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You don't. You just need to make sure you have beer for sale.
AO
Of course, putting a winning team on the field is the best kind of marketing, and if the Cubs win it all, whoever the manager is will become an instant Chicago legend. But I think there's a recognition in the front office that they're not at that point in the success cycle.
Is there? I don't think so. Just because they dealt away a few expiring contracts this season doesn't mean they're going to rebuild. Until Hendry comes out and says it, maybe not directly, I will continue to believe that he thinks they're only another 2nd baseman and a couple veteran relievers away.
And they'll probably throw a boatload of money at Dunn to play 1b (which I'm not necessarily opposed to, by the way).
Now, come the offseason, you may be right that the temptation to imagine that Adam Dunn or some such veteran is the solution might just be too much for Hendry, who otherwise will spend the winter being carped about by fans. But the evidence thus far gives me hope that he sees the appropriate next steps.
I mean, Darwin F'in Barney has been on the big-league roster for nearly a month. This is simply not a franchise with many assets right now. Hendry's let the team get old and now it's collapsed, and there is no cavalry waiting to arrive. So of course he's going to do a bunch of dumb s**t this winter - he doesn't really have any other choice, except to do nothing at all, and we all know that won't fly. So here's my predictions:
1) Cave to public pressure and hire Sandberg, probably on a two-year deal.
2) Spend a bunch of worthless money in the offseason.
3) Come to camp in the spring talking about all the improvements made in the offseason and play up the team's ability to contend.
4) When things go south, undermine Sandberg at every turn. "We don't understand why we're not winning more games" blah, blah, blah.
5) Spend a bunch more money. Go into season with Sandberg as lame duck. Leak to every writer that Ryno's on the "hot seat".
6) Fire Sandberg midway through 2012.
7) October 2012: Federal authorities announce surprise arrest of Hendry for extortion relating to embarrassing pictures of owners in scheme that dates back to 2006.
8) October 2013: Judge dismisses complaint against Hendry on a vague "technicality."
9) November 2013: Hendry re-hired by Cubs as assistant to GM Ed Wade.
The North & South Sides of Chicago disagree, though for opposite reasons.
I'm not sure what this means.
One team hasn't won a pennant in forever. They draw really well every year.
The other team recently hosted the Twins for a series that began with both teams tied for first place in August, and couldn't even come close to filling it, despite thousands of Twins fans present. (I know, I was at one of those games).
Dunn for 2/20MM would be fine. They've got a hole at first base, and Dunn's a great fit, partially because of his own self-imposed limitations (he wants to stay in the NL) combined with his inherent limitations (he can't play the outfield). I don't think he'll be that expensive unless Hendry makes him so by bidding against himself, which he so often does.
Other than that, I agree with Levi's comments; this year's been about as much of an in-season teardown as we could've expected. The free agent market isn't seen as the panacea it once was--teams are smarter about locking up good talent in their FA eligible years, so there's less talent available. I'm reasonably optimistic that the Cubs're getting realistic about where they are.
All three of those games had a listed attendance of 30,000+, which is really good for midweek games. Since the All-Star break, they've only had two games with attendance below 25k (August 25 and 26 vs. Baltimore). In May, when they were playing like hot garbage, they were lucky to get 25k.
White Sox attendance tracks directly with team performance. Fans will come out to see a winner.
There's no way he comes that cheaply. He'll be the best hitter on the market, and he's not old. If a team gets him for 5 years, $60 million, it'll be a bargain.
It's true. Geovanny Soto IV is going to be a Chicagoland hero when the Cubs take the 2077 Space Series.
Maybe desperation sets in without a reasonable 1B option, or maybe he can get Dunn at a reduced price like Gern suggests, but if there's any player that I don't see Hendry getting into a bidding war over it's Adam Dunn.
Isn't Tyler Colvin taking grounders at first base? Why wouldn't that be an option?
Since when was 25,000 the standard of success? That's league average attendance.
30,000 is really good for a midweek game for who? For a team churning in place? OK. For a team tied for first place playing head-on against the team their battling (and with thousands of that rival team's fans in attendance?)
Almost all teams have their attendance go up in summer, once school lets out.
White Sox attendance tracks directly with team performance. Fans will come out to see a winner.
Sounds like a winner gives them league average attendance. Meanwhile, floundering in the same town gives the Cubs better ticket sales each year.
The Sox have built a winner. They've only had two losing seasons in the last 11 and one of them was a 79-83 year. In the last five years prior to this one, they've won a world championship one year, claimed a division title in another, and fought in a pennant race in yet another. (And this year makes four times in six seasons they've been in the thick of things in the dog days of summer). That's building a winner. Their attendance should be better than what it is.
Maybe. But that's a separate argument. If they weren't in contention, the attendance would be worse than it has been.
If you look at recent history, you'll see that attendance goes up as the team succeeds on the field, and goes down as it struggles. The trend is there.
Even the Cubs draw more when the team is successful. They never have truly dismal crowds, the way most bad teams get, but when the team is bad, it's easier to get tickets.
Another thing to consider is that attendance is down across the board this year. The overall effect is being masked by the new park in Minnesota, but the trend is fewer people going to the ballpark.
Yeah, but if he's limiting himself to one league, that limits his options.
If every NL team is going to lowball him like that, I strongly suspect that he'll broaden his horizons.
I suppose it's an option, but I'm not convinced Colvin has the bat to carry first base, and it'd be a waste of his athleticism. It's not like the Cubs have a lot of great outfielders, either.
Not that he's very similar to Dunn at all, but Soriano certainly fits the "slow, crappy defensive player who strikes out a ton" description. OK, maybe he was a little faster then, but he wasn't FAST.
Wasn't he coming off a 40/40 season?
Aren't they committed to Soriano, Byrd, and Fukudome? That's an expensive outfield, but it's not a terrible one.
It's an option, I guess, but as Gern alludes to, it's a waste of a guy who can be giving you better defensive contributions and who may not be able to handle the load at first offensively anyway.
I'd be more interested in seeing if he could handle CF than 1B, frankly. I'm admittedly skeptical that he can handle CF, but if the Cubs are really in rebuilding mode, they should be seeing if they can trade Byrd.
Dunn approached the team before and they opted for Bradley. I am sure there will be mutual interest but the price tag is anybody's guess.
It is possible the Cubs elect to sign a pitcher instead but eveybody has to recognize that first base is the biggest hole. Replacing Fukudome's bat with Dunn's is a massive upgrade.
Yes, but ... the difference between them is essentially 100 points of SLG. Nothing to sneeze at, I understand, but Fukudome also gives you much more defensively. I don't think the difference between them is huge overall.
The difference between Colvin and Dunn is probably much bigger, because Dunn gives you 40 or so points of SLG plus 70 or so points of OBP.
Any team that can throw out a top 10 payroll isn't that far from being a contender (unless Omar Minaya is running it) but the Cubs seem to be in perennial "just fill some holes" mode in the offseason. It's sort of similiar to the White Sox usual plans, but the Sox find more waiver wire type solid contributors (Garcia, Thornton, Vizquel, Santos) then most teams that makes up for their obsession with guys like Juan Pierre and Mark Kotsay.
When the Cubs do give out superstar contracts the players aren't superstars (Soriano, Zambrano, Fukodome). Still, they have some nice pieces with Starlin and Soto up the middle.
As for White Sox attendance Dewey, as usual, nails it: could be better but when the team is winning the crowds get bigger. Luckily for Sox fans JR runs the Bulls like a business and the Sox are his prize child.
Surprisingly, I've seen almost no public pressure to hire Sandberg. In fact the media seem to be blindly opposed to it.
For one year he should be. Sori, Byrd and Fuku are all signed thru 2011. After that, if Colvin is still hitting like a big leaguer, move him back to OF, and spend the Fukudome money on a power hitter.
Good, I hate having his .380 OBP clogging up the bases.
I think there are two equally plausible explanations for the cool talk about Sandberg. One is that they are deciding that they don't want to hire him for the big league job because they don't think he's up for it. The other is that they are making the comments leading into the hire, with the purpose of saying that it is definitely not for P.R. reasons. I don't know of any good reason to hire Sandberg or not to hire him, but he could be thought of as an ideal rebuilding phase candidate, having spent a significant amount of time now managing in the minors. Other that the fact that he comes across in public as kind of a dull personality, I really have no idea whether he would do a good job. It is hard for me to believe that after this long setup period that they won't hire him, but who knows.
I fail to see what his objection was to Dag's original comment; his counter was that the Sox good series almost meets the attendance of a bad Cubs series. That just reaffirms what Dag was saying. And I agree - if there ever was to be a team in this town considered a winner, it's the White Sox of the last 10 years or so.
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I've said it before elsewhere, but perhaps the Cubs should consider trying Soriano or Ramirez at 1b. It may (or may not) help them with injury issues and allow them to just focus on hitting (which may or may not help them). I agree Colvin should stay in the OF, most likely a corner. And I disagree with the idea of trading Byrd; sure, he's probably overachieving but for only $5mil a year that's a piece you keep.
Good, I hate having his .380 OBP clogging up the bases.
Well, that's obviously not the whole story with him, but I do agree there shouldn't be a rush to trade him at this point. He's gone after next year, and they're not going to save money or get anything that useful back if they did move him. He needs a platoon partner, but why not try to make that happen in LF next year (with Soriano at first) and give Colvin RF?
I actually think this team could, in theory, be patched up into contention. Why? They have a pretty good core of starting pitching talent. I recognize the significant obstacles: payroll constraints, availability of talent, not to mention the well-known limitations in Hendry's ability to build a major league roster, but unless the Cubs are in a situation where they need are entering an austerity phase, in theory I think it should be possible to rebuild and contend.
I can see a situation where they could contend, but that's counting on a lot of things that went wrong last year and this year, and that are very unlikely to finally go right next year. I don't expect them to be as bad as this year (I'll pass on tooting my own horn again), but .500 is probably the ceiling (and could once again be good enough in the NL Central).
But it's precisely the $5 million that makes him such an attractive trading piece! You might actually get something for him. If the Cubs were more willing to trade overachieving, cheap players, they probably wouldn't be stuck trying to trade so many underachieving, expensive ones.
Also, I don't know if anyone's looked at his numbers lately either, buy Byrd has been killing this team for what, a month now? Longer? He's hit exactly two homers since the second week of June, and his stats on the year are now notably worse than Fukudome's. Plus, his 2008 aside, Byrd has never been a guy who could get on base without a high BA to begin with. His hot start has led to a major overrating of his ability - why not see if that's true throughout the league, and take adavantage if it is?
If the Cubs had a cheaper or better option to replace him, fine I'm all for it. But opening up a hole that's currently filled by someone cheap to fill another hole doesn't make the team better.
Moses, I could see trying Ramirez at 1B, in fact if the long-term plan is to move him there when Vitters is ready, then I could get behind that. No way should Soriano go there. I think he does way more damage at first than he could possibly do in left. At least in left he has some idea of how to play the position. I agree with platooning Fukudome, but leave him in right. If you're going to have Colvin, Fukudome, Byrd and Soriano in the line-up, I think Colvin has the best chance of learning to be passable at 1b for the 2011 season.
Soriano is here for 4 more years, I don't want to see him out there in 4 years, much less next year. He hasn't been able to play a passable LF yet. He started in the IF, and his biggest problem is playing balls while on the move. I think he could learn 1B.
His original comment was that the on-field success of the White Sox has no effect on attendance. That's simply not true, as I demonstrated. White Sox attendance does go up if they're winning, and it goes down if they're losing. The fact that the Cubs get busloads of tourists from Iowa and the White Sox don't is beside the point.
It's not opening up a hole, though, because Fukudome's still going to be around, who was just as good a CF last year as Byrd is this year, which also figures to be true next year. Meanwhile, Colvin's still around to play RF, or even CF if he can handle it. I thought adding Byrd was superfluous before this season, and I don't see why he's not expendable now. It makes no sense to keep a guy just because he's cheap when you're already stuck with the expensive guy (Kosuke) anyway.
But despite the winning the Sox will always be the ugly duckling next to the Cubs. I don't pretend to know exactly why the Sox don't draw better overall but there are quite a few factors I'd consider likely causes. They play in a downtrodden neighborhood far away from the trendy side of town; their park is much maligned (unfairly IMO) and they don't have any home grown superstars or real charismatic players -- mostly quiet stars like Buehrle and Konerko, Floyd and Danks. Ozzie is a media darling but fans don't come out to see the manager.
Add in a fanbase that was whittled down from years of failure pre 2005. I wish the Sox drew better, then they'd have more money to play with, but the facts just seem to point to a club that will always struggle to draw well unless they have a new shrine of a ballpark and/or and elite team. Neither of which happens very often.
That has less to do with on-field performance and more with some really poor decisions w/r/t marketing and broadcasting the team, chiefly putting the games on pay TV back in the '80s, before most people had pay TV. There was a significant period of time when, for the vast majority of Chicagoans, the Cubs were the only game on TV. That was a huge disadvantage for the Sox.
In absolute terms, the White Sox do draw poorly. The White Sox rank 17th (between Houston and Seattle) in attendance/game this year. Yes, they share a market, but there's no reason they should draw worse than the Brewers and Tigers.
There are only so many dollars in the Chicago area that people will spend on baseball, and right now the Cubs get the lion's share of them.
Give Ricketts a little bit of time. He's already starting to even the playing field. Massive ticket price increases, more intrusive in-park advertising, and louder music before each at bat will have Wrigley on a par with the Cell before you know it.
It'll probably hurt the Cubs more than it will help the Sox, though.
The easiest explanation (may or may not be a correct one) for the Sox is that the South Side is simply much less affluent than the North Side. In a split market, demographics are going to play a big role, and the Sox drew the short end of the stick. And as the Cubs' national visibility has increased over the last several decades, they've played an even bigger part, since nothing attracts people who want to throw money around like a crowd.
There are only so many dollars in the Chicago area that people will spend on baseball, and right now the Cubs get the lion's share of them.
When I was a kid in the 70s, the Cubs routinely drew 12,000 or so and was far from the attraction they are today. Wrigley attendance really jumped in the '84 season and has remained consistently high ever since. This is for many reasons, of course -- the national audience attracted to the Cubs by WGN, the emergence of Wrigleyville, the affluence of the fan base, Harry Caray, etc.
I've never really looked at White Sox attendance in any great depth, but b-r reveals something interesting to me:
When was the last time the White Sox were in the top third in AL attendance in a season that could not be attributed to a playoff run (that year or carrying over to the following year) or a new ballpark?
1973
During the same time span (since '73), they finished in the bottom third of AL attendance 12 times.
They're not in the minors, you'll notice.
Won't happen again.
Let's face it -- Barney and a lot of the guys they are using in the pen aren't MLB prospects by any real means. Even if they had the roster space, they aren't going to be able to get a lot of new talent on the MLB roster without spending a lot of money that they don't claim to have.
If only the White Sox had a park of their own that was built in 1910 or so.
First, Colvin will start 2011 as an everyday player as part of the hope-springs-anew plan and the Cubs will treat him like a budding star.
Second, the team will add a bat because they can't sell the same lineup to the fans when it has been so bad. Adding a bat at first base is the obvious place to do it - particularly because Dunn is almost certainly going to be on the FA market.
Now, the Cubs may opt to add a pitcher but I doubt that's the direction they choose. The team will add an FA with a name. Dunn seems obvious in light of all this and once that happens, Fukudome becomes the expendable outfielder. Since Fukudome is probably the one getting marginalized in this scenario - and he makes a lot of money - I think he is likely to be elsewhere on opening day.
Unfortunately, by the mid-80s, when Old Comiskey was just beginning to get some nostalgia value, there was a recognition that the park was simply too run-down to save. Decades of ownership that couldn't afford maintenance beyond a coat of paint (the post-Charlie Comiskeys, Veeck, the Allyns) had left the park beyond repair.
Not if the state legislature gets involved in building a new park.
Since this seems to have veered off somewhat into a White Sox/Cubs thread...
If the White Sox had taken off for Milwaukee (as they came rather close to doing), would Chicago have gotten another expansion team by this point, and if so, when? Would the '77 expansion been too soon? '93?
If the White Sox had left, I'm assuming that Comiskey would have been demolished by the mid-70s at the latest, which seems to me to be a decent assumption.
Would being Chicago's only baseball team for a period have changed the Cubs' fortunes?
Old Comiskey was literally beyond repair by as soon as the early-1980s. I recall reading about the politics behind the building of new Comiskey, and an independent engineer's report had concluded that the "Baseball Palace of the World" simply had outlived its useful life. It never had been maintained properly...and a building that big, and that old, in a location with weather shifts that dramatic, needs lots of upkeep.
Anyway, just like Wrigley is now (IMO), old Comiskey was a dump. Terrible place to see a game. It would have been (just like Wrigley is now) nostalgia for something only because it is old.
Old and good...not the same thing.
I suppose Comiskey could have been renovated and spruced up, but its overall design was fundamentally flawed in comparison to some of the other ballparks of its generation. I think there are very good reasons why Fenway and Wrigley are still standing, while Comiskey and Tiger Stadium are gone.
I can't claim to have much knowledge of Fenway, but I think one of the fundamental reasons why Wrigley is still standing is because of its location. The Cubs know that they have a tremendous built-in advantage having their stadium in one of the "IT" neighborhoods on the North Side. But if they tore Wrigley down, there is no chance that a modern stadium could fit in Wrigley's footprint...and it isn't like there is a ton of vacant real estate available in Wrigleyville/Lakeview/Lincoln Park where they could put a new Cubs Park. If the Cubs moved to the suburbs, after the initial honeymoon period, their attendance would probably mirror the Sox attendance.
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