Cubs Tourism Attendance Stresses Need to Develop Homegrown Fans

So more proof that Wrigley is becoming Exaclibur -- a once popular nightlife/party scene that's now where out-of-towners and suburbanites go when they visit Chicago, but that's no longer cool with the locals...

That actually happened sometime around 1986.

I don't think I'll ever really understand the phenomenon of Cubs fans (actual fans) complaining about higher attendance.

It really isn't that complicated. It is less enjoyable to go to a game where you have to fight to be able to watch the game because the people around you are completely uninterested and constantly moving around, etc. It is more enjoyable to go to a game and sit around people who notice that the center fielder is shading five steps to left and that the third baseman has inexplicably decided not to guard the line. It isn't higher attendance per se, it's that we don't like the trixies and their "men" any more than people outside the stadium do,

I get your point and don't disagree. Thing is, if I had a choice between that and watching a game in a nearly-empty environment like Marlins fans do, I'm not sure I'd pick the latter over the former. (Though obviously I'd take their playoff success.) Know what I mean? It sucks that it's almost overrun with douches, but given the fact that being in a stadium full of fans like you and me seems pretty unattainable, I'll take it over the opposite.

I'd much rather take the empty stadium than what is typically at Wrigley during a "good" year. 

I love watching a game in a packed stadium.   There's nothing like being in a crowd of people who are hanging on a 3-2 count and hearing the reaction when the pitcher gets the strikeout.  But when something happens at Wrigley, half the stadium looks up from their cell phone or their beer and says "huh?  what just happened dude?" and then goes back to high-fiving their bro because the hot chick smiled at them..

I won't deny that Wrigley has something of a brofestation problem, but I think that's exaggerating it in the extreme. The douches are obvious and obnoxious, to be sure, but that means they have an outsized effect. I've gone to at least 10 games every year since 1998 (this year and last excepted... I only went to 7 or 8 last year and only 2 so far this year) and that problem is just not as bad as a lot of people make it out to be.

Certainly if you are not in the bleachers it is much diminished. The bleachers are an absolute, no-holes-barred nightmare.

That's definitely true. And I have to confess to being one of Those Cubs Fans in the bleachers a couple times: Showing up early to get a good spot in the bleachers is a good idea. Starting to drink Old Styles immediately is not.

Sure, but you asked what people are bitching about it and that is it. I hate to say it, but Cardinal games in St. Louis are pretty baseball intensive. Not everyone is a crazy fan, but the proportion is pretty high.

Maybe, but look at the Cardinals' entertainment dollar competition in St. Louis: meth, incestuous sodomy, and bestiality are very popular there, obviously, but probably don't stack up against baseball -- even for Cardinal fans.

To be honest, I don't understand what most Cubs fans complain about.

No World Series win in over 100 years. 

Well, that's a good point. The only thing more exasperating and embarrassing than listen to the stream of presumably semi-literate morons who call into the Cubs postgame show on WGN after a win is listening to the stream of presumably semi-literate morons who call into the Cubs postgame show after a loss.

Ehh, no, I don't think that's it. The city-dwelling fans can go to a game anytime they want; knowing the team sucks (like it does this year) is likely to lead us to find other things to do. Suburbanites and out-of-towners plan entire trips around going to a game -- and often buy their tickets before the season even starts.

So in other words, when the team is having an especially bad year, the first people likely to drop out of attendance are the city-dwellers. The team turns it around, and they'll be back, no doubt about it. That's hardly the same thing as Wrigley becoming Excalibur.

Wait, I am a die hard Cubs fan and have gone to two games in a season at Wrigley for the first time in years. Instead of being packed in between the bros and the hayseeds I could actually get pretty good seats at no premium with a little room to put my scorecard down between innings.

I suspect that the people they are losing are the "staycation" tourists with no real interest in baseball but a willingness to spend a nice day at the ballpark. Besides, the die hards knew in February that this team was a disaster.

I totally agree with your assessment.  And honestly, I'd be more likely to catch a game at Wrigley right now (I'm not a Cubs fan but I'd love to see the Reds if they were in town), since the frat boy contingent seems to be down.  But from a business standpoint, the Cubs have depended on tourist fans for decades now, and rebuilding the local fanbase to compensate for declining tourists is going to be difficult -- unless they can actually field a winning team. 

Although I don't feel sorry for Ricketts per se, I really do think he got screwed in his deal with the Tribune.  He let his fandom seriously cloud his business judgment.

I don't think Young Ricketts has any business judgment. I also don't think the state should pony up $$ to an organization that is owned largely by a guy (Older Ricketts, it is his money after all) who spends money campaigning against states spending money on private companies.

No public money for the Cubs.

I actually think that sports marketing mostly takes care of itself for teams like the Cubs. Ricketts bought a team in a perennially weak division in a region that LOVES winners. If the Cubs were to field an 85-88 win team, which is not a particularly good team, they'd have 3 million people. It's very achievable, but the product has to be better than a good PCL team, which this one is not.

I can honestly say there is nobody on this team whose jersey I would buy for my kid. That's pathetic.

I can honestly say there is nobody on this team whose jersey I would buy for my kid. That's pathetic.

C'mon, Castro doesn't excite you at all?

Castro might be good, but at some point he's going to need to figure out why they keep sticking that hunk of leather on the of his hand. Or start turning on balls and play third. He can't field like that and stay at shortstop and he can't have the power he has and play third.

But he'd be the closest. Maybe Dempster on character, but not on success.

True, his defense needs work. But I think we can safely chalk that up mostly to age (he seems to throw a lot of balls he should probably just eat)... he's still really, really young. Kid's got potential like whoa. And really, he gets to a lot of balls that a lot of other guys wouldn't, so that runs the Es up too.

Potential is potential. I waited in anticipation for Shawon Dunston ("he's faster than Ryno!"). I waited for Corey Patterson ("five tools, and so fast!"). I waited for Felix Pie ("what Patterson was supposed to be!"). I waited for Brooks Fucking Kieschnick ("he's the best we've got!"). I pretended that Bobby Hill was a major league ball player. etc. etc. etc. I am completely and utterly potentialed out. If he can learn to field he'll be a good player. If not, he will be another of the above.

Besides, I hear he hangs out with Soriano, who may be the least interested and least professional of the ballplayers the Cubs currently overpay. That worries me.

Yeah, I'd like him to "stay dumb", as it were, and hanging out with Soriano is bad news. And while I was happy for him that he made the All Star roster, I'm not sure I like how that might work on him either.

And yeah, I'm hesitant to buy into prospect hype too... I admit I always liked Shawon, but I never got too caught up in the Pie and Patterson excitement because watching them actually play didn't inspire much confidence. Kieschnick and Hill were total jokes from the get-go. But Castro? I like his approach... he just looks good in a way that those guys never did. Time will tell, but for now I'm happy to have SOMETHING to be interested in with this team.

it's going to be really easy to turn attendance around in a short amount of time if they actually field a decent team. go out and get Prince Fielder to show you care about winning. I know it'll just be another huge contract, but it doesn't change the fact that the guy is a stud, he's a name and he can actually help them win.

Well, that's what they did when they signed Soriano. At the time people said that NOT signing him meant the Cubs "didn't care." I, personally, would avoid Prince Fielder like the plague. The man is a vegetarian and is still the size he is. I don't see him aging well. But that's in the details.

I generally agree that winning cures all ills. The leaders in the NL Central are on pace for 85 stinking wins this year. The Cubs have more money than a few of them combined. If they spent well and developed good players they could have a long run of playoff appearances. A consistent 90 win team would dominate the Central. You can't finally win a World Series without getting in the playoffs . . .

There also has to be an impact on tourist fans from declining exposure on WGN.  I don't have the number in front of me, and really don't have time to go looking, but as just a ballpark figure, I'd say that WGN only shows about 1/3 of the Cubs' televised games.  The other 2/3 are shown on WCIU (which is only local), and Comcast SportsNet, which probably doesn't make it past the 150-mile radius. 

When I was a kid (eons ago), I used to watch Ryne Sandberg field ground balls on summer afternoons in my Kentucky living room.  There was no other team except the Reds and Dodgers (home team and division rival) that I knew better than the Cubs, specifically because they were on the WGN superstation ALL THE TIME.  That national exposure has been severely limited because WGN is no longer the exclusive home of the Cubs, and WGN isn't the superstation it once was.

Were I Ricketts, I would find a way to significantly increase the number of games that WGN carries every season.  Oh, and figure out how to field a decent ball club.

Another thing that helped the Cubs is there were no teams in Colorado or Arizona or Florida. Now there are teams there for those former Cubs fans to migrate to. but the Cubs do still travel well out west, primarily because of WGN.

I used to be a tourist, and I still have plenty of relatives who are long-distance, out-of-town Cubs fans. (They are almost always Cubs fans because they don't really like baseball ... they only know enough to know they shouldn't like the Yankees.) And while I can understand why Ricketts would make the argument that the city and state needs to pay for a Wrigley renovation, a renovation is not what's going to bring these people to town. These people don't come to Chicago because they're going to Wrigley. They go to Wrigley because they're coming to Chicago, and they don't really care how crappy the ballpark is. Crumbling grandstands will keep them from spending $80 a ticket on a game, maybe, but they won't keep them out of the city. That's just another $80 for quadribike rental people or the ferris wheel operators at Navy Pier.

Fair point. But also bear in mind that a TON of "tourists" come in from the suburbs. Those people might still come into the city for other reasons, but what could be 2 or even 3 trips in the summer could turn into just one. That 37% figure was just out of state people in attendance... I bet the "out of Chicago" figure is probably about that high, too.

True, but how much does the family coming from, say, Kankakee for a Cubs game spend outside of the Cubs game? Whatever it costs to park (and that might go back to the Cubs ... I don't know how Cubs parking works), and they might grab a bite somewhere around the park, maybe. There's not a lot of tourist dollars for the city there. And again, I don't think the overall crappiness of Wrigley has nearly as much effect on the likelihood of these people to make the hour and a half drive as the crappy team and the $80+ ticket price.

In comparison to people who come in from out of state and stay longer, yeah, it's probably less, sure. But the tax revenue derived from money spent inside of the Cubs game isn't exactly inconsiderable... If we assume that there are as many suburbanites at the game as there are out-of-staters, that means that 74% of attendees are not city residents who are, to one extent or another, filling the city's coffers. It is, in a manner of speaking, "free money" for the city. I assume we'd all like more of that, and while Wrigley's condition might not deter people en masse, the crappiness of Wrigley isn't exactly going to make people more likely to come drop some coin here either.

...the crappiness of Wrigley isn't exactly going to make people more likely to come drop some coin here either.

But consider local history. How much more coin was dropped on the South Side after the opening of New Comiskey? Attendance records suggest a spike that lasted about three or four years (which I doubt justified the cost of the park) that tapered off to historic levels reflecting the team's performance. And this spike can't be attributed solely to the park, as it also corresponds to the arrival of Frank Thomas, arguably the best White Sox player of all time. You have just as much justification for saying getting a good player will spike your attendance as building a new park.

And it's not as if Wrigley all of the sudden turned crappy. Suburbanites and out-of-towners have been ignoring the troughs and the concrete rain for decades. I doubt they just happened to notice the mess of the thing now. More likely, it was the combination of the jump in ticket prices, the high price of gasoline, the collapsing economy, and the really bad team. Free market folks like to say that price will settle at appropriate levels all on its own. Well, RIcketts has found that level.

I agree with pretty much all of that; ultimately the product they put on the field is going to determine attendance and, consequently, revenue. But there's also this to consider: Cubs players and managers have long bemoaned the quality of the team facilities within the park... the clubhouse, the workout facilities, the lack of a batting cage near the dugout, etc. I certainly won't argue that that's the reason for the Cubs' pitifulness in general, but it does seem to me that it has to have at least a marginal effect (as do all the day games, though probably to a much lesser extent.) And in a competitive year, a few wins is all the difference between making the (very lucrative) postseason or not and could even be the difference between being meaningfully in the race or not. So to me, the two are linked: making the proposed improvements to Wrigley (and improving the team facilities would be a pretty significant project alone) is likely to have a measurably positive impact on the team's performance, which is, as you correctly mention, what is likely to drive attendance for the long term.

A "few wins" is not what separates this team from contention. In those years when they have contended the "issues" you raised don't seem to get much traction. By all means, the Ricketts family should look at what the Red Sox have done and emulate it (with regard to Fenway renewal and the winning) but this excuse crap is for the birds.

This year's team, no.

And I don't like the excuse-making either. But I really do think that their facilities do, over the course of 81 games, have to have some real detrimental impact. And I'd also bet there's a cumulative effect on guys who play multiple seasons here, too... I'm not talking a major difference, but even if it winds up comprising +-2 wins/season, that's something.  And even if there is no "there" there, there's still no really just no reason why that issue shouldn't be addressed.

Greenberg's search for "best available" tickets for Saturday's game
against the Astros yielded bleacher seats priced at $85.76 each.

For the second to last place Cubs vs. the last place 'Stros.  It was also broadcast locally on tv.  Meanwhile I'm stuck listening to what's shaping up to be an ALC race on the AM radio....

Yeah, I really wish there was a way that the TV contracts could be set up so that if one team is doing significantly better than the other, the one that is doing well gets precedence on WGN/WCIU -- the other can get shuffled to Comcast.  Especially when they're playing division rivals.

Totally, I'm not complaining about The Cubs either, I wish both team's games were on tv more often.  As for The Sox, if I want to watch important games that aren't broadcast locally I guess I'll have to shell out for MLBTV since I don't have cable.  Frustrating.

Before you invest in the MLBTV, I urge you to check the blackout rules.  I had it when I lived out-of-market and LOVED it; however, living in-market, I was frustrated with the lack of games I could see live due to the blackout rules.

^^this.  I wanted to go the MLBtv route, but the games are blacked out here (Cubs AND Sox).  You have to be logged in outside of the Chicago viewing area (works great if I'm in Denver!). 

Also, no matter what you can't get post-season games.  The tv contracts with stupid @#%^! ^&*$#%^ TBS prohibit internet broadcasts.  Did I mention I hate the TBS deal?

So much for that.  Looks like it's the bar or nothing.

Have you checked the mlb.com deals? I have the one for radio broadcasts and that seems to have no geographic restrictions on it. There is a TV deal as well. I'm not too worried about the playoffs for either of these teams.

Isn't the TV deal just MLBTV?  with all its aforementioned blackouts?  Anyway, screw all these guys with their restrictions and charges. It's like they want to drive fans away.

Wait. Maybe I am confused. I only have the radio deal and that doesn't have any local blackouts. I listen to Cubs games on it all the time at work. Maybe when they stream the TV they black it out. That would be tremendously stupid, but then, so is the All-Star Game . . .

Unless MLB changed the rules this year, the TV stream is subject to local blackout restrictions.  Radio never has been (I thought about getting it for work too, but decided it wasn't worth it as most Sox games are night games).

The TV blackout primarily affects you locally, however the TV blackout is also enforced on MLBtv for national games.  So FOX Saturday baseball is blacked out, Sunday night baseball on ESPN is blacked out (although ESPN doesn't have their heads in their ass and they stream in on espn3.com), and the TBS Thursday (?) night games are blacked out of MLB.  The national blackout rules apply across the board to post-season games.  And while I agree, I'm not worried about either team in the post-season, I was always a baseball fan who watched the post-season, no matter who is in it, because I like BASEBALL.  Now, by the time the World Series finally makes it to Fox, I've been out of the baseball loop for 3-4 weeks, and I could care less about watching the Series.

MLB was seriously stupid with the post-season contracts.  Give it back to ESPN -- who would simulcast the local teams on ABC, and stream it online.  F&^*^*&^ stupid TBS.

/end rant.

I've got an actual clock radio at work :)

Thanks for the tip!