Scorecasting (38 page)

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.