Odds stacked against sports fans

For the sake of simplicity, let’s build in some assumptions here that aren’t quite accurate but illustrate a point. Namely, that cheering for a pro sports team is a losing proposition.

Let’s start with football, and by that I mean the type of football — largely the same game, but with some significant differences — played mainly in Canada and the United States. The one where you’re allowed to touch, catch, throw and carry a prolate spheroid with your hands.

There are nine teams in the Canadian Football League. If we assume you’re cheering for one of them and that any given year, each has an equal chance of winning the Grey Cup, your boys will have a one in nine chance of drunkenly hoisting a rather drab, unexceptional trophy in a chilly November parade. In percentage terms, that translates to an 11.11% chance. Which means you have an 88.89% chance of crying in your beer by the time the last whistle sounds.

Your odds in the 32-team league National Football League are considerably grimmer. If each squad has an equal chance of winning, your team’s chances of a Super Bowl victory are 3.125 in 100.

The National Hockey League also has 32 teams, so the odds each has of winning the Stanley Cup — again making some spurious and simplistic assumptions about a level playing ice — are also 3.125%. Nothing to bet the farm on.

The National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer each have 30 teams — meaning each franchise has, in theory, a 3.33% chance of claiming the league crowns any given year.

There are 15 teams in the Women’s National Basketball Association, where in a perfectly fair world, each would have a 6.67% chance of winning the final playoff round any given year. The odds are a little better in the Professional Women’s Hockey League, where each of the 12 teams would have an 8.33% chance of prevailing.

Now, we all know that some franchises in every league are in a better position to win than others, mainly due to superior talent tied to the size the owners’ bankrolls. The Los Angeles Dodgers, who may win a third consecutive World Series title this fall, are stocked with all-stars.

The New York Yankees have won 27 World Series in their storied history, 16 more than the second-place St. Louis Cardinals.

The Chicago Cubs, on the other glove, went 107 years (from 1909 to 2016) between titles. The Cleveland Guardians (formerly the Indians) last won in 1948. Five existing MLB franchises have never won the World Series: the Colorado Rockies, San Diego Padres, Milwaukee Brewers, Tampa Bay Rays and Seattle Mariners.

The late, lamented Montreal Expos (1969-2004) never even made it to the Fall Classic, though they would have had an excellent shot in 1994 if the strike that began that August hadn’t shut down the season and started the ball rolling toward the team’s contentious move to Washington a decade later.

The last of the seven Canadian NHL teams to win the Stanley Cup was the Montreal Canadiens 33 years ago, in 1993. Phillip Danault, the oldest current member of the Habs, was born three months before that year’s victory parade unspooled along Sherbrooke Street.

Even allowing that there is never really an equal opportunity in pro sports — despite salary caps in some leagues and a ton of PR hoo-ha to disguise the fact that small-market teams will almost always have less chance of winning than the small percentages I’ve laid out while big-market ones will usually have more — it’s obvious that even the most favoured teams fall far short of winning championships half the time.

Counting the 1955 championship they won when based in Brooklyn, the Dodgers have won nine World Series titles in their illustrious past, which dates back even before 1932 — 94 years ago — when they adopted the Dodgers name permanently. Since that time, they have failed to win the series 85 times.

And even though they haven’t won a Stanley Cup since Patrick Roy backstopped them to that win over Wayne Gretzky and the Kings in the final in ’93, the Canadiens have won 24 since the team was founded in 1909, predating the NHL.

That’s far more than any other team (the Toronto Maple Leafs, who haven’t won a Cup since 1967, are second all-time with 13 titles). But that means La Sainte-Flanelle have either failed to make or been bounced from the playoffs 93 times in a 117-year history. Halte-là! Most of the time, Les Canadiens n’étaient pas là.

So back to my point: If we assume fans suffer as much pain from losing as they experience enjoyment from winning — another utilitarian calculation open to debate, but let’s go with it for now — then cheering for sports teams is clearly a mug’s game. Sometimes you win but most times you lose. Tom Petty was correct that even the losers get lucky sometimes. But R.E.M. was also right to insist that most of the time, everybody hurts.

And that was so, even before corporate interests larded on all the obscene gambling come-ons and pay-per-view options and streaming subscriptions and $11,000 ticket prices for seats at the NBA Finals and $18 Souvenir Draft Beers at Blue Jays home games.

Let’s not even think about $625 premium jerseys and other ridiculously priced sports merch. Especially not the $12.6 million US paid for a mint-condition 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card in 2022 — a card identical to one you might have attached to your bicycle frame 70 years ago so that the clothespin jaws held it against the spinning spokes of your back wheel to make a fluttering, faux motorcycle putt-putt-putt sound.

Above all, let’s try to avoid fouling out altogether over this week’s news that the Los Angeles Lakers are being sold to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger for $12.5 billion US. This in a country where 36 million citizens — slightly north of 10% — live below the official poverty line, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. (The poverty threshold is set at an annual income of $31,812 for a family of four and $16,320 for a single adult under age 65.)

To again quote Kurt Vonnegut, the patron saint of this blog: “The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and Democrats, instead.”

Substitute Conservatives for Republicans and Liberals for Democrats, and you basically have the same situation obtaining in Canada. They don’t call politics a blood sport for nothing.

And yet … and here’s the thing. (So maybe this is really the point. I knew we’d get there eventually.) And yet … sports fans keep doing it.

We get up early, stay up late, lie awake worrying, buy the jersey, learn the backup goalie’s middle name, rearrange our schedules, yell at televisions and occasionally use language that would cause Al Pacino to blush. We do all this in the hope that, someday, a group of people we have never met will perform slightly better than another group of people we have never met, thereby providing us with a feeling of personal triumph.

Nobody thinks this way about other forms of entertainment. If you go to a movie and the hero defeats the villain, you don’t spend the next three days telling people, “Boy, we really kicked Goldfinger’s ass!”

You don’t wear a T-shirt commemorating the 1987 Best Picture winner. You don’t refer to the actors as “we.” You certainly don’t spend several hundred dollars on a replica costume and then become enraged when somebody says the movie was overrated.

Sports fans, however, show no such restraint.

We say “we” constantly. We need to score here. We’re terrible on the power play. We have to draft better. As though the general manager is going to call us after the game and say, “Good points, Kevin. We’ll take a look at that.”

And the emotional investment is remarkable, considering the actual arrangement. The players are generally much younger, better paid and more athletically gifted than we are. The owners do not know who we are. The league does not know who we are. The referees definitely do not know or care who we are, although we have spent considerable time explaining to them that they should.

Yet we voluntarily attach our degree of satisfaction with life and sense of personal worth to the performance of this organization.

This would not make for a particularly sound financial strategy. Imagine going to your financial adviser and saying: “I’d like to put my retirement savings into an asset whose value depends almost entirely on the performance of a bunch of highly paid strangers, is influenced by injuries, bad officiating, weather, management decisions and occasionally a bounce off somebody’s skate, and which historically loses more often than it wins.”

If that makes a lick of sense, it’s not a financial adviser you need. It’s a psychiatrist.

But pronounce the words, “I’d like to go halves with you on a pair of season tickets in the reds,” and suddenly complete strangers are sharing your gluten-friendly vegan sushi pops during the second intermission for $37 a bite.

The most remarkable thing is that the system works even though the mathematics are so discouraging. Every season begins with millions of people believing, against the available evidence, that this could be the year.

This is especially impressive in cities where “this could be the year” has been repeated annually since the previous century.

I myself am not exempt. I have cheered. I have suffered. I have experienced the peculiar combination of hope, dread and gastrointestinal distress that occurs when your team has a one-goal lead with four minutes remaining in a playoff game. I have watched games I knew I should turn off but could not, like a person standing in front of a malfunctioning toaster saying, “Maybe this time it won’t catch fire.”

Of course it does. Dr. Penfield, I smell burnt toast.

And there is, of course, a counterargument.

Sports can be wonderful. They can bring people together. They give us stories, heroes, villains, improbable comebacks and moments that remain vivid decades later. A championship parade can make an entire city happy at the same time, which is no small accomplishment. I mean, if you discount the riots and looting and hit to the taxpayers in police overtime.

And perhaps that is the actual point.

Sports fandom isn’t a rational investment. It’s more like buying a lottery ticket virtually certain to disappoint you 162 times before finally being eliminated (in May or June if you’re a Habs fan; in October if you’re still carrying a yellowed, crumpled newspaper photo of a toothless but triumphant Eddie Shack in your drawstring purse).

The trick, then, is to understand the terms and conditions.

You are not buying a championship.

You are buying hope, entertainment, tribal companionship, arguments with friends and an annual opportunity to say, “We’ll get ’em next year.”

The odds are terrible. But that’s just the way we like it. Because if sports fandom were actually a sensible proposition, we would all be doing something responsible on Saturday night or Sunday afternoon. Reading the classics. Mowing the lawn. Volunteering for a worthy charity.

And gosh, what a waste of time that would be.