Cubs operate like a fast-food franchise, and that’s a problem

If the Cubs proved definitively that Tuesday night that 15 groundskeepers was not a sufficient number of groundskeepers to put a tarp on a field, that Thursday brought the news that the Cubs had earlier sent 10 groundskeepers home early. In the Chicago Sun-Times, Gordon Wittenmyer writes that the team did this not because head groundskeeper Roger Baird requested it -- and, perhaps, without even consulting him -- but because the front office is dedicated to keeping seasonal employees like groundskeepers under 130 hours of work per month.

If those groundskeepers had worked more hours than that, the Cubs would be on the hook for their health insurance under the Affordable Care Act’s standards. If they didn’t -- say, if those employees in question were at home and off the clock, watching 15 of their co-workers put a tarp on a baseball field as if trying to fit a child’s turtleneck onto an irritated rhinoceros -- then they wouldn’t.

The Cubs denied this in the most bloodlessly room-temp corporate boilerplate possible -- “We’re no different than any organization trying to gain efficiencies,” a team spokesman said. “However, our efforts to manage costs had nothing to do with the episode on Tuesday night.” Others in the organization, albeit off the record, contradicted that statement in more vigorous language. Because there are the employer provisions of the ACA involved here -- hell, because there are bosses and workers involved -- this story will become an idiot prism for a proxy argument about Obamacare and its notional victims, which most likely will become a bigger proxy argument about even dumber things. It could happen in this very comments section if you want it!

But let’s consider what else this was, which is one of the most profitable organizations in (the also very profitable) Major League Baseball running one of the sport’s iconic ballparks like a dang Dollar General. This raises the question of whether scrimping, shaving and saving on game day counts as an Efficiency worth the Gaining, and the sub-question of whether Efficiency without Effectiveness is anything more than a management-class word for cheaping out. It’s a question Wittenmyer put to three anonymous representatives of other MLB teams, all of which answered with some version of “LOL wut no obviously not.” Some types of Efficiencies -- the ones that make the team a national punchline for a week, say -- are not really efficiencies at all.

The smaller businesses that must run according to this razor-edged efficiency -- like the perpetually skeleton-crewed and microscopically margined dollar stores mentioned above -- tend do so out of necessity; offering Wal-Mart grade prices without Wal-Mart’s structural advantages demands as much. Fast food franchises, which do the same, also work on narrow margins. Wal-Mart, the most famous and vicious apostles of this sort of efficiency, does it for reasons that have less to do with necessity than raw profit-centered principle. The Cubs are, of course, free to take and make as much profit from each game and gainable efficiency as they want, can, and believe they can get away with. But this sort of cheapskating is not a matter of necessity, or not primarily that.

It’s tempting, given the very public beliefs and business practices of the team’s owners, to see this sort of prosaic cheapery and semi-clever obligation-ducking as a matter of principle -- not one having to do with Obamacare, exactly, but more with a general view of the value and role of lower-rung employees in an organization. After all, the chiseling cheapness so shamefully on display on Tuesday night is by no means an institutional thing.

In their attempt to create what owner Tom Ricketts has repeatedly and aspirationally described as “the best organization in baseball,” the team has not been afraid to splash out for in-demand front-office talent. They presumably will be willing to extend eight- and nine-figure contracts to the players those well-paid executives believe could join the promising young corps of hitters and create the first good Cubs team in a decade.

That sort of spending is all to Ricketts’ credit, and also something like his job. But so is being willing to pay for a properly staffed grounds crew, if only because The Best Organization In Baseball would by definition not do things like Struggle For 270 Minutes To Put A Tarp On An Infield. Neither would such an organization endure a similar and expensive groundskeeping screw-up during spring training and then repeat it six months later in a game that counts.

And another part of the owner’s job, and another part of Ricketts’ perfectly admirable pursuit of becoming the best organization in baseball, is being capable of making necessary changes even and maybe especially when they seem distasteful. The Cubs have been willing to do this sort of thing with players that didn’t work out, but eating a few million dollars in bad contract is something that Ricketts’ ilk delight in publicly shrugging off; it’s the corporate-casual version of Rick Ross spending $50,000 at a strip club or a trustfund nighmare putting an emoji-strewn photo of a $41,000 brunch tab on Instagram. All of the conspicuous-consuming rich boys above can afford it, and can also afford to do all those things without ever breaking faith with their (more similar than they know) brands.

We don’t really have an ending for this story, not yet, and so we might as well leave it here, at this clear place of choosing. But while this is definitionally not a big deal, Ricketts’ response or non-response to it will be about more than groundskeeper hours. For Ricketts to recognize that low-level employees -- the ones paid by the hour, and so carefully kept off the company’s healthcare rolls, throughout the organization -- are important to achieving his admirable organizational goal for the Cubs, he will have to confront a truth that does not jibe with his politics and principles. That inconvenient fact is that the least-paid, less glamorously skilled and otherwise lower-profile employees of his organization are as important to achieving his organization’s goals as the better-paid ones out front. This is also that “efficiency” is not quite being used correctly when it’s rolled out as a synonym for “cheaping out in important places where we think no one will notice.”

In other words, it’s going to rain sometime. Until it does, those people are a cost center. But so is an umbrella, or, in the case of fire, sprinklers and, for that matter, firemen.

Ricketts can certainly fix this and ensure that it won’t happen again; the question is whether he will, or wants to. But he will either recognize this challenge and rise to it, or he won’t. He’ll grow a little and make the changes necessary, or he’ll roll out the spokespeople again as needed when it’s time to reassure everyone who needs reassuring that, the most recent avoidable embarrassment notwithstanding, it is still his goal to be “the best organization in baseball.”

Cubs fans will know what decision Ricketts makes, because they will have the team and the organization and the game experience to prove it. They will not just notice when it rains.