The Chicago Cubs and the Curse of a Stereotype (Part 1)

Once again, the Chicago Cubs are not in the World Series. Last year, however, they seemed destined to win it. They won 97 games, the most for any Cubs team since 1945 and the most in the National League. Their team included seven all-stars, as well as the Manager of the Year and the Rookie of the Year. Then, during the 2008 National League Division Series (NLDS), the Chicago Cubs lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in dramatic fashion. They were swept in three games, played on October 1, 2, and 4. They lost games 1 and 3, playing badly. In those games, they left a total of 8 runners in scoring position. During game 2, however, all of their infielders committed errors (i.e., four errors, during the second, fourth, and ninth innings). The ball bounced up their arms, off their shoulders, and left them looking around, confused. Cubs’ fans, looking for an explanation as dramatic as the Cubs’ failure, settled on a longtime favorite, the “curse of the billy goat.” Given the Cubs’ history and people’s love of supernatural explanations this is not surprising. People are especially likely to believe in superstitions when they feel that they lack control over an event. People also expect the cause of a dramatic event to be equally dramatic. Oftentimes, however, the cause is not dramatic, but rather a subtle and seemingly unimportant situational factor. In the case of the Cubs, this factor may have been the stereotype that they are “loveable losers.”

No explanation for the Cubs’ history of failure has been more appealing than the curse. Fans have been blaming the team’s poor performance on the infamous billy goat since 1945. In that year, Billy Sianis supposedly cursed the Cubs because he was asked to leave Wrigley Field with his goat, during game 4 of the World Series. Since then, the Cubs have earned a reputation as “loveable losers.” The last time they won the World Series was in 1908, and for many years they were the worst team in the National League. It has even been suggested that Cubs’ players take the curse with them when they go on to play for other teams (i.e., “the ex-Cubs factor”). According to Ron Berler, any team that has three or more former Cubs on its roster is destined to lose the World Series. This has been true in all but three World Series since 1946 (the exceptions were 1960, 2001 and 2008). In an effort to remove the curse, goats have been allowed into Wrigley Field, they have been butchered and hung on the Harry Carray statue out front, the Bartman ball was blown up (and the remnants were made into spaghetti sauce and eaten), and the dugout has been exorcized by a priest. Of course, none of these supernatural cures has helped them to win a World Series.

Baseball players, and athletes in other sports, have been known to choke under pressure. The “yips” describes a sudden inability to make routine plays. Some notable examples include the Yankees’ second baseman Chuck Knoblauch (a former Gold Glove winner), the Dodgers’ second baseman Steve Sax, the Pirates’ pitcher Steve Blass, and the Cardinals’ pitcher Rick Ankiel. The yips, however, affect the performance of an individual, not a whole infield. What happened to the Cubs in game 2 was more like a collective yips, caused by the pressure of a “do or die” situation. In fact, what happened during game 2 was prefaced by something Mark DeRosa, the Cubs’ second baseman, said in an interview after they lost game 1, “I think it’s pretty do or die.” And, even though he also said, “You can’t go out and put undue pressure on yourself,” that is apparently easier said than done. The first error in game 2 was committed by DeRosa (although, Ryan Theriot, the Cubs’ shortstop, missed a one-handed grab earlier in the inning that Rick Telander has called a “half-error”). Although many psychological concepts help to explain what happened to the Cubs, an especially important one is “stereotype threat.”

Part 2