The Cubs’ Curse in the Age of the Auteur GM

Hello, BP Wrigleyville! I’m Tom Hitchner, and I’ve been blogging about various sports matters at my site The Spiel for the last year. I’m very flattered that Rian has asked me to write the occasional piece here, especially because I’m missing a key qualification: I’m not a Cubs fan. I’m a Giants fan. I wasn’t paying enough attention to baseball as a kid to see Will Clark’s grand slam off Greg Maddux in 1989, but I did see Bonds not quite hit it out against Terry Mulholland in 1998. My dad was a Cubs fan—he’s still alive, he just changed allegiances to the A’s when he moved out to California, and then changed them again, to the Giants, once they started winning World Series. I do not come from hearty stock.

So it’s pretty random that I should be writing about the Cubs. On the other hand, it’s not as random as if I were invited to write about, I don’t know, the Nationals or the Mariners or some team like that, because the Cubs, for an obvious reason, hold a fascination across baseball—across the country—that few other teams can touch. In fact, I’m not sure what other teams I could write about as a non-fan. The Yankees, sure, and maybe, as a Giants fan, I could write about the A’s or Dodgers. Actually, a Giants blogger writing about the Dodgers on a regular basis would be kind of interesting. But none of those teams match the mystique of the Cubs, The Club that Can’t Win.

And yet, from outside Cubs nation, it seems as though that mystique of the North Side franchise has dimmed somewhat, just when the Cubs are making a serious bid to win a championship and thus justify the rest of America’s long attention to their plight. I could be wrong—I certainly can’t claim to have read everything written about the Cubs this season, or to be especially plugged into the fandom—but my impression is that the media have not spent a lot of energy exploring and, particularly, hyping the watershed moment a Cubs championship would represent. This applies especially to stat-savvy new media, of course, but also to some in traditional media: sure, they mention it, but not as a central part of this year’s Cubs story, as they did in 2003. For example: In a recent discussion of the Chapman trade on NPR, the mention of the 108-year drought was totally perfunctory. “Do we have to talk about this again?” asked Howard Bryant before launching into it.

If I’m right that the idea of a Cubs championship is being treated, in the broader media, as somewhat unremarkable, and even perhaps expected, it’s a big change from the last time a baseball team broke an epic drought. The cover of Sports Illustrated’s baseball preview issue in 2000 was a prediction that the Red Sox would win the World Series, and one of the features was a protracted, only half-kidding meditation on how deeply New Englanders’ self-conception would be transformed by that event. In 2003, the amount of attention given to the droughts of both the Cubs and the Red Sox—the curses, the elderly fans praying to live long enough to see the day—dominated the playoff coverage. And all of that is to say nothing of what it was like when the Red Sox actually pulled it off the next year. Why is that not (at least anecdotally) not as much the case this year?

Well, first, the Red Sox’s 2004 victory may have stolen some of the curse-breaking thunder from the Cubs, who might now be in the unfortunate position of John Landy, the second person to beat a four-minute mile. And some of the decreased attention is probably due to the continued scorn of younger, savvier baseball writers and their fans for the narrative-first sportswriting of the previous generation. And lastly, of course, it’s only August; should the Cubs win the pennant, I’m sure that we’ll hear more about Billy Sianis than we can stand. (Though again, that SI story from 2000 about the Red Sox winning ran in March.)

However, I think in the Cubs’ case specifically, there’s another factor in the decreased emphasis on the club’s history, and his name is Theo Epstein. Epstein has arguably matched or even supplanted Billy Beane in his reputation as a genius GM, someone who can all but guarantee playoff appearances due to his exceptional understanding of baseball talent. Epstein, Beane, Andrew Friedman, Brian Cashman, Jeff Luhnow—these are the models of what I call, for reasons I’ll explain, the auteur GM, widely perceived as an individual genius who remakes the team according to his (and, one day, her) own strategy and vision. The huge amount of attention paid to the doings and plans of these GMs has accompanied an explosion of in-depth knowledge of the game on the part of fans, but it seems to me it has also eroded the baseball world’s attention to the team, a franchise with continuity between its past and its present, and that this helps explain the decreased interest I see in the prospect of the Cubs breaking their drought. I should say that this connection is another unprovable impression of mine, but it seems that the best way to test an impression of this kind is to publish it online and see if people tell you you’re crazy. So here I go.

I’m hardly a cinema expert, but my understanding is that, after World War II, the culture’s understanding of the role of a film director changed significantly. Of course directors had always been important, but before the war they hadn’t been considered solely responsible for a film; directors (with certain exceptions such as Hitchcock) were seen not as “authors,” but as important contributors to a team effort. But with the French New Wave directors like Truffaut, and later in the English-language cinema with directors like Kubrick and Coppola, the director of a film began to be perceived as that film’s auteur (literally, “author” in French), ultimately responsible, to the exclusion of the screenwriter or the stars, for the film’s vision and content.

It seems to me that that shift in understanding parallels the change in how we’ve viewed baseball GMs ever since Moneyball. Of course general managers were regarded as important before Michael Lewis’s book, and some, such as Branch Rickey, were considered among the most important figures in baseball history. But they were seen as part of an ensemble, and it wasn’t uncommon to omit their names entirely and refer to a team’s baseball operations collectively as “the front office.”

All that began to change with the nation’s sudden awareness of Billy Beane. Moneyball portrayed the manager as a figurehead, the scouts as uncreative traditionalists slow on the uptake, the players as mostly interchangeable cogs. There was pushback on a lot of this, including from statistically-minded people in baseball, but a lot of it stuck, and the new wave of GMs became fascinating figures, with their own philosophies, their own visions, even their own controversies—Beane and Cashman nearly left their teams, and Epstein left the Red Sox twice, the second time for good. Like the postwar film director, the GM went from being regarded as one of a number of important figures in a collaborative project, to being considered the captain of the ship.

And just as the increasing independence of auteurs led to a flattening of differences between the different studios, I think that the increasing focus on the GM as an individual, authorial genius is bound to entail a decreasing focus on the franchise as a whole—its contexts, its history, the stuff that makes it different from all the other franchises. This decreasing focus on franchise doesn’t apply to the team’s own fans, who care much more about the franchise than about any of the individuals associated with it, but to those regarding the team from the outside. To fans without a strong connection to the Cubs franchise, it may seem as though it’s not Chicago steaming towards a championship, but Theo Epstein. Epstein was brought to the Cubs to win a World Series, and he seems to have assembled a team that—let me studiously avoid any jinxes—has as good a chance as anyone to do just that. (And note that this phrasing—he assembled the team—is commonplace in these discussions.) If they brought in a guy to win the World Series, and then he does it, it seems less significant that they didn’t win all those years before: they didn’t have the guy then! The story becomes more about Theo Epstein, Commissioner’s Trophy for Hire, than about the previous eras of the team.

There are two disclaimers I want to make (apart from the big one, which is that I might be wrong about all of this). The first is that I’m not saying this change is total, or fast. Epstein was hired in late 2011; this “Cubs Win the World Series” ad for the MLB: The Show game was aired in 2012. So it’s not as though the mere presence of an auteur GM removes all interest from the team’s larger story. It’s a matter of degrees, of a gradual change in perception. Still, I believe it’s real, and Chicago isn’t the only place you can see it. For instance, the A’s repeated failure in the playoffs is portrayed not just as a source of anguish for A’s fans, but also as a millstone around Billy Beane’s neck: why is he denied the just reward for his vision?

The second disclaimer is that, contrary to how it may seem, I’m not saying this change in perception is a bad thing. While I think some of the attention paid to GMs is excessive, there’s a real argument to be made that the game is fresher when we study the shifting personnel and strategies of the front office, rather than returning to the same stories until they become cliches (Giants: Bobby Thomson; Red Sox: Carlton Fisk; Cubs: Steve Bartman, that damn goat, etc.). The tradeoff is probably to the good; still, it is a tradeoff. I’m rooting for the Cubs to win a World Series (in an odd year, of course); I hope, when it finally happens, we fans outside of Cubs Nation are still able to appreciate, not just the accomplishment, but the history that gives it its meaning.

Lead photo courtesy Jeff Curry—USA Today Sports.