Are the Chicago Cubs Cursed?

In the book Scorecasting by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim, they attempt to explain that the Chicago Cubs are not cursed to lose forever, but that they instead have less of a financial incentive to win. To try and explain this Moskowitz and Wertheim look at the elasticity between regular season home attendance percentages to winning percentages (the teams win loss record). Elasticity refers to the responsiveness of one variable to the changes in another. In this case is what how elastic attendance is to winning percentage for the Chicago Cubs. In order to find this the authors of the book calculated the response of home game attendance to season winning percentage for every MLB team over the last century. By doing this calculation they were able to get a measure of the sensitivity of fans to the success of teams.

In economics there are three types of elasticity: elastic (meaning it is highly responsive to changes in the variable and has a value greater than 1), Unit elastic (meaning that a percentage change in one variable yields the exact percentage change in another or it is equal to 1), and inelastic (which means the variable is not responsive to changes in the other variable and has a value less than 1). According to the authors if the number of their calculations was 1 it meant that if the team wins 10 percent more games the attendance will also rise by ten percent. Greater than one means attendance rises by more than 10 percent and less than one means that the fans are not sensitive to wins, creating less of an incentive to win. (Moskowitz & Wertheim, 2011)

The authors found that the MLB average is unit elastic at 1, meaning that a 10 percent increase in winning percentage will cause a 10 attendance increase the next season. The New York Yankees have an elasticity of 0.9 which is to be expected because of the history of the team and success. The Chicago Cubs, however, who have not won a World Series in over 100 years, have an elasticity of 0.6 much less than one, meaning their attendance is largely unaffected by the success of the team. As a comparison the authors compared the elasticity of the Cubs to their cross town rivals the White Sox whose stadium is roughly the same seating capacity and who have also won a World Series recently. They found that the Chicago White Sox had elasticity almost twice as high as the cubs at 1.2. They also found that the attendance for the cubs has wavered at between 82-99 percent every year for the last 11 years where as the White Sox attendance has wavered between 37-90 percent. Their high mark was the season after winning the World Series. The same season after the White sox won the World Series the Cubs finished in last place yet had a 94 percent attendance rate.

Surprisingly what was also found is that the Cubs attendance is much more sensitive to changing beer prices than it is to the team’s success. The authors obtained, adjusted for inflation, general beer prices from 1984-2009 and found that attendance was more than four times more sensitive to beer prices than to winning percentage. What is even more surprising is that the Cubs ownership knows this an despite the cubs posting a 48.6 percent winning percentage over the past two decades the Cubs owners have managed to successfully increase ticket prices by 67 percent during that time but beer prices remained flat. They found that the Cubs have the third highest ticket prices in the league averaging almost $48.00 per seat. However, their beer price is the third lowest in the league at 5 dollars a beer.

Through this evidence the authors have been able to show that the Chicago Cubs are not cursed to lose forever they simply don’t have the same incentives as the rest of the league to win. The Cubs will simply generate revenue regardless of how they perform on the field. The Cubs fans will tolerate losing baseball, high ticket prices and low beer prices to have a memorable day at Wrigley, but they will not tolerate high beer prices.

Moskowitz, T. J., Wertheim, L.J. (2011). Scorecasting: The hidden influences behind how sports are played and games are won. New York: Crown Archetype.