Chicago Cubs: Do the Fans Really Want a Winner or Will It Damage the Tradition?

On September 28, the Chicago Cubs lost for the 91^st and final time of the 2011 season, increasing the number of years they have gone without winning the World Series to 103.

Since back-to-back rings in 1907 and 1908, the Cubs’ streak of futility has gone unmatched in professional sports. The second-longest ever World Series-winning drought belonged to their crosstown rivals, the White Sox, who erased theirs in 2005. The Cleveland Indians claim the second-longest current streak—the last time they won it all was 1948. The Cubs haven’t even won the pennant since 1945.

Besides their unparalleled deficiency, what is remarkable about their streak is its consistency. The Cubs’ deficit predates the creation of the other three major North American sports leagues. The ‘Lovable Losers,’ a nickname the Cubs ‘earned’ through their particularly ineffectual play in the 60s, and 70s, regularly tread the bottom of the standings, while losing in often bizarre fashion when they do reach the playoffs. 

This is the Cubs’ history. Perennial losing has been the main story line in the Cubs’ narrative since World War II, their barren pre-World War II years tacked on to elongate the losing streak and enhance the Cubs’ woebegone chronicle. It’s all any Cubs fan knows.

It’s a point of pride, too. The Cubs—capital L Losers—have one of baseball’s most rabid and committed fan bases. Trying to get around on Clark St. in Wrigleyville during Cubs’ games is a nightmare. But it’s hard not to observe, amidst all the forlorn protestations that follow Cubs’ losses, a sensation of satisfaction that the continuous losing preserves a more significant narrative—the one that forms the very substance of the Cubs’ history.

Fans exalt the teams in baseball’s unofficial "upper echelon," like the Yankees, Red Sox, Braves and Cubs, not only for their long and storied histories but for they way that their franchise’s narratives can be smoothly summarized. The Yankees—baseball’s powerhouse, home of Ruth and Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle and Jeter. The Braves—a franchise of relatively consistent strong play and class, home of Aaron, Spahn, and Maddux.

And the Cubs lose. They have fielded some of baseball’s best players, from Cap Anson to Three-Finger Brown to ‘Mr. Cub.,’ Ernie Banks (who holds the unfortunate record of most games played without a playoff appearance, never making the playoffs during his 19 years, all spent with the Cubs). Longtime broadcasters Jack Brickhouse and his successor, Harry Caray, are iconic baseball figures. Wrigley Field is one of baseball’s paragons.

These icons are indelibly marked by the Cubs’ overarching narrative of perpetual losing. Cubs fans relate to their team and its icons through this narrative. Ernie Banks was a player you wanted to see win it all, but who you knew never would. The Cubs never occupy the space of forgettable mediocrity, alongside ho-hum franchises like the Montreal Expos or Kansas City Royals—they’re the Cubs. They lose in grand style.

The clearest comparison of the Cubs’ narrative is to that of the Boston Red Sox. Both are among baseball’s most storied franchises, have fielded some of the game’s best players, and play in iconic ballparks in big baseball cities. Both have spent the majority of the modern baseball era nursing extended losing streaks.

For both teams, losing was the lore, the focus of the franchise. Each team has a Curse—the Curse of the Bambino against the Curse of the Billy Goat. Fans pointed to coincidences, "effects" of the Curse, as ruining yet another promising season. Having a curse is, paradoxical though it may seem, a great thing for a fan: it is a sign that your team has been selected, out of all the teams, to suffer. Year in and year out, your team is not just a team that loses because of bad personnel decisions or mediocre play or any other of the dozens of reasons that teams lose; your team is Cursed.

The Red Sox broke their Curse in 2004, cementing its complete erasure with a 2007 title. Red Sox Nation celebrated, but the Red Sox narrative has lost something. They’ve become more like a version of the Yankees, throwing money around, each season without a World Series title regarded as a failure. If they hadn’t won their two recent titles, their massive collapse this season would have been chalked up to the Curse. Without the Curse to occupy the narrative space, the real faults of the team become clearer. 

Without the Curse, the Red Sox are back to being a regular team. The Cubs hold the Cursed title on their own now. No fan has the right to complain about his or her team losing as often as a Cubs fan.

Cubs fans love to complain about their futility. Chicago’s Second City pokes fun at the Cubs’ ineffectiveness in each of their comedy shows, to thundering laughter. The Onion, headquartered in Chicago, frequently lampoons the Cubs’ futility, including headlines like ‘Chicago Cubs Can’t Believe They’re Doing This Again,’ to ‘Cubs, Absence From World Series Agree to 4-Year Extension.’ These jokes are an essential component of Cubs solidarity.

In a weird way, Steve Bartman, who achieved infamy in 2003 when he cherry-picked a foul ball out of Moises Alou’s glove in the NLCS, symbolizes Cubs fans. Like many Cubs fans, Bartman is passionate, even obsessive, about the Cubs. He badly wants the team to win, on the surface. But subconsciously, maybe he knows that actually winning would be antithetical to the Cubs’ ongoing legacy, adding a World Series title to the books but expunging something more significant from the Cubs community.

In a 2004 article about fan disillusionment, Jeffrey Scholes points to the “eternal, recurrent optimism of Cubs’ fans” as the fuel for their fandom. This optimism is a uniting force, and keeps fans returning year after year. Like a skyrocketing lottery jackpot, the sheer numbers of which inspire awe, the Cubs’ perpetual losing is itself significant, the architect of mystique. Once it’s won, once the Cubs win, it’s back to zero again.

After another poor showing in 2011, the Cubs are being pressured by their fans to make changes. The Cubs will make changes, and the fans will be back, rabid as ever, to continue participating in the Cubs’ losing, one of baseball’s most storied traditions.

If only every team’s fans could be so lucky.