To all, While there are some interesting parallels here, it certainly doesn't make much sense as a Cub fan. When the Tribune time and time again shows little concern over winning, (which would produce perhaps even more profit in the long run), why don't a majority of us as fans boycott the games until they make some changes? It's nearing a century now and we've yet to hold the owner's feet to the fire. Best regards, Cle

The Western Standard
By Colby Cash

In case I haven't mentioned it lately (and my editor tells me I haven't), I have a fortnightly sports column in the Western Standard. I use it to try and plunge a little deeper into sport than the ordinary daily-paper drudge has a chance to--or, at least, that is the idea. Here's a column that appeared late last month.

Someone once wrote that "cheering for the New York Yankees is like cheering for U.S. Steel." I'm pretty sure that is the original form of the sentiment, anyway. When I recently consulted Google on the source of the quotation, I discovered an astonishing list of things that people think cheering for the Yankees is like cheering for:

"for Microsoft"
"for Enron"
"for Donald Trump"
"for Wal-Mart"
"for General Motors"
"for the house in blackjack"
"for the tanks in Tienanmen Square"
"for Satan"
"for Darth Vader"
"for the Edmonton Eskimos" (ha!)

Google doesn't know which came first. But you can see the common crux of the folk saying in most of its incarnations. The Yankees are an American business. The guiding ideology of modern American business is that it owes everything to its shareholders and literally nothing to the social good. Isn't it absurd for a non-shareholder to feel loyalty to the Yankees? Or, by extension, to any other sports team?

Businesses, as it happens, serve the greater good precisely by ignoring it. But the truth is more interesting than that: everywhere you look, you can see people cheering for corporations. Even in the 1950s, General Motors had passionate devotees--grease-haired teens who chanted "Fo No Go" at Ford buyers. U.S. Steel, regarded widely as an unsavoury predator in the 1960s, became an object of hope for American protectionists when foreign firms became more competitive in the 1980s and steelworkers became romantic, doomed Deer Hunter figures. If Microsoft lacks for visible true believers, its rival, Apple, certainly doesn't. And in places like the Wall Street Journal and Forbes you can read countless fan-like pieces trumpeting Wal-Mart's contributions to American productivity. Hell, with a little digging through back issues you could find similar odes to Enron.

Corporations are simply groups of people acting with a certain end in view. Like individuals, they have personalities--and if they didn't, we'd anthropomorphize them anyway, because that's how our brains are wired. Companies have learned to take advantage of this. When suitably assisted by advertising and P.R., it's called "branding". Sports teams were doing it fifty years before any other North American business had thought of it.

The public's relationship to corporations has changed radically in our time. Retirement-related tax reforms undertaken widely in the 1980s have transformed the middle class in Canada and the U.S. into an investor class; this will, one day, be recognized as the most electrifying social change of the period. The average man has become more corporate-friendly, more intelligent about business, and better disposed to capitalism. And a whole new tier of business journalism has arisen to turn CEOs into celebrities.

I don't think it's a coincidence that, within sports, there has been a parallel shift of attention from players to management. Some general managers, like the Oakland Athletics' Billy Beane, have already become folk heroes. We've seen the rise of legendary figures who don't play or even run teams (like the surrealistically successful pitching coach Leo Mazzone, or the author and Red Sox advisor Bill James). As investors have become more broadly aware of obscure metrics of business performance--P/E ratio or EBITDA--similar measures have become more popular with sports fans, spawning an analytical "sabermetrics" industry that is already large in baseball and growing in football and basketball.

It has become necessary for all football and hockey fans to become conversant with the minutiae of salary caps. But today's young sports fan doesn't mind; he spends as much time imitating general managers in fantasy leagues as he does watching the games. And thanks to the Internet and the growth of casinos, he regards sports gambling, which has its own complex mathematical shorthand and bears strong similarities to investing, as a natural, socially acceptable activity.

Other changes are on the way; the sports freak just being born will be as unrecognizable to his forebears as today's 20-year-old fan is to his 40-year-old compatriot. To take just one example, a fascinating concomitant of the new mass capitalism has been the rise of "ethical investing". We have mutual funds dedicated to particular environmental or religious norms, and there are whole sectors, from "fair trade coffee" to organic farming, predicated on a special claim to piety. So I'll ask you: who will be the first baseball club to insist on "ethical" contracts with poor Latin players? Or the first NHL team to introduce proper education programs for young draftees skipping college? The future skitters away as the mind reaches ever outward to grasp it.