Lecture: Norman Rockwell and the Chicago Cubs—The Making of Baseball’s “Loveable Losers”

(audience murmuring)

All right. Good evening, everybody. My name is Sarah Kelly Oehler, and I'm the Field-McCormick Chair and Curator of Arts of the Americas here at the Art Institute.

I'm delighted to welcome you to the museum tonight and to our program on Norman Rockwell, Baseball, and the Chicago Cubs. Now, before I introduce you to our primary speaker, Bill Savage who frankly is the baseball expert, whereas I'm the art person, I'm gonna speak for just about six or so minutes about our new acquisition of "The Dugout" to give you a little background on the painting. And I hope for many of you, the name Norman Rockwell is a familiar one.

He was one of the most beloved illustrators of the 20th century, and he employed an accessible and realistic style to convey the interactions between people around him with warmth and humor. Now, between the 1920s and the 1960s, his work was seen by thousands if not millions of Americans every single week in the form of magazine covers that entered their homes through such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post, which is what we'll look at a little bit tonight. And he used these covers to explore a range of subjects.

He was looking at politics, he was looking at the fine arts, he was looking at social interactions, at dating, and so forth. And of course, sports was really central to that and among that baseball. So what we've acquired for the Art Institute is a large preliminary oil study on the left here in this slide for the cover image for the Saturday Evening Post issue of September 4th, 1948, which is what you see on the right.

Now in May of 1948, Rockwell received from The Post this baseball themed commission. And it was pretty loose as far as we can tell. And he was living in Vermont at the time.

So he decided to go to Boston, which was sort of the nearest major league field that he could get to. And he decided he would go watch the Boston Braves play the Chicago Cubs in a doubleheader, and they were playing at Braves Field. Now the Cubs ended up losing both games, which is I think part of our story tonight.

(audience applauding) But I think honestly that Rockwell had gone into it already having decided to create a cover that contrasted the dejected players in the bullpen or in the dugouts, excuse me, with the gleeful Braves fans behind them. I mean, that sort of only makes sense if you think about it. So the painting features four well-known ballplayers from the Cubs organization.

So we see from left to right the Cubs pitcher Bob Rush and you see the arrow there. We have the manager, Charlie Grimm. We have the catcher sort of hidden back there, Al "Rube" Walker.

And then we have the pitcher Johnny Schmitz standing in black behind. And I'm gonna return to the fifth figure in the composition in a few minutes, which is the batboy of course. Now importantly, this was not a directly observed scene.

Instead, and this was actually reported in the magazine at the time, Rockwell staged the entire composition. He invited people to pose and he ended up taking reference photographs. And this was actually exactly how he worked for almost every single cover that he did.

But what's interesting is that we also know that this was a collaborative effort where he worked with not just Kenneth Stuart, who you see here in the derby hat who was the art director for the Saturday Evening Post, but he actually also collaborated with Charlie Grimm, the Cubs manager to decide on the composition. So it was really sort of from the beginning a work together. So he then recruited people in the stands to act as the fans.

Now a lot of these ended up being the family members of the Braves players that were there that day. So they were very happy to do this. But what's interesting to me is that he actually also, oops, went back to his studio and he then recruited some of his neighbors to pose as well.

And then he even included himself. So that's him on the right posing. And so he's actually in the composition as well.

But now when it came to the ballplayers, he of course was at the field. So he decided to do a lot of reference photos as well of each of the individual players. So this is Grimm again with his arms crossed which is actually quite important as I'll return.

But let's look now at our figure of the batboy because it's actually thanks to these reference images which are all preserved that we know that this forlorn batboy was not in fact a member of the Cubs organization. What he did was invite the Braves batboy. (audience laughing) Frank McNulty and he gave him a whopping $5 to don the Cubs uniform and pose for him.

And he actually... This is where he had to take the most referenced photos. He couldn't get the right expression out of McNulty it seems.

And so Rockwell then took everything back to the studio. And again, this was his practice. And he started experimenting with the composition.

And he created at least three studies in charcoal and graphite that we know of as well as the Art Institute's oil and in another oil that I've been able to sort of track down. I actually recently made a trip to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts to do archival research for this new painting. And in fact, what was really wonderful is that I was able to prove through this trip that the Art Institute's work is in fact the very first version that Rockwell undertook.

And the way that we know this, and I'd gone into this sort of thinking this was the case, you know, I was looking to sort of prove it, is that if you look closely at the Art Institute's oil, there, the greenish one, and then the final watercolor, which is on the right here, the final watercolor is what he actually sent to the Saturday Evening Post for reproduction. So this was the sort of final model. But there's a very significant change and it's with our friend Charlie Grimm again.

Because what you see is that in the Art Institute's oil he has his arms crossed like that reference photo. But in the final version, his hand is to his face, and every single other study for this painting that I've located has the hand to the face. So it's very clear that Rockwell started the composition and then decided it wasn't what he wanted.

And in fact, I found a letter where the photographer who was there that day basically said to him, "I don't like what you did. You should have used a different photo of mine." So that was helpful information as well. I'll also just point out a few other changes.

And I think for me the most significant is this color palette change. The Art Institute's oil is full of this light green fresh sort of spring quality. It was May after all.

But then the final version is much more uniform in this cool blue and white tones, that were probably a little more suitable for reproduction. Now by the time that the cover was published, several months later, again, in September, the Cubs had fallen to last in their league. So it seems possible that this seemed rather timely, if not perhaps a little prophetic.

And it's certainly images like these that contributed to an incredible visual culture that, you know, we refer to as sort of the reputation as the "lovable losers," which Bill is going to complicate for us tonight. But I think it was certainly a reputation that many of us associate with the Cubs. And of course this reputation was only broken in 2016 when the Cubs finally won the World Series.

(audience applauding) And I couldn't resist. I've been at the museum a long time, and we were delighted to celebrate that victory with our Lions and their hats out front. We had never had to make Lions hats before.

So I hope that you enjoyed this just very short little exploration of "The Dugout" as sort of a preamble to our speaker which is the second part of our program. And so we're really delighted to feature Bill Savage tonight. Bill is professor of instruction in the Department of English at Northwestern University and he teaches a course there called "Baseball in American Narratives." He's also an active member of the Society for American Baseball Research.

I know we have a lot of those members here tonight so welcome to you all. (audience applauding) And Bill has also published scholarly essays on the history and literature of the Chicago Cubs and gasp, the White Sox. But in 2016, he wrote a fan perspective column on the Cubs for ESPN.com called "The View from Section 416." He is a Cubs season ticket holder and as well has apparently a tremendous collection of old scorecards and new bobbleheads.

So please join me in welcoming Bill Savage to the Art Institute. (audience applauding)

Look at this. Look at this. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. Let me get my water ready.

So I want to start by thanking Miguel Perez and Sarah Kelly Oehler and all of the other Art Institute of Chicago folks for asking me to do this talk. Thank you all for being here in the audience. Thank you to Teagan and Gabby for doing our sign language interpretation.

I want to give special thanks to one member of SABR who is here, my friend Jake Pomrenke, who generously fact checked my story for baseball details and saved me from several mistakes. And like any honest ball player though, I will take responsibility. Any remaining errors are mine.

So the plan for my talk, roughly half an hour is to look at some of the historical facts about the Cubs that go against the "lovable losers" narrative. And I may need medical attention for spraining my fingers for doing scare quotes tonight. I'm going to examine some of the cultural reasons for the dominance of that narrative from sports media and popular culture.

And finally, I'm gonna try to identify a single source, someone who we can say for good or ill, the "lovable" part of "lovable losers" has an origin. Full disclosure and disclaimer, I will be expressing some strongly held opinions tonight and these opinions are mine and mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the English Department at Northwestern University, the Art Institute of Chicago, or Major League Baseball. To begin, I'd like to demonstrate Mark Twain's aphorism.

They said "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." So I could point out right now today, the Cubs franchise record is over 150 years. 11,473 wins, 10,879 losses for a winning percentage of .513. So they're over .500 over their 150 year history.

So they're winners, not losers. (audience applauding) Let me just say the applause here indicates that argument goes over better here than it does in your average bar room. So some history though.

Over time the Chicago National League franchise were very often winners, but that history is largely forgotten due to two prominent features of American culture. Recency bias, which is also a form of historical amnesia and the dominance of video in our contemporary culture. The National League franchise, now known as the Cubs were originally the White Stockings.

And William Hulbert, I got to get ready for this. William Hulbert, team owner, was one of the founders of the National League 150 years ago this season. You can visit his grave site at Graceland Cemetery a few blocks north of Wrigley Field along with the final resting place of many other Chicago notables.

And notice here that there's no longer a Cleveland or a Buffalo in the National League, but there was when it was originally founded. Chicago's one of only two original franchises. Hulbert's team won the first National League pennant in 1876 under the leadership of pitcher Albert Goodwill Spalding.

Later more famous for his sporting goods company and the creation of the myth that Abner Doubleday invented baseball one day in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York. The Chicago team were also NL champions in 1880, '81, '82, so a three-peat, well before these basketball guys. '85 and '86.

So the Cubs, the National League team, were winners a long time ago. But history isn't just facts. History is narrative. History is stories.

And the early history of Chicago baseball has a story that shows how narratives can flip. Before the founding of the National League, one of its predecessors, the National Association was playing. And on July 23rd, 1870, the first shutout was thrown in that league's history.

The New York Mutuals beat Chicago nine to nothing. A verb was invented, to be "Chicago'ed." (audience laughing) Being Chicago'ed originally referred to the ignominian shame of the Chicago team not managing to score a single run. But later when Chicago was so dominant in the National League, the term was flipped.

And to be Chicago'ed meant you were the loser who got shut out the way the Chicago Cubs or White Stockings did in their dominant era. So the 19th and early 20th century Chicago teams also demonstrate an important aspect of how historical narratives work. The choice of what frame we apply largely determines the stories we tell, determines what matters.

Take Adrian Constantine "Cap" Anson who played for, managed and later was part owner of the Chicago National League franchise. Depending on which stats you look at, he was almost certainly the first ballplayer to amass 3,000 career hits. He was an innovator on defense playing first base, a forward looking strategist as the game evolved.

He loved aggressive base running to mess with the other team's defense. And this is before players had gloves, so mattered. He was inducted into the baseball hall of fame in 1939.

He is still the winningest manager in Chicago Cubs history. That's one frame. Anson was also in no small way personally responsible for drawing the color line in organized baseball.

In the late 1880s, he refused to play against teams that had black ballplayers on them like Moses Fleetwood Walker, which directly led to the exclusion of such players from organized baseball for generations until Jackie Robinson reintegrated the game in 1947. So when we talk about Cap Anson, which frame will come first? His accomplishments on the diamond or his personal and professional racism and the structural racism he helped create. The question of the Cubs as winners or "lovable losers" is a magnitude less important and morally fraught than the Anson frames, but it works in the same way.

If we take the frame of the team's entire history, the Cubs have often been winners, not losers. In fact, and I know a lot of people in this room know this, but I'm assuming not everybody. The Cubs fielded the winningest single season team ever.

After a fallow period post Anson, the franchise returned to dominance in the second half of the first decade of the 20th century. Between 1906 and 1910, the team now called the Cubs, won 530 games. The most wins of any five year span in baseball history, including all those great Yankee dynasties.

We can all think of dominant teams that won all the time. The '06 to '10 Cubs won more than anybody. The 1906 team won 116, 36, and 3 for a winning percentage of .763, still the best single season in MLB history.

The Seattle Mariners had as many regular season wins in 2001, but their winning percentage was lower, .716, because they played 162 game season. The Cubs were so dominant in that period. They inspired poetry from opposing team sports writers.

Yes, I know sports writers used to do poetry. I'm kind of glad they don't anymore, frankly. Franklin P. Adams of the New York Evening Mail wrote a poem called "Baseball's Sad Lexicon," helping to immortalize an historic double-play combination.

"These are the saddest of possible words: 'Tinker to Evers to Chance.' Trio of bear Cubs and fleeter than birds, Tinker and Evers and Chance. Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble, Making a Giant hit into a double- Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble: 'Tinker to Evers to Chance.'" Now one reason I'm glad sports writers aren't doing poetry anymore is we no longer have to explain what the word "gonfalon" means. That was a term for pennant.

You know the tendency in poetry to want to jazz things up. So these guys, this is the the Hall of Fame plaques for these three players. Their third baseman didn't make the cut for some reason, maybe his name didn't scan properly or something.

But they are, you know, legendary. But even with the Cubs regular season dominance in those five years back to the loser-winner frame, they lost two of the four World Series they played, in 1906 to the White Sox. (audience applauding) Okay.

Now we know who to go for later. So good. And in 1910 to the Philadelphia Athletics. Okay, nobody's here.

Now the West Sacramento Athletics, which leads to a key point. And this is again another generality about American culture that I think matters. In American culture, you have to win it all or you're a loser.

To deploy a couple of football examples and while baseball might be our national pastime and our oldest game, football at the high school, college, and NFL levels is the most watched sport in the USA right now. Grantland Rice's poem, "Alumnus Football," and another reason not to write poetry as sports writers, it's like 14 pages long, ends with the lines, "For when the one great scorer comes to mark against your name, he writes not that you won or lost, but how you played the game." And this has been transformed into the aphorism, "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." An ideal of generous sportsmanship everyone should aspire to. Football legend Vince Lombardi disagrees.

He is credited with saying, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." Lombardi's attitude dominates American culture's thinking about not just sports, but almost every competitive thing we're involved in. Win it all or you're a loser. In this frame, the 1906 Cubs winning this regular season team ever were losers because they didn't win the World Series.

This is a troublesome idea for me. We have 30 major league teams. Only one fan base per year gets to be happy in the off season.

Everybody else is losers. Lately it's the Dodgers, historically the Yankees. And logically and maybe emotionally, if winning it all is the only thing, then being a sports fan is a form of masochistic self-inflicted torture.

(audience laughing) Maybe especially in a game like baseball, which is a game of failure. A great starting pitcher would win 20 games. That's roughly half his starts.

So he doesn't win half the time and he's great. A great batter will make an out 7 out of 10 at bats and they are gonna be in the Hall of Fame. So if baseball is a game of failure, even dominant teams will lose 60 games a year.

So there must be some pleasure gained by just watching or just playing rather than worrying about winning all the time. As a Cub fan, let me just say, I believe that very thoroughly. And perhaps there's a middle ground to quote "Bull Durham's" Nuke LaLoosh, "I like winning, you know? It's better than losing." Okay, winning's better than losing.

The Cubs in the period after Tinker to Evers to Chance dominance leading up to Rockwell's painting in 1948 won National League Pennants at a pretty good clip. 1918, 1929, 1932, '35, '38 and 1945, just three years before the painting. But in each case, they lost the World Series.

So they were marked down by the one great scorer as losers regardless of how well they played to get to the World Series. And at least one of those World Series unfortunately is remembered more for what an opponent did than the fact that the Cubs won the National League pennant in part due to winning 14 games in a row down the stretch of the season. I refer, of course, to the alleged called shot by Babe Ruth in the 1932 series, which the Cubs lost in a four game sweep.

Another reason the Cubs-as-Winners narrative doesn't land culturally is recency bias and alow the moving image. No video exists for ESPN to show how great Tinker to Evers to Chance were and Harry Steinfeldt, their third baseman. There are some famous photos or film of Chicago Cubs winning moments.

This is the 1938 Homer in the Gloamin'. A late afternoon home run by Gabby Hartnett that put the Cubs in first place beating the Pirates a few days before they clinched the pennant in St. Louis at the end of the season before losing the World Series in four games to the Yankees. Drive a man to drink.

But in our TV video oriented culture, the lovable sort of regular winner Cubs are basically invisible and so are largely forgotten. And this story also requires honesty. The winning era in Cubs history did end.

From 1946 until 1983, the Cubs were pretty miserable. Lots of reasons. Bad ownership.

Philip K. Wrigley, who inherited the team from his father William, was not particularly interested in baseball. He had chewing gum and yachting on his mind. Corporate indifference leads to organizational incompetence as the Cubs had bad general managers, bad field managers, not to mention the ill-fated college of coaches where they rotated multiple coaches into the manager's seat during the regular season between 1961 and '65.

And they mostly had bad players. Although there were usually one or two charismatic stars stuck on the roster or promising rookies who could get traded away and then become the stuff of infinite regrets. Lou Brock.

But again, I would point out narrative frames matter. I don't know, do Philadelphia fans regret the fact that the Cubs got Sandberg and Jenkins from Philly? Two Hall of Famers thrown in trades? Anyway, a side note, when Leo Durocher, and we'll get back to him, was hired after the disastrous College of Coaches experiment was mercifully terminated, he asserted that the Cubs were not an eighth place team going into the 1966 season. He was right.

In his first year at the helm, the Cubs came in 10th. (audience laughing) Dead last in the National League, a veritable doormat. So why be a Cubs fan? Why root for losers? With winning not on the menu, the Wrigleys marketed the ballpark to fans as a fun place to go on a sunny afternoon.

Have something to drink and a hot dog, some ice cream for the kids. The great Cubs scorecards of the 1950s by artist Otis Shepherd. All feature fans and food, not ball players.

(audience laughing) And they had some good ball players, in '54, you could have put Ernie Banks on there. And I guess I love this image. The anthropomorphic giant baseball head guy implies that somewhere out there, there's an anthropomorphic giant baseball bat guy who's going to come and whack him into an anthropomorphic giant baseball glove guy.

And again, peanuts, hot dog, some ice cream, a beverage that I can imagine could be beer or pop. And this doesn't have anything to do with winning. It's about fun at the old ball game.

Even exceptions during this period play into the loser's lovable or otherwise narrative frame. 1969, the Cubs collapsed late in the season. I was seven and can still hear my uncle Jimmy in the basement swearing at the television and saying things about the Mets I will not repeat in a polite audience.

The narrative frame shaped perception. The Cubs didn't lose because a black cat went by Ron Santo when he was in the on deck circle. And I'll get to the other curse soon enough.

But because of the ill-tempered manager, Durocher, who ran his players into the ground and badmouthed them to the press, and the Mets were on fire. They went 23 and 7 that September. Once Wrigley sells the team to the Tribune Company, we enter a more modern era with plenty of video to work with for good or ill.

But the loser narrative remains because whenever the team shows signs of not being losers, their success gets framed with their losing history allegedly caused by of course the Billy Goat curse. This is a staged photo of Sam Sianis theoretically trying to bring another goat into the ballpark. There's no video of the first time, anyway.

Just in case anyone is here purely for art and doesn't know anything about the story. Tavern keeper William "Billy Goat" Sianis who was a genius at marketing. His original bar was across the street from the old Chicago Stadium.

The Republican National Convention was there. He put a sign outside saying, "No Republicans will be served in this tavern." Republicans ran in to demand service and he happily sold them all the beer he had, right? (audience laughing) And you know, one day a billy goat wandered in, probably fell off a truck on the way to the stockyards, he adopted it and it became his logo. So he tried to bring his pet goat Murphy, presumably Murphy's Law, I don't know, to a World Series game in '45.

Fans nearby complained about the animal's aroma and ushers escorted them out. The Cubs lost that World Series to Detroit in seven games and Sianis allegedly sent a telegram to P. K. Wrigley asking "Who stinks now?" (audience laughing) So had they won that seventh game, we wouldn't be here today, they wouldn't be lovable losers, but they lost. This legend has been endlessly retold and embellished by Chicago sports writers, many of whom partook or partake of the Sianis family's hospitality.

Which is great by the way. I love the Billy Goat. Get the double cheese, it's the best. The bar itself promotes stories about the curse and its eventual end.

Before 2016, whenever the Cubs were doing well, the Sianis clan made multiple tries to remove the curse as Billy's nephew Sam, rest in peace, he just recently passed away, or Sam's son Bill would take new goats to the ballpark to exorcise the curse. Cubs management even brought in a Greek Orthodox priest to try to bless the diamond before the playoffs in 2008 much to the manager Lou Piniella's consternation. The Billy Goat curse has such power that when the Cubs designed their World Series ring after finally winning it all in 2016, it included a Billy Goat profile on the inside of the ring part at the suggestion of the players.

This narrative framing of lovable losers cursed by a Goat was made cultural phenomenon by changes in sports media landscape with cable television. From 1979 until 2019, the WGN superstation sent Cubs games into homes nationwide, sold fun at the old ballpark and made the lovable loser narrative common knowledge from coast to coast. Comedians and late night talk show hosts could always use the Cubs as a punchline.

And they did. You don't even have to YouTube it. It's coming back to you. Chicago newspaper columnist and huge Cub fan Mike Royko popularized the "Ex-Cub Factor." The idea that any player who played for the team was tainted by "Cubness," a fungible form of loserhood that they took along to their next team.

And any team in the World Series with three or more ex-Cubs on it would inevitably lose. This idea has been thoroughly debunked by pesky facts, but the idea lingers. Other popular culture appearances of the losers reinforcing this narrative.

The 1993 movie "Rookie of the Year", which depicts a young boy who's like 12 or 13, has a broken arm, and it heals in a freakish way giving him the ability to throw an unhittable fastball. Of course he leads the Cubs to a pennant. Seems the only way anyone could imagine the Cubs winning a pennant is a magical child.

(audience laughing) You know, not say developing good players in your farm system, spending money on proven ML free agents, hiring a manager who won't blow out his star starter's arms. No, it'd be a magical child. I bet that script and production got green lighted like that.

Music. For good or ill, and some of you might have heard some of this coming in, everyone knows Chicago folk singer, songwriter, Steve Goodman's tune or fatal earworm, "Go Cubs Go." Originally written as a promotion for WGN Cubs radio broadcasts after the Beach Boys turned down a prompt from the WGN to do it. Imagine what that would've sounded like.

Now it's played every time the Cubs win, they blare it over the speakers so fans can go deaf. More germane might be his song, "The Dying Cub Fan's Last Request," written while he in fact was dying of cancer. It's a tragic story really.

He was passed away a few days before the Cubs clinched in '84, and he was a huge Cub fan. And everybody who knew him, you know, just loved him. He was a great guy. I'm one degree of separation.

I know a lot of people who are his friends. But I'm gonna quote just a few lines from that song to give you a sense of how even someone who loves the Cubs talked about them. This is the chorus, and I'm not going to try to sing, I'm just gonna recite.

"Do they still play the blues in Chicago when baseball season rolls around? When the snow melts away, do the Cubbies still play in their ivy covered burial ground? (audience laughing) When I was a boy, they were my pride and joy, but now they only bring fatigue to the home of the brave, the land of the free, and the doormat of the National League." He told his friends, "You know the law of averages says, anything will happen that can. That's what it says. But the last time the Cubs won a National League pennant was the year we dropped the bomb on Japan.

The Cubs made me a criminal, sent me down a wayward path. They stole my youth from me. I'd forsake my teachers to go sit in the bleachers in flagrant truancy.

And then one thing led to another. And soon I discovered alcohol, gambling, dope, football, hockey, lacrosse, tennis. But what do you expect when you raise up a young boy's hopes and then crush them like so many paper beer cups?" And he'd always go... He'd make the sound effect.

"Year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year." And some live performances, he just keeps going. He tells his friends, "Don't cry. We'll meet by and by near the heavenly Hall of Fame." He said, "I've got season tickets to watch the Angels now.

So it's just what I'm going to do." He said, "But you the living, you're stuck here with the Cubs so it's me that feels sorry for you." (audience laughing) And that's a dedicated diehard Cub fan providing the loser narrative. Science fiction. Hugo Award-winning author John Scalzi has a series called "Old Man's War" set a number of centuries in the future featuring humans fighting interstellar battles with hundreds of alien species.

And it includes a running gag about how the Cubs still haven't won the World Series. (audience laughing) Comic book. Brian Azzarello in 2008, 100 years after their last World Series, Eisner Award-winning writer Brian Azzarello and artist Rafael Grampa team up on a comic book story.

"All I Goat for Christmas," depicting John Constantine, a DC Universe demonic investigator who gets hired to go to the Billy Goat Tavern and break the curse. And I like this image a lot 'cause this is nasty. This is not just some...

Like he sacrifices a real little goat, and then it turns into this demon and basically all the people in the bar have to eat it. It's... Well, it's a horror's comic. What do you want? It was also an attempt to manifest the Cubs finally winning after a hundred years.

It took eight more years, but maybe that's what did it. Who knows? To shift gears. Can we see the Cubs as winners and not just because they finally won a World Series in 2016 and not just because only one team wins it all? Well, they made the postseason in 1984, '89, '98, 2003, '7, '8, '15, '16, '17, '18, '20, and '25.

11 postseasons over 41 years. One more than their 10 appearances in 41 World Series seasons that they played through 1945. Of course, now the playoffs are expanded.

It's apples and oranges to some degree. But whenever they make the postseason, their success is still framed by sports media as lovable losers, somehow overcoming their innate Cubness. Every time the Billy Goat curse comes up, the 69 choke gets re-litigated.

Too many day games. The ball between Leon Durham's legs. Will Clark reading Greg Maddux's lips before blasting a grand slam. An innocent fan catching a foul ball.

Not gonna name him, he suffered enough. Lou Piniella holding back his best pitcher for a game four that never happened 'cause we lost game one, two, and three. A real Cubbie occurrence.

There's a litany of loserhood recited. Maddon's managerial miscues, the fade to drop out of the wildcard race in '19. It just goes on and on.

So if the Cubs are cursed, it's by this narrative frame. When they lose, they're losers, and even when they win, it's just an excuse to remind everyone how much they usually lose. So the real issue for me is not the loserhood.

It's the lovable part. Plenty of other Major League teams have had traditions of losing. The White Sox went from 1917 to 2005 without a championship, but no one slapped a lovable loser label on them.

They had the big fix in the Black Sox scandal with its endless, sentimental Hollywood mythologizing instead. The Philadelphia Phillies didn't win a World Series at all till 1980 and no one called them lovable. Might be the fan base.

(audience laughing) But the Phillies were literally the first team in Major League history to lose 10,000 games all the way back in 2007. So where does the lovable part of lovable losers come from? First use of the term I have discovered and research ongoing is from Tribune sports writer Dave Condon, one of the men who helped popularize the Billy Goat curse with his stories about his favorite tavern and its canny owner. And in that story, he's referring not to the Cubs, but to the 1964 New York Mets who outdrew the Yankees that year.

It was the only expansion team's third... It was only the expansion team's third season, but they had a brand new ballpark, some colorful players, and endlessly quotable Casey Stengel managing. So they were more fun than the Bronx Bombers, even though the Yankees are winners, of course.

But wherever it started, it became attached to the Cubs like a barnacle. Bad ownership, bad management, bad players can all make you losers, but it takes something else to make losers lovable. More than just the bricks and ivy of Wrigley Field, a Vienna Beef hot dog, or your favorite Old Style Beer vendor.

We need an individual to credit or blame for the lovable part. We need a goat in two senses of the word. Little etymology. While GOAT all caps has lately come to be an acronym for "greatest of all time," the term in sports originally meant a loser.

Someone to blame, a scapegoat, the opposite of a hero. Iconic comic strip character Charlie Brown's baseball team always loses and he is always the goat rather than the hero. Charles Schulz, when asked why Charlie Brown's nine never win, replied, "Losing is funnier than winning." So I guess we've got that going for us, right? So is there a goat in the Cub's lovable loser narrative? Yes, I would argue there is.

Even though blaming or crediting individuals is dicey at best. Stephen Jay Gould, he's a paleontologist, essayist, and big baseball fan wrote a great essay entitled "The Creation Myths of Cooperstown." He explored the fact that Americans love origin stories with single points of beginning rather than the complexities of evolution and contingent history. The game of baseball evolved from many English, Dutch, and American sources, but countless Americans embraced the spurious and always dubious claim that Abner Doubleday invented baseball one day in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York.

The lovable aspect of Cubs loserhood also evolved from many sources. A team having lost a lot, the generally positive fan experience at Wrigley, sports writers and broadcasters endlessly repeating the lovable losers mantra as we have seen. Artists in media from film to fiction, folk songs to comic books.

Nonetheless, I feel we can actually attribute the lovable part of the Cubs image to one man. And it's not Norman Rockwell. This is the wall label by the painting.

And I'm not trying to be a bad guest, but the Cubs weren't lovable losers yet. They were just three years from the World Series in 1948. Anything could happen.

If there is one individual whose personal image, whose actions on the field, and whose words off it made the losing Cubs lovable, it's Ernie Banks. Got his bobblehead. (audience applauding) Frankly, I was expecting a lynch mob, not applause.

Hall of Famer. My boyhood hero near the end of his career on the beloved 69 team. We all imitated his batting stance, real high.

First man to win an MVP award, most valuable player, while playing on a losing team. And he did it twice, 1958 and 1959. The next guy, also a Cub, Andre Dawson in 1987.

Gold Glove winner, 14 time all star. His 512 career home runs were tied for eighth most in a Major League career when he retired in 1971. He was also the player who went the longest time playing for a single franchise without ever making the postseason.

In the first 10 years of his career, the Cubs finished under .500 each season. The last five years of his career, the Cubs finished in second or third place, which is pretty good, but still isn't winning at all. Despite all of this loserdom, Banks had a relentlessly cheerful demeanor.

He was always smiling, always happy. Hard not to love the guy. Look at him. He's great.

I'm following through on the scorecard and bobblehead thing. It wasn't a joke. He famously made poetic rhyming and optimistic predictions for sports writers during spring training, including "The Cubs are Due in 62".

They came in ninth place with a record of 59 and 103. Ahead of only the expansion Mets in their first season who lost 120 games. A record that stood until recently broken by a team I won't embarrass.

Trying not to be a hater. "The Cubs are gonna to shine in '69." Yeah, they shined, they shone, but they didn't win at all. His profile on the Cooperstown website includes the following statement.

Hall of Fame manager Leo Durocher, Banks' skipper with the Cubs from '66 to '71, was famous for asserting that "Nice guys finish last." But he made an exception for Mr. Cub: "Banks is the one nice guy who finished first, but he had the talent to go with it." Banks may have finished first in a Mr. Cub popularity contest, but his teams never finished above second place. His most famous words endlessly quoted in many variations are what sealed the deal for me. His tagline folds neatly into the Wrigley ownership idea that winning doesn't matter.

"Fans should just embrace having a relaxing day, spending money at the concession stands at the old ball yard." From his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1977. "There's sunshine, fresh air," not today. "And the team's behind us, let's play two." More often quoted endlessly in various permutations.

"It's a beautiful day for a ball game. Let's play two!" Not let's sweep this doubleheader. (audience laughing) Not even, let's go win one for the Gipper. No, just let's play two. Positive spin.

Playing the game is what matters most. It's a good and fun for its own sake. Win or lose for players and fan alike. Negative spin.

No burning desire to win, no killer instinct, hence a loser, leaving fans disappointed, but lovable. Banks's words are carved not only into the memory of generations of fans and sports writers. They're engraved on Banks' statue in front of Wrigley Field where there was a copy editing kerfuffle when they first put it up, they left the apostrophe out.

And they are literally carved into his grave marker at Graceland Cemetery. So the degree to which Cubs are lovable, losers, rather than just losers, we owe to Ernie Banks. He truly was Mr. Cub in more ways than one.

Thank you for listening. (audience applauding) Can you put the painting up? Yeah. (audience applauding)

Well, Bill, thank you so much for that. I will be the first to admit as the person who wrote the wall label that I now feel compelled to rewrite the wall label.

I'm sorry. No, no, this is good. You're talking to a person who does not in fact follow baseball much and knows the art and not the baseball. So it's great to then connect.

Let's go back to the painting though.

Yeah, I'll go back to that. There we go.

So we actually want this to be audience Q&A. There are audience or there's some staff members here who can bring around some microphones for people that have questions for us. And it can be about baseball or it can be about art.

We're very open to either of those questions. Let's see. But in the meantime, you know, I mean, I think this is, for me, what is really interesting in sort of thinking about is this fact that in fact, when Rockwell went to this ballpark, he must have, and as I alluded to, he must have already known what he wanted to do.

So the fact that it was the Cubs was somewhat irrelevant. And the fact that they then ended up blasting their league seems a little irrelevant at all. And that seems to sort of jive with what you're saying.

Yeah. Well, they wouldn't have known in May that they were going to come in last yet. And I suspect that it just was probably Rockwell's schedule as much as anything else.

Like he had a deadline, he had a timeline, they were in town, so it was the Cubs. And by the way, if you like that jersey they're wearing, that's the giveaway tomorrow in the Wrigley Field Budweiser bleachers, first 5,000 fans get a replica jersey from that period. Yeah. That's pretty good.

I'm here shilling for the Ricketts.

Anyway. So like I said, can we answer any questions for people about....

If you raise your hand... Yeah. If you raise your hand, they will come find you with microphones. There's one here. We can't see you very well.

So we're going to rely on our colleagues. Stand up if you want to get... If you want the microphone, stand up.

There we go. Right there. Okay. We're starting in the back there.

Yep. All right, go for it.

[Audience Member] Okay. First of all, I have to apologize 'cause this is an art question.

No problem. And the sports part was just fantastic. So thank you so much for that. I hope it was taped so we can see it a little bit later too.

Anyway, my art question is in explaining what he did to put this piece of... That was ultimately the cover together, there's a tremendous amount of work. Yet I have the feeling from what you said and from the fact it was Saturday Evening Post, he did this every week.

How did he do that?

So this is a terrific question. And I will just say also we are equal opportunity, art or baseball, up here. So Rockwell in many ways was a machine.

I mean, he really did have to work on a fast pace. It's certainly why he used things like reference photographs so that he could quickly assemble a composition and put it all together. And, you know, and it sort of evolved over time.

Initially, it was reference photos and he was cutting things out and sort of arranging things. And then sort of, you know, mock, painting canvases, that sort of thing. He actually, in later use, would actually use a projection, which is rather interesting.

So he was sort of working even faster. So I think, you know, this was something he loved. He loved being an illustrator. He loved doing this work.

And so I don't think he saw it as a grind, but it certainly was a pace where again, in May, he gets this commission. He's going to Boston because it is close, and also frankly, he needed the Saturday Evening Post people there so they were driving up from New York. And so they met in the middle.

And he was churning these things out and having it at the post by, you know, mid-August. But in the meantime, he's doing that every week for, you know, dozens and dozens of weeks. So I think he took advantage of modern technology.

And I think he also then frankly was just very adept. He was really extraordinary as a draftsman. He, you know, is actually really quite extraordinary as a painter as well.

I think that's one of the things I love about the Art Institute study is that it is very painterly. There's a lot of brush work 'cause he's working quickly, and you can actually see underdrawing where he's just, you know, trying out things, especially sort of around the feet of one of the players there. You see all the underdrawing where he's not even covering it because he's working quickly.

So, you know, and again, then he gets this news that, oh, sorry, this is not what anyone is happy with. So in some ways we have the reject of the group, but I love it for that reason. It's an interesting aspect of Rockwell's work. Second row, here.

[Audience Member] This is a question about the art. Do you think that the anthropomorphic baseball inspired Mr. Met? And if the artist was still alive when Mr. Met was created, do you think he should have sued? (audience laughing)

The question is, did this cover of a scorecard inspire Mr. Met? Mr. Met is the... For those of you who are maybe not familiar with baseball mascot culture, is an anthropomorphized guy with a giant baseball head. I think that idea is general enough that the Mets will probably get away with it.

And Otis Shepherd was also the illustrator for the Wrigley Gum Company, all of their ads and images and stuff. So I don't believe this is actionable. And I, you know, it's sort of like Mr. Pumpkinhead, you know? It's out there in the culture.

I also would just say I feel like this was not uncommon to sort of anthropomorphize in this way.

[Staff Member] We have one right here in the middle. Okay. Okay. Back there.

[Audience Member] The painting in the bottom right-hand corner looks like it was given to someone, a family. Do you have any information about that?

I did. That was part of my quest to Massachusetts. The painting is inscribed to Dr. And Mrs. Bovaird from Norman Rockwell. And I actually really had not had any clue who they were.

But thankfully in the 1970s, Mrs. Bovaird wrote a long series of very informative letters to the Norman Rockwell Museum as they were cataloging works. And it turns out that they simply were fans and they had gone to visit him. They had tried to purchase something and he actually sent them the wrong work.

And so... And he didn't sell works very often. This was actually quite unusual that he sort of was going to sell them a work, but it was a sort of easy thing for him to do.

But for the most part, these were not circulating through sales. And so they went to visit and, you know, sort of a couple years after they had tried to buy something and said, you know, "Do you remember us?" And so they just struck up a conversation. And then he just started rifling through his files and he said, "Oh, I think you would like this, you know, for the kids 'cause they had two sons." And so he actually gave the family a version of this that's also an oil to the sons and then he gave this version to the parents.

So they actually ended up with two works, and then they had sort of several others that I mean... So I think he was just handing them out like, you know, party favors practically, which is kind of amazing to think about. But they had no connection to him otherwise other than just expressing interest and going to visit him.

So...

[Staff Member] We have a question right in the front.

Okay.

[Audience Member] It's an art question. Do any of the photos exist at all that were taken, you know, to compare? Yeah. So all of the reference photos actually exist at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

And they have tremendous archives. I mean, for all that Rockwell was giving things away, he seems to be a bit of a pack rat and he was fairly well organized. So he kept everything.

So there's hundreds of photographs from across his entire life, thousands of photographs that he was keeping. And I'm sure some have disappeared, but they are all there. They're working on cataloging them.

So it's a great resource. Yes.

[Audience Member] I don't really have a question. I just have a couple observations. First, I appreciate everything you said. I'm from Cleveland.

(audience laughing) I grew up there, moved here, went to Northwestern, and then became a Cub fan and obviously an Indian fan, now the Guardians. But I also went to Cub Fantasy Camp and an observation from Cubs Fantasy Camp, what you said about Leo Durocher was some of the players said to me that Durocher, he was a tyrant. And one time he was in the dugout and they had a pitcher named Joe Niekro, who was a very good pitcher for the Cubs at the time.

But Leo Durocher did not like the way Joe Niekro touched his hat before he threw a pitch. And all the players, they turned to each other and said, "He's gonna be gone by tomorrow." And he was traded the next day.

All right. Well, can we start telling Durocher's stories, we're going to be here all day?

[Audience Member] No, no, no. That's it.

It's Leo Durocher signed my Shakespeare midterm.

Okay. True story.

[Audience Member] So anyway, I just thought I'd share that story. Thank you. Thank you.

[Audience Member] Anyway, thanks.

More questions. Hopefully baseball.

[Audience Member] All right, bleachers, calm down. (everyone laughing) Here's my question. So the Art Institute has all these paintings and all these American paintings.

Why has it taken the Art Institute so long? What has been the reticence of getting Norman Rockwell in the institution?

So it's in part because they didn't circulate through an art market. I mean, that's really the biggest part of it is, you know, the vast majority of the Art Institute's collection comes through, you know, an art market that's existed since the beginning of the museum in 1879. And so fundamentally, because Rockwell wasn't engaging with that, it's only works...

His works have really only been in a secondary market since his death. And so I've actually spent... I've been here 24 years. I've been looking for Rockwell for about 24 years.

You know, and just never had thought that any one of them coming up was exactly what I wanted. Frankly, also they can be pretty pricey and so I didn't really want to invest in something that didn't seem perfect. And so this really just felt like the most extraordinary opportunity.

(audience applauding)

[Staff Member] We have a question in the back of the auditorium here.

[Audience Member] When the Cubs turn into a juggernaut, is it going to be possible for them to be labeled as lovable winners? Or will it be like a Cubs version of the Dodger Death Star? (Bill laughing)

So this is an inside Cubs fan. Well, people thought that was going to happen after the first World Series in 2016. I mean, three years in a row, they made the league championship series.

Paul Sullivan at the Tribune wrote great pieces about "Once the Cubs are winners, they won't really be lovable anymore." The example he used was the Boston Red Sox who had also gone forever without winning a World Series and then won, like, two in a few years and three relatively quickly. And there it really is for me about the fan base. Like if the fans are still lovable, are they lovable winners? I don't know.

I mean, it's... But winners don't have to make themselves lovable. Winning is lovable in this culture.

This will be our last question up in the front.

[Audience Member] Where were you in 2016? (Bill laughing)

Where was I in 2016? You got a subpoena? I mean, come on. I took my dad to game one of the World Series. Yes, I was...

And this is, you know, baseball fandom is about what you inherit. My best pal brought his mom, I brought my dad. We were brought up to be Cubs fan by them.

The Cubs lost one to nothing. My dad nearly had a diabetic stroke trying to get to the L. It was quite the experience. But 2016 was a great year.

Everyone had a good time and then we wanted to win again. 'Cause I mean, the last time we won the World Series, we repeated so it's... And it just hasn't happened 'cause that is the lovable loser idea.

But I will add, we will keep those hats for the Lions for the next time. (Bill and Sarah laughing) (audience applauding) Yeah. Thank you all very much. Thank you all.

(audience applauding)