City of Chicago Mired In Slump for the Ages

The Cubs hadn’t won a World Series in a lifetime, but 77-year-old Jim Green indulged in a little optimism as he sat basking in the sun at Wrigley Field.

“I don’t give up on the Cubs,” declared the retired banker. “Sometime in the next 100 years, they’re going to win.”

Despite the team’s unfamiliar stay atop the standings in the first half of the season, pessimism comes more naturally to Cubs fans. They are the longest-suffering in a city in which the White Sox, Blackhawks, even the once-storied Bears and Michael Jordan’s Bulls have fallen on hard times.

“We’re never going to see a World Series here, are we?” Green’s friend Leo Deutsch, 74, asked with a sigh.

But why not? Why in the name of Sammy Sosa do the Cubs keep falling short year after year?

Up in the broadcast booth, former Cub great Ron Santo is as stumped as everyone else.

“I wish I had the answer,” the ex-third baseman said, raising such possible factors as Wrigley’s winds, the pitcher-hostile conditions and bad luck. “I just think you’ve got to be lucky. Timing is everything in life.”

Still, he lamented: “I can’t believe that it’s been 93 years since we won a World Series.”

The collective tailspin of Chicago’s teams is a citywide slump for the ages, deeper than anything Philadelphia, Cleveland or New York can dredge up from losing years of yore.

Chicago, the city of the “El,” has been the city of the “L” in sports-page won-loss columns, especially in the last few years.

* 1999 marked the first time that all the major teams finished with losing records. Only the White Sox in baseball kept it from happening again in 2000.

* Chicago teams hold half the longest current championship droughts in the four biggest U.S. team sports: the Cubs, without a World Series title since 1908, and the Blackhawks, who last won the Stanley Cup in 1961.

* The Bears haven’t had a winning season since 1995 and last made the NFL playoffs in ’94. The 1985 version was considered one of the best teams in NFL history, going 15-1 and winning the Super Bowl under Mike Ditka.

* The Cubs--despite stars like Santo, Ernie Banks and Ryne Sandberg--have essentially been out of championship contention since World War II. Since their 1945 World Series loss, they have finished within 10 games of first place just five times.

* The White Sox haven’t won the World Series since 1917 and haven’t been in one since 1959.

* The Bulls, who won six titles with Jordan, have been a laughingstock since he retired after the 1997-98 season. They had an NBA-worst 15-67 record last season.

* The Blackhawks have missed the NHL playoffs four straight years.

Sports economists and other experts blame a combination of reasons:

Poor player personnel decisions, owners more committed to the bottom line than winning--even the weather. Then there are the intangible factors, including Second City syndrome.

“Chicago should have all the advantages,” says sports economist Michael Leeds, a Temple University professor. “It’s one of the biggest cities, it has mega-media deals--the Cubs in particular--it’s got all these things going for it. And yet the teams don’t seem to win.

“It must be the water.”

The water aside, a primary reason for all the losing may lie in financial numbers whose full extent remains closely guarded by the franchise owners. Winning might not be as important financially as it used to be.

Vince Lombardi said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” but Richard Sheehan, professor of finance and business economics at Notre Dame suggests an update: “Winning isn’t everything--business is everything.”

Despite being in the nation’s third-biggest city with a far-reaching media market, Chicago teams rank only middle-of-the-pack in payroll and expenditures. Nos. 1 and 2, New York and Los Angeles, are near the top.

The Cubs, with a $64 million payroll, and the White Sox at $62.3 million ranked 14th and 16th among baseball’s 30 teams as of Opening Day this spring, while New York and Los Angeles teams topped $100 million and accounted for three of the four fattest payrolls.

The Blackhawks were 16th of 30 teams in the NHL with a payroll of just under $32 million last season. The Bears, at $73 million, were eighth in the NFL. The Bulls had the NBA’s lowest payroll--but only because the elite free agents they tried to sign took one look at the lowly franchise and said no.

Some reluctance to spend heavily is sound business. Sports business experts say disincentives have been built into the system--from the increased revenue-sharing in the NFL to reverse-order drafts and parity scheduling.

In the NFL, says University of Chicago sports economist Allen Sanderson, 80 percent of revenues are shared, and national TV revenues--about two-thirds of all league income--are divided equally. The Bears, he notes, have drawn sellout crowds without winning.

“Somehow, there’s such loyalty in this community to certain teams that the owners don’t feel the financial imperative to succeed,” says Robert Baade, sports economist at Lake Forest College. “It seems to me there’s some loyalty surplus that these owners have abused.”

And spectators share the blame, just for showing up to watch a bad team?

“People want to be entertained,” says Sanderson. “The blurry line between sports and entertainment is more blurred than ever now. The more it becomes about entertainment, the less the focus on competition.”

Mark Grace, a fixture at first base for the Cubs until they let him go to Arizona as a free agent, put it this way in Baseball Weekly: “What they are is a tourist attraction. All of the tourists come to see this historical monument (Wrigley), and they don’t give one whit whether they win or lose.” All that matters, he says, is that “the Tribune Co. makes money.”

Not true, insists the owner of the team since 1981. “We want to win, but we want to do it in a way that makes economic sense,” Tribune executive vice president Dennis FitzSimons said.

Analyzing the finances of big-league sports franchises is difficult because of complex ownership structures and accounting maneuvers. But experts dismiss such reports as a major league baseball study released last year claiming that every team except the Yankees, Cleveland and Colorado lost money in 1995-99.

Most teams are owned by a limited partnership, an individual or a larger corporation.

Authors James Quirk and Rodney Fort note in their book “Hard Ball: The Abuse of Power in Team Sports” that sports team owners have tax shelter opportunities not available to most other businesses. So, what appears to be a before-tax loss by the team can, under certain circumstances, be converted into an after-tax profit for the owner.

An esoteric factor is Second City complex, part of the notion that Midwesterners accept what life throws at them. Many writers over the years have portrayed Chicagoans as taking their share of hard knocks and accepting it. Could some of that attitude have rubbed off on their teams?

Don’t laugh, it just may be true, says Bernard Beck, a Northwestern University expert on the sociology of sports.

The phrase “Second City” outraged Chicagoans, Beck notes, when it was coined by journalist A.J. Liebling in the New Yorker magazine in the ‘40s. But it’s long since become an accepted axiom that New York is top dog over Chicago.

“You’ve got to believe there’s some kind of connection between the general public and how its sports teams do,” Beck says.

Winning, according to conventional wisdom, is good for not just civic pride but the local economy. In 1998, Fortune magazine estimated that Jordan alone had generated $10 billion for the U.S. economy and untold millions for the Chicago economy.

Since the Bulls and Blackhawks went bad, souvenir and sports memorabilia sales have fallen off. Even the pizza delivery business that thrived during the Jordan era has slacked off.

But there’s a silver lining to all the losing, and its local acceptance, says Sanderson, a Chicagoan since 1984.

“I think a city can overdose on sports,” he says. “Maybe we have our values in not a bad place, in that we don’t care about the losing. We’re enjoying the museums, the lakefront, the restaurants and the other cultural amenities. I think the city has its sports in quite a reasonable perspective.”