Maybe the Tribune Should Just Give Up...

... Give up trying to cover baseball, that is. Our speedy daily finally caught up on the popularity poll story that broke in Scott Riefert's blog a whole week ago. It might as well be a weekly newspaper. But David Haugh's insecure report is full of reassurance for Cubs fans and Cubs owners alike. It begins like this:

A Bear market it remains. And the Cubs can still lay claim to being the most lovable baseball team in town despite this year's losses.

Really? The Cubs are still most lovable? How does that paragraph square with the information that comes two paragraphs later:

"If I were to show you a graph or a trend line, you'd see the Cubs' and Sox's [popularity] is almost identical," said Howard Goldberg, senior vice president for Scarborough sports marketing.

And the information that comes four paragraphs after that:

The difference of 3 percent between the Sox and the Bears and Cubs makes it a statistical dead heat in the race to be the city's most popular sports team.

To be fair, sports guys aren't used to covering polls, and those morning journalism classes are so tedious when you just want to watch a ballgame, but surely there's an editor or someone in the Sports Dept who has read at least one story about a poll for a presidential race. No? In which it is explained that you can't draw any conclusions based on differences that fall within the margin of error. No?

So how does the Tribune conclude that "the Cubs can still lay claim to being the most lovable baseball team in town"? (Most lovable is an interesting category, isn't it? Is that the same as most popular? This reminds me of the Tribune story last October that ignored the 1.75 million fans who attended the White Sox ticker tape parade and declared that the Cubs were still "bigger." Big and lovable. Like a purple dinosaur. Or a unicorn.)

Maybe lovability is based on attendance, which has always been the Cubs' favorite statistic, since it's the only statistic they consistently win. According to Haugh:

Before Thursday's home doubleheader, the Cubs averaged 39,873 fans per game. That ranks sixth in the majors, compared with the Sox's 36,014, which is 10th. The Cubs' ability to outdraw the Sox one season after their city rivals won a World Series, in the middle of a year defined by disappointment at Clark and Addison, encouraged Cubs officials more than the survey discouraged them.

Attendance can't be taken as a measure of popularity, since attendance can be influenced by other factors (for example, attendance might be swayed if the Tribune portrays Wrigley Field as a "sacred garden" and "place of joy" while it describes U.S. Cellular Field as a scary place surrounded by drug-abusing ethnic minorities. Or, attendance might be swayed if the Tribune-owned city magazine steers tourists to Wrigley and ignores U.S. Cellular Field.) Haugh also forgets a few crucial facts:

1. U.S. Cellular Field has a practical capacity (maximum tickets sold this year for a single game) of 39,750, while Wrigley Field can pack 41,700 drunken dupes into its sodden confines. Almost 2,000 more fans per game can fit into Wrigley, so as long as both parks are selling out, the Cubs will always win the attendance game. Woo woo. As my cousin says, "You can raise the attendance flag." With both stadiums at maximum attendance these days, attendance can't be an accurate measure of popularity or, um, lovability.

2. The Cubs sold the lion's share of Wrigley Field seats before the season, back when the Tribune was still telling Chicagoans that the Cubs would be great this year (Rick Morrissey actually predicted they would win their division), so the numbers hardly measure the Cubs' lovability "despite this year's losses." Anyway, there's a lot of evidence that people go to Wrigley for reasons that have nothing to do with the Cubs. As long as there's beer and sunshine, the Chicago Sky would sell out there. Playing chess.

3. Only one team in Chicago has ever drawn 1.75 million fans on a single day: The Chicago White Sox.

A Tip of the Cap

Maybe sports coverage should be left to the Tribune's Q section, where the writers seem at least naive enough to be fair. Cubune Watcher Keith Makenas pointed us to a July 23 story in Q that reported

"White Sox [hat sales] are almost double the Cubs right now [in the U.S.]. Two years ago, it would have been flipped."

I guess cap sales don't measure lovability. Is that what you're telling us, Tribune?