Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won

by L. Jon Wertheim

  No matter. The following night, the Cubs would lose the decisive seventh game to the Marlins, who would go on to win the World Series. And poor Steve Bartman would take his rightful place alongside Mrs. O’Leary and her cow among the city’s bêtes noires. With Halloween a few weeks away, Steve Bartman masks began appearing at parties, outnumbering witches and ghosts and Osama bin Laden costumes by a healthy margin. A comic at the famed Second City comedy theater soon did a routine dressed as Bartman, bumping into a fireman as he tries to catch a baby from a burning building. A local radio station began playing a song, “Go Blame It on Steve Bartman.” Then there were the T-shirts spoofing the MasterCard “priceless” commercials:

  Tickets to a Cubs game: $200

  Chicago Cubs hat: $20

  1987 Walkman: $10

  F–ing up your team’s chances of winning the World Series: Priceless

  Law and Order began taping an episode about a “foul ball guy” who deprived his team of a victory and was subsequently found murdered in a bar. Interviewed on the local news, Dan May, a local law student, explained that if he were to cross paths with Bartman, “I wouldn’t shoot him. But I’d break his knees.” Richly, Rod Blagojevich, then Illinois’s governor, stated that Bartman “better join the witness protection program.” He added that if Bartman had committed a crime, “he won’t get a pardon from this governor.” Meanwhile, Florida’s governor at the time, Jeb Bush, jokingly offered Bartman asylum. Bartman went into hiding and declined to give interviews or make appearances, including an invitation to attend the Super Bowl. There were rumors that he underwent plastic surgery. At the time of this writing, he has yet to resurface in public.

  Bartman didn’t catch the ball that night. It squirted away from him and eventually was recovered by a Chicago lawyer who sold the ball at auction to Harry Caray’s Restaurant Group. The winning bid? $113,824.16. That off-season, the ball was destroyed in a ceremony that drew more than a thousand Cubs fans and Chicago celebrities on the order of Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan, Caddyshack and Vacation director Harold Ramis, and Caray’s widow, Dutchie. The detonation was overseen by Michael Lantieri, an Oscar-winning Hollywood special effects savant. (Disregarding suggestions to use Caray’s thick glasses to ignite the fire that would melt the ball, Lantieri utilized a no-smoke detonation device.) Fans stood outside the tent—some wielding signs reading “Death to Bartman”—chanting “The ball is dead. The ball is dead.” The steam from the ball was gathered, distilled, and used to prepare pasta sauce for Caray’s restaurant. Really.

  If all this sounds a bit—how to put it?—extreme, to many fans “Bartman’s blunder” confirmed what they had already believed for so long: The Cubs are simply doomed, a star-crossed franchise that has done something to anger the fates. A curse once ascribed to a vengeful billy goat now had a human face, one wrapped in a terminally uncool set of headphones.

  Maybe the misbegotten fans—and, for the sake of full disclosure, we count ourselves among the legion—were on to something. The last time the Cubs won the World Series was 1908—the longest championship drought in all major North American professional sports. For the sake of perspective: Teddy Roosevelt was president, the concept of a world war was yet to be conceived, and the horse and buggy was more common than the automobile. It was Jack Brickhouse, the longtime Cubs play-by-play announcer, who noted, “Everyone is entitled to a bad century.”

  When Bartman made that awkward attempt to catch the ball, it was as if karma, suddenly awakened, reminded us that the Cubs and success don’t mingle. After Castillo’s walk, a parade of miscues ensued, hits dropped between fielders and the fortunes of the team did a pirouette. Proof of a higher power at work. The Cubs were—indeed, are—simply the unluckiest franchise in all sports. In a word: cursed.

  Right?

  Well, first, let’s define luck. Webster’s weighs in with this: “a force that brings fortune or adversity … something that brings extreme outcomes that are unexpected.” So how “unlucky” are the Cubs? For example, how unlucky is it that a team would play for an entire century without winning the Big Prize once? In a league with 30 teams, as there currently are in baseball, assuming that each team has an equal chance at winning, the odds that one would play for 100 seasons and never win the big prize are about 3.5 percent, or 1 in 30. Unlikely but hardly impossible.

  If you’re looking for a real outlier based on strict odds, think back to the New York Yankees’ achievement of winning 27 of the last 100 World Series crowns. (There was no World Series in the strike year of 1994.) The chances of that? One in 32 billion, or 1:32,216,000,000.

  No one attributes the Yankees’ remarkable success to luck. This kind of luck simply doesn’t happen. The Yankees have just been really good, employing some of the most gilded players—Ruth, DiMaggio, Mantle, Jeter—scouting and developing talent, and hiring expert coaches. (Yes, at least in recent years, they’ve also spent a boatload of money.) The Yankees may be a lot of things, but no one, at least outside Boston, is arguing that the franchise is lucky. So why should we ascribe the Cubs’ remarkable lack of success to luck? That is, why are we quick to embrace luck for the Cubs’ failure and reluctant to do so for the Yankees’ success?

  Luck is something we can’t explain. It is often attributed to things we don’t want to explain. Psychologists have found that people too often attribute success to skill and failure to luck, a bias called self-attribution. We brag about the three stocks we bought that hit it big but dismiss as bad luck the seven that plummeted. We applaud our quick reflexes and driving skills when avoiding a gaping pothole, but when we hit it squarely, we curse the weather, other drivers, and the city (everyone but ourselves). In many aspects of life, we are quick to claim success and reluctant to admit failure. We do the same thing for our favorite team.

  A curse, or bad luck, is an easy way out. When attributing failure to luck, you need search no further for an answer. To borrow a favorite phrase from baseball clubhouses, “It is what it is.” Bad luck has the beautiful, comforting quality of getting you off the hook. Failure is unavoidable if it’s due to luck. It was out of your control, and there is nothing you could have done or should have done to change it.

  Is the real explanation for the Cubs’ futility being masked by the convenience of a so-called curse? And if so, is there perhaps something that can be done to change the franchise’s fortunes rather than sacrificing fumbled foul balls to the baseball gods?

  To answer these questions, we need to measure something that is inherently immeasurable: luck. Although we can’t directly measure luck itself, we can infer from data where luck has had its influence.

  Consider again what it means to be unlucky. The term implies a certain randomness or a lack of control; in other words, outcome that isn’t commensurate with ability. A team that consistently wins its division yet never wins the World Series? That’s unlucky. A franchise that consistently finishes second in its division despite having a great team and record, perhaps because the ball didn’t bounce its way a few times? Or it happened to be in a division with a mighty powerhouse such as the Yankees? That’s unlucky. A team that loses a lot of close games may be unlucky. A team performing well on the field in every measurable way but failing to win as many games as it should? Again, unlucky.

  That said, how much of the Cubs’ futility can be attributed to bad luck? To win a World Series, you have to get there first. The Cubs haven’t been there since 1945 and have been to only four divisional series since, which doesn’t give them many chances to win a championship. Were the Cubs consistently unlucky not winning their division? Did they just miss the divisional title a number of times because they were competing head to head with their very successful rivals the St. Louis Cardinals, whose ten World Series titles put them second behind the Yankees? If so, the Cubs should finish second far more often than they do third or fourth or last.

  Alas, the Cubs have finished second even fewer times than first. They have finished third more times than first
or second, finished fourth more times than third, and finished dead last 17 times. This evidence is not consistent with luck. Luck should have no order to it. Luck implies that you are equally likely to finish second as you are to do anything else. The Cubs’ consistent placement toward the bottom is not a matter of luck. They have reached the bottom far more often than random chance says they should, finishing last or second to last nearly 40 percent of the time. The odds of this happening by chance are 527 to 1.

  For comparison, the Yankees have been to 40 World Series (winning 27) and have finished first in their division (or league, in the early part of the twentieth century) 45 out of 100 times (the Cubs only 12), and when they haven’t finished first, they’ve usually finished second (16 times). In fact, the Yankees’ experience is opposite to that of the Cubs. The Yankees finish first (far) more often than second, finish second more often than third, finish third more often than fourth, and have finished dead last only three times. This is also not consistent with luck.

  If you want to pity a team that is unlucky, consider the Houston Astros. That team has never won a World Series in its 48-year existence despite reaching the League Championship Series four times and the Division Series seven times. The Astros have also finished in the top three in their division 26 out of 48 years—more than 54 percent of the time—and have finished last in only three seasons.

  Another way to measure luck is to see how much of a team’s success or failure can’t be explained. For example, take a look at how the team performed on the field and whether, based on its performance, it won fewer games than it should have. If you were told that your team led the league in hitting, home runs, runs scored, pitching, and fielding percentage, you’d assume your team won a lot more games than it lost. If it did not, you’d be within your rights to consider it unlucky. A lot would be left unexplained. How, for instance, did the 1982 Detroit Tigers finish fourth in their division, winning only 83 games and losing 79, despite placing eighth in the Majors in runs scored that season, seventh in team batting average, fourth in home runs, tenth in runs against, ninth in ERA, fifth in hits allowed, eighth in strikeouts against, and fourth in fewest errors?

  Historically, for the average MLB team, its on-the-field statistics would predict its winning percentage year to year with 93 percent accuracy. That is, if you were to look only at a team’s on-the-field numbers each season and rank it based on those numbers, 93 percent of the time you would get the same ranking as you would if you ranked it based on wins and losses. But 93 percent is not 100 percent. And for the 1982 Detroit Tigers, this was one of those “unlucky” years in which performance on the field simply did not translate into actual wins and losses. Lucky teams are those whose records are not justified by their on-the-field performances—in other words, there is a lot unexplained.

  Based on this measure, how unlucky are the Cubs? Did the Cubs lose more games than they should have based on their performance at the plate, on the mound, and in the field? Is there something unexplained about their lack of success—like a curse?

  Unfortunately (for us Cubs fans), no. The Cubs’ record can be explained just as easily as those of the majority of teams in baseball. The Cubs’ ritual underperformance in terms of wins is perfectly understandable when you examine their performance on the field. To put it more precisely, if we were to predict year to year the Cubs’ winning percentage based on all available statistics, we would be able to explain 94 percent of it, which is higher than the league average. Here you could argue that the Cubs are actually less unlucky than the average team in baseball.

  Who has been most affected by luck? Or, put differently, whose regular season record and postseason success are the hardest to explain? Life being heavy into irony, it’s the Cubs’ rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals. If you look at their performance on the field, you’d predict fewer wins than the Cardinals have achieved. Even more irritating to Cubs fans, it is also hard to explain how the Cardinals won ten World Series. The Dodgers have been to one more World Series than the Cardinals (18 to 17) but have won four fewer times. The Giants have been to the Fall Classic one time more than the Cardinals but have won four fewer championships.

  But if bad luck—or a deficiency of good luck—isn’t the answer, what is driving the Cubs’ futility?

  To traffic in the obvious, the reason the Cubs haven’t won is that they haven’t put particularly skilled teams on the field. You could start by picking apart personnel moves over the years. In 1964, the Cubs dealt a young outfielder, Lou Brock, to the rival St. Louis Cardinals for pitcher Ernie Broglio; this is generally considered by some (mostly in Chicago) the single worst trade in baseball history. Broglio would go 7–19 with the Cubs. Brock would retire as baseball’s all-time leader in stolen bases and enter the Hall of Fame. The Cubs’ trade of Dennis Eckersley, a future MVP, for three minor leaguers would rank up there, too. So would the decision to let a promising young pitcher, Greg Maddux, test the free agent market in 1992. Over the next decade, Maddux, as a member of the Atlanta Braves, would establish himself as the National League’s dominant pitcher and a lock for the Hall of Fame. But all teams make trades that with the benefit of hindsight are boneheaded.

  The bigger question is why the Cubs haven’t put good teams together. We believe that the answer has to do with incentives. What fans are attributing to bad luck may be masking something more disturbing about the franchise.

  Apart from the ineffable reasons—pride, competitiveness, honor—sports teams have an economic reason or incentive to do well. A more successful team generates more fans, which generates more revenue. Winning teams should attract more sellout crowds and trigger larger demand for sponsorships and local and national TV ratings and souvenir sales. Overall, winning should boost the brand name of the franchise, and all these things should increase the team’s bottom line. The opposite would be true of losing teams. Think of this as a way for fans to reward a team’s owners when the team performs well and punish them when it doesn’t. This process aligns the incentives of fans with those of the owners, who gain financially by winning.

  Sure, every team wants to win, but not equally. We don’t often think about teams having different incentives to win, in part because knowing a team’s incentive is difficult. But we can try to infer incentives by looking at data in new ways. For example, how does home game attendance respond to team performance? Home attendance is just one measure of a team’s popularity and revenue, but it is correlated with others, such as sponsorship and souvenir sales. Imagine a team whose fans are so loyal or numb that winning or losing would not change attendance or the fan base. Compare this team with a team whose fans are very fickle and sensitive. Wouldn’t the second team have a greater incentive to win? Failing to do so would be costly.

  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.

  So, how do the Cubs stack up? It turns out that their attendance is the least sensitive to performance in all of baseball (see the graph below). The sensitivity of attendance per game to winning percentage for the Cubs is only 0.6, much less than one. The league average is one. If the Dallas Cowboys are America’s Team, the Cubs are America’s Teflon team.

  Contrast these figures with those of the Yankees, where attendance sensitivity is 0.9, meaning that attendance moves almost one for one with winning percentage. You might think this is the case because New York fans are notoriously harsh, more willing to punish their teams for bad performance, or that Yankee tickets are so expensive that at those prices the team had better be good. Or perhaps the fans have been spoiled by all the success and have consuming
expectations. So maybe a better comparison is to Chicago’s other baseball team, the White Sox, who not only share a city with the Cubs but also play in a ballpark with roughly the same seating capacity. As it turns out, the White Sox fans’ sensitivity to wins is more than twice that of the Cubs fans and one of the highest in the league.

  ATTENDANCE ELASTICITY TO WINNING

  The stark differences between the Cubs and the White Sox in terms of fan attendance can be seen clearly even over the last decade. The tables on this page list the wins and losses, rank in division, and total attendance of the two Chicago teams from 1998 to 2009, including total seating capacity per season to account for stadium modifications.

  CHICAGO CUBS

  CHICAGO WHITE SOX

  Over the last 11 years, the rate of attendance at Wrigley Field wavered between 82 percent and 99 percent of capacity, whereas the White Sox had as little as 37 percent of their capacity filled in 1999 and as much as 90 percent of capacity filled in 2006—the year after they won the World Series, when attendance is always goosed. The same season, the Cubs would finish in last place, yet they posted a 94 percent attendance rate. The last-place Cubs entertained 165,801 more fans than the World Champion White Sox hosted that season! (And that doesn’t include the thousands of rooftop seats enterprising landlords across the street from Wrigley rent out.) In fact, the Cubs have posted higher than 94 percent attendance rates in every season since 2002 despite not having even been to a World Series.