one out, he hit a fly ball deep enough for the runner to tag and score. Busch had not been hitting well this season, but he had three extra-base hits, two walks, and that sacrifice fly in the two games we saw this weekend. 

In a way, I felt vindicated. In our first season of travel, 2023, I commented  that Busch, whom we saw twice, looked better than the other AAA players we were watching, and that I suspected he'd get another chance at the majors. The Dodgers, for whom he played a few games that year (without hitting very well) traded him to the Cubs, and he has been a very, very good player for them, good enough to finish in the top 20 in voting for the league's Most Valuable Player last year.

Wrigley Field: Fifth Impressions

After really enjoying the Wrigley Field experience yesterday, we didn't enjoy it nearly so much today. Part of it was that the Diamondbacks didn't play as well, but a bigger part of it was that there were more runs scored, which made it harder to keep track of the score without it being displayed anywhere.

Wrigley Field has two large video boards (the one in right field isn't visible in the picture at the top), which display all sorts of information, including pictures of the players, fun factoids, and statistics that even a statistics nerd doesn't care about, but not the score.

There's also the old-timey scoreboard in centerfield that gives the inning-by-inning score of all the games in the majors at the moment, as well as things like the balls and strikes. The Cub game is one of the 15 games listed on a Sunday afternoon, but to figure out what the score is, you have to add the numbers of the scores by inning, and since the numbers aren't that big from 400 feet away, you have to make sure you don't mistake a "6" for a "0" or vice-versa. 

There are scoreboards along the facing of the upper deck, but if you're sitting anywhere behind home plate, as we were both days (once in the upper deck, once in the lower deck, once a few sections to the first base side, once a few sections to the third base side), those are at a steep enough angle that they're unreadable.

In that respect, Wrigley today is far inferior to the typical high school baseball field of my youth.

The other thing that was frustrating, though I can't blame the Cubs, is the that southbound "L" stopped operations a few minutes after the game because of "police activity" somewhere in the Loop. So we, and thousands of others who were planning on taking the L, were dumped off two stops away from Wrigley. Luckily, it wasn't a bad part of town (it was at the DePaul University campus), and we were able to get a rideshare within about 30 minutes, but it was frustrating. 

Random impressions of Wrigley

Wrigley is the most beer-oriented park we've been to. The T-shirts that say "The Cubs way: Win or Lose, We Will Booze" seemed appropriate. On Saturday, when they showed people on the Jumbotron between innings, the appropriate response, male or female, young (hopefully over 21) or old, was to chug your beer. Not Coke, not margaritas, but beer.

MLB players all have their "walk-up" music that plays when they come to bat in their home stadium. It's silent when a visiting player comes up, except for a couple of places we've been (Atlanta and Wrigley), where the organist may play something he finds appropriate. Listening for two days, we heard the Wrigley organist play six or seven different Christmas carols for Corbin Carroll, "Tomorrow" for Ildemaro Vargas, and "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" for Jose Fernandez.